Call for Papers
First Pacific Asia Workshop on Game Intelligence & Informatics (GII)
To be held in conjunction with
The 24th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (https://www.pakdd2020.org/)
11-14 May 2020
Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre
https://web.northeastern.edu/guii/gii/
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: January 22, 2020
Camera-ready copies: March 6, 2020
Notification of acceptance: February 21, 2020
SCOPE AND TOPICS
Understanding the game state and player action is a fundamental objective for any game researcher, because it sheds light on various aspects about the players and the game, such as skills, strategies, engagement, intention, retention, difficulty level and decision-making. Such intelligence helps us advance closer to the holy grail of providing a perfectly personalized and wholesome user experience, in a data-driven manner.
In recent times, there have been numerous innovative advances in the space of AI and machine learning for the gaming domain, including bots and reinforcement learning agents for perfect and imperfect information games, dynamic content generation for digital games, and so on. Similarly, the research community around human-computer interaction, has given us very interesting qualitative insights on the behavior of game users in terms of skill assessment and skill-matching, factors and designs that enhance engagement and retention, and so on. The recent proliferation of digital games for commercial, social, and educational purposes has further necessitated a new research direction towards game intelligence and knowledge discovery. The problem space becomes all the more intriguing when we consider the applications to and the challenges in niche gaming sectors such as (i) serious games – including education, citizen science, crowd-sourced task completion, etc.,(ii) MMORPG and other real-time, distributed multi-player games, (iii) AR/VR and IoT- enhanced experiential games, (iv) real-money games, including cards, casino and other partially observable stochastic games, and (v) esports and fantasy league games/sports. The key quest would be to enable a vision of end-to-end informatics around game dynamics, game platforms, and the players by consolidating orthogonal research directions of game AI, game data science, and game user research.
The immense volume of multi-dimensional data that digital games generate – including (but not limited to) game moves and actions of millions of players, click-stream in gaming platforms, data from wearables and sensors for AR/VR, and so on, contains a goldmine of information about the gameplay behavior, player inclinations, intentions, and preferences etc. Many researchers have been tackling this data to develop insights about the user experience. The GII workshop aims to bring together research that lies at the intersection of machine learning, human computer interaction and digital gaming. We invite high quality innovation that push the state of the art on topics including, but not limited to:
- Player modeling and behavior modeling
- Skill-based player journey – including skill assessment (which becomes especially difficult in stochastic games where there is always an element of chance involved), skill-based matching, predicting skill evolution
- Player intent mining and behavior prediction and timely predictions of events such as churn, addiction, etc.
- Player strategy mining
- Player profiling and persona detection
- Applications of game user research and machine learning in serious games (including education, citizen science, crowd-sourced task completion), stochastic games, fantasy sports, esports, AR/VR/wearables-enabled experiential games, massively multi-player distributed games, etc.
- Reinforcement learning agents that can enhance player experience via competition, up-skilling human players, assisting with strategies, etc.
- Adaptive procedural content generation, for customized content based on player persona, evolution, etc.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
Authors must submit original and unpublished work. Papers must be 6-8 pages not including references, in the Springer LNCS/LNAI submission format (template given here). The submissions need not be blind, i.e., the authors can include their names and affiliations in the paper. Please follow this link to submit the papers.
ORGANIZERS
Sharanya Eswaran, Games 24×7, India
Magy Seif El-Nasr, Northeastern University, US
Tridib Mukherjee, Games24x7, India
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Georgios Yannakakis, University of Malta
Santiago Ontañón, Drexel University and Google AI
Tristan Cazenave, Lamsade, Dauphine
Matthew Berland, University of Wisconsin Madison
Brent Harrison, University of Kentucky
Sam Snodgrass, Modl.ai
James Lester, North Carolina State University
Guenter Wallner, Eindhoven University of Technology
Ruck Thawonmas, Ritsumeikan University
Theja Tulabandhula, University of Illinois, Chicago
Koyel Mukherjee, IBM Research