We will cover key focus areas and approaches to enable a modern Machine Learning function, as well as the strategic mechanisms that align Minecraft’s personalization efforts to the studio philosophy that “Minecraft is for everyone”. The project’s mission is to put gamers at the center enabling them to play anywhere, from any device. For online gaming to effectively bridge geographic and demographic differences, and thus sustain healthy social bonds, platforms need to offer better affordances that both support different modes of self-disclosure and help gamers manage the possible impacts of doing so. Today, in addition to his management responsibilities, Dr. Lee speaks and writes widely on technology trends and policies. Talk title: World-best Mahjong AI: Suphx – Help Human to Play Better. Michael Cook is an AI researcher and game designer, currently working at Queen Mary University of London, where he holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship. There are several ways they can help in game development. These modelling and visualization skills have been applied across disciplines to develop interactive visual simulations of urban sustainability, heat loss and gain from built environment and precision agriculture. A sought-after speaker, Dr. Ackerman had been an invited speaker at the United Nations, Google, IBM Research, and Stanford University, amongst others. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, ONR, the U.S. Army, U.S. Health and Human Services, Disney, and Google. She is interested in how data biases and methodological limitations delimit what we can learn from online social traces, and how we can make the systems that leverage such data safer, fairer, and generally less biased. *All times are displayed in Pacific Time (UTC-08:00), Chairs: Haiyan Zhang, Xbox & Sam Devlin, Microsoft Research, Phil Spencer, Xbox On one hand, Suphx can teach and help human players to improve their Mahjong skills; one the other hand, our techniques designed in Suphx can also be applied in real-world complex decision applications such as financial investment. Dr. Christopher Power is an Associate Professor at the University of Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada. Gaming is his life-long passion. William Guss, OpenAI & Carnegie Mellon University Christopher Power, University of Prince Edward Island, Peter Lee, Microsoft Research If we consider co-creation directly between players and non-player characters (NPCs), co-creating the game-play together, we can imagine novel game mechanics like improvisation with NPCs. He has also worked on a broad range of applications of machine learning in domains ranging from computer vision to healthcare. Go, Poker and Dota. These goals are best met in healthy online communities that foster trust among their members, as gamers must weigh risks and benefits using their understanding of the community. I am a Co-I and PI on several RCUK and charity-funded grants. Francisco is the Head of Data Science and Data Engineering at Minecraft. Talk title: Designer-friendly Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning for Videogames. Second, we describe algorithms to allow designers to calibrate agents while learning to express desired behaviors (presented at ICML 2020). Talk title: Session chair for Game studio plenary. She also serves as a Director on the board of Block by Block, a non-profit partnership between Mojang and UN-Habitat, and is a Trustee on the Board for the French American School of Puget Sound. Learn more about applying for the AI/ML residency program starting the summer of 2021. Agents of various kinds can do much more than “just” play games. I currently teach Data Structures and Parallel Programming (GPGPU) and have previously taught 3D graphics, statistics and programming to a range of cohorts. Anastasia comes from a family of artists, and studied graphic design, photography and 3D visual arts, aspiring to become an artist too. If the future of digital creativity is algorithmic, this project asks how futures thinking can be reoriented through plural valuations of human capability towards social justice. In 2019, she completed her B.S. Their work has been supported by the NSF, the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and has been recognized with a Best Paper award at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling and an NSF CAREER Award. The recent growth of accessibility in the video game industry has enabled play for thousands of people with disabilities. It was designed to foster interest in procedural content generation – with a particular focus on adaptive and holistic generation – touching on co-creativity and open endedness. The Uber AI Residency is an intensive one-year program (starting mid-late June/July 2020) intended for individuals seeking to advance their careers in machine learning research and … I run the InterACT Lab, where we focus on algorithms for human-robot interaction — algorithms that move beyond the robot’s function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that coordinates well with people, and is aligned with what we actually want the robot to do. As part of this program, Residents collaborate with distinguished scientists from various Google AI … Spencer has two daughters in college and lives with his wife in the Seattle area. Dr. Mark Riedl is an Associate Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing and Associate Director of the Georgia Tech Machine Learning Center. Abby has been playing video games since she was a small child demanding that people “play!” King’s Quest on the Tandy 1000. Talk title: Gaming as Vanguard of AI Innovation. The program will pair you with an AI … Currently selected items are under the "current selections" heading. In this talk we will look at how AI can be applied to help foster a safe and civil community. I got interested in AI quite late. Kareem Choudhry (Corporate Vice President, Gaming Cloud, Microsoft), Programming languages & software engineering, Microsoft’s Anti-Harassment and Anti-Discrimination Policy, Equal Employment Opportunity Policy, or Standards of Business Conduct, advance the state of the art in reinforcement learning, Director of Health and AI Partnerships (Academic), Royal Academy of Engineering/ExxonMobil Gold medal, Royal Academy of Engineering Innovation prize, Responsible Gaming, including ethics, safety, and inclusivity, Computational creativity and content generation, Understanding Players, player engagement and analytics. Talk title: Game-Human Interaction: Developing Methods that Capture the Player Experience. My long term goal is to create autonomous agents capable of intelligible decision making in a wide range of complex environments with real world applications. I start by discussing a novel methodology called Data-Driven Retrospective Interviewing, which enabled us to use, process and visualize player logs and combine them with annotations from interviews to shed light on design problems that impacted players’ engagement, adherence, and motivation. Resolution of these limitations requires new, sample-efficient methods. Creating inclusive and positive experiences for players in the metaverse requires safety by design which creates opportunities to apply artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Example-based Procedural Placement Dr. Maya Ackerman is an award-winning Artificial Intelligence expert, named “Woman of influence” by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. I have previously studied the application of human-computer co-creativity in problems ranging from improvisational dance and pretend play to music recommendation. Hear how developers, educators, content creators, and curriculum designers work together to bring learning from computer science to social-emotional learning to millions of students who are suddenly home from school, and how the gaming community is rallying around the popular social platform to connect virtually and bridge differences. In this talk, we examine the relationship between trust and social interaction across different gaming communities, grounding the discussion in both a large, on-platform survey of gamers and an automatic analysis of self-disclosure on English-language gamer forums. Talk title: Assisting and Coordinating with Humans. Save your virtual seat and register by February 19, 2021: Engage, Learn and Share at the Microsoft AI and Gaming Research Summit 2021. We work across different applications, from assistive arms, to quadrotors, to autonomous cars, and draw from optimal control, game theory, reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, and cognitive science. Human-AI co-creation offers exciting new possibilities for games and game creators. and Master of Science (S.M.) Wayne Yang, Blizzard Entertainment, World-best Mahjong AI: Suphx – Help Human to Play Better A three-year fellowship for second year PhD students enrolled at a university in the United States, Canada, or Mexico who are underrepresented in the field of computing and pursuing research aligned to the research areas carried out by Microsoft Research. So far it is the strongest Mahjong AI in the world and ranked higher than 99.9% players in Tenhou. In this talk we will formalise the problem of ad-hoc teamwork and present our proposed approach to meta-learn policies robust to a given set of possible future collaborators. Search Search Microsoft.com. App Center takes security seriously. Dr Kenji Takeda is Director of Health and AI Partnerships (Academic) for Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. Stephanie Milani is a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Candidates for the Azure AI … She has also served as an inventor and TV host on the BBC series, Big Life Fix, inventing cutting-edge technology in support of people and communities in need. This includes events Microsoft hosts and participates in, where we seek to create a respectful, friendly, and inclusive experience for all participants. On the other hand, at a meta level, if we consider co-creation between game creators and AI systems, we can imagine game development and design workflows where industry professionals and AI systems co-create game agents together. AI Residency … Talk title: Session chair for Responsible gaming. She has worked with leading video game makers on research and ideas for new play experiences. In particular, Hanabi is interesting to humans since it is entirely focused on theory of mind, i.e., the ability to reason over the intentions, beliefs and point of view of other agents when observing their actions. He leads Microsoft Research across its eight laboratories around the world. Related: Listen: Art + Architecture + AI … Catherine Varner, Dreamhaven, Making Things that Make Things: Computational Creativity for Games and Worlds Fireside chat between Peter Lee (Corporate Vice-President, Research and Incubations, Microsoft) & Kareem Choudhry (Corporate Vice-President, Cloud Gaming, Microsoft). My research focuses on developing systems that expand access to information for people with disabilities, in particular sign language users and low-vision readers. I am interested in the broader applications of game technology to develop intuitive systems models. AI Residency … We contrast in-game experiences with activity in fan forums, where public perceptions of games are often formed and shared. We will reflect on how best to discuss these topics with non-technical audiences and get everyone invested in what AI can do for the players. Chris Martens, North Carolina State University, Designer-friendly Machine Learning and Reinforcement Learning for Videogames In addition to enhancing game designs, the method has demonstrated utility as a tool for esports players, spectators, and coaches to diagnose strategic behaviors as well as for diagnosing progression and pacing issues. Kareem Choudhry, Xbox, Talk title: Musical AI Landscape & Opportunities in Gaming. But what if our AI design assistants could speak and write in a language we already understand, like program code? in statistics from the University of Washington and he is also interested in the software tools and infrastructure required for allowing machine learning to be useful in practical settings. She currently leads the teams responsible for Minecraft Education, Minecraft Hour of Code, Minecraft’s China business and the work to make Minecraft more accessible for players of all abilities. My dissertation investigated the effects of creative arc negotiation — a novel real-time decision-making paradigm for improvisation between people and computers — on player experience within VR games for improvisational theatre. degrees in Information Systems and in Computer Science from WWU Münster, Germany. Phil Spencer is executive vice president, Gaming at Microsoft. In recent years we have seen fast progress on a number of zero-sum benchmark problems in AI, e.g. An innovation and technology leader, Haiyan has spent the past 20 years working hands-on in software engineering, user experience, hardware R&D, service design, Cloud platforms, design thinking and blue-sky envisioning. Anca Dragan, University of California, Berkeley, Coordinated Self-Play to Ad-Hoc Teamwork In Bleeding Edge Alexandra holds a PhD (2016) from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Raluca Georgescu, Microsoft Research, Agents for Game Development Dr. Riedl’s recent work has focused on story understanding and generation, computational creativity, explainable AI, and teaching virtual agents to behave safely. Suphx has been highly recognized by the best human players. To facilitate research in this direction, we propose and ran the second iteration of the MineRL Competition on Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning using Human Priors. Open AI Scholars Program : Fall 2020 . Magy Seif El-Nasr, University of California, Santa Cruz, Minecraft’s transformative journey to personalized player experiences Date: February 23, 2021 - February 24, 2021. Haiyan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and a member of the prestigious British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA). He has testified before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee. I practice a human-centered AI research methodology — applying a combination of design, human-computer interaction, and AI/machine learning methods — to explore questions about AI and creativity. Junjie Li, Microsoft Research, Zero-Shot (Human-AI) Coordination (in Hanabi) Kareem prides himself on being at the edge of technology and consumer innovation. I ask what AI can do for games, and what games can do for AI. I have completed my undergraduate studies in computer science, followed by a Masters degree in big data analytics at UCL in London in 2017. IBM AI Residency Program : Fall 2021 ; Shell.ai Residency Programme ; 2020. As a first-party Microsoft Azure service, we're responsible for following all of Microsoft… In addition, Tommy is a lecturer in computer science at King’s College London and on advisory board to the GDC AI Summit. These goals are best met in healthy online communities that foster trust among their members, as gamers must weigh risks and benefits using their understanding of the community. This talk will give an overview of the algorithmic choices and infrastructure used to integrate reinforcement learning into the content development pipeline. Incorporating machine learning and reinforcement learning into videogames is a huge opportunity and a reality for a number of top titles today. I take a keen interest in projects related to the field of reinforcement learning. Residents will also: Learn how to perform research in deep learning and AI. Strong program and project management professional with a Bachelor of Science (BS) focused on Computer Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Recently, the card game Hanabi has been established as a new benchmark environment to fill this gap. All the selected candidates get a chance to be mentored by GoogleAI scientists and researchers and collaborate with teams at alphabet. Mikhail Jacob, Microsoft Research, Making AI a Product Concern She has lived and worked in Australia, Toronto, China, Italy, San Francisco, London and now resides in Bellevue. Not only are games an important testbed for driving AI development, but advances in this space also have the potential to impact how we develop and play games, and a wide range of real-world applications that go beyond gaming. This virtual research summit brings together researchers and innovators from academia, creators from the gaming industry, Microsoft Research (MSR), and Gaming teams at Microsoft… The AI Settlement Generation challenge is a competition that asks participants to write code that can generate interesting and believable Minecraft settlements. 2021. She continues to push on the boundaries where technology can transform people’s lives for the better. Understand prior work and existing literature. Jakob Foerster, University of Toronto & Vector Institute, Chair: Nancy Baym and Rachel Bergmann, Microsoft Research, Automated Futurisms in Digital Game Production She draws her experience from academic institutions and research labs across 5 different countries. Nominations for the 2021 Microsoft Research Ada Lovelace Fellowship will be accepted July 15 – August 14, 2020. Since then, she has spent the past decade doing a mix of analytics, data science, and game economics in the gaming industry. Additional emphasis will be how the 3D representation of Earth is transformed into a 4D digital twin model via a dynamic time-of-day / time-of-year system that is augmented with a sophisticated weather forecast system. She received an M.Sc. Diego Pérez-Liébana is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Games and Artificial Intelligence at Queen Mary University of London (UK). In public service, Dr. Lee was a commissioner on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity and led several studies for both PCAST and the National Academies on the impact of federal research investments on economic growth. His research is centred in the application of Artificial Intelligence to games, Tree Search and Evolutionary Computation. A two-year fellowship for third year PhD students enrolled at a university in the United States, Canada, or Mexico and pursuing research aligned to the research areas carried out by Microsoft Research. In these roles, Spencer led the Xbox organization with the launches of Xbox One S and Xbox One X, the acquisition of Minecraft and influenced blockbuster game franchises from “Halo,” “Gears of War,” “Forza Motorsport,” as well as Microsoft Publishing. Chris is the author of two highly cited and widely adopted machine learning text books: Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition (1995) and Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (2006). She researches digital labour in video game play and production cultures. Alexandra Olteanu, Microsoft Research, Chair: Ruth E. Falconer, Abertay University, Machine Learning for Optimal Matchmaking Adith Swaminathan, Microsoft Research Ackerman is a Computer Science and Engineering Professor at Santa Clara University and the CEO/Co-founder of WaveAI. Current areas of application are the Water-Energy-Food-nexus, Microbial Ecology and Health and Social Care. Most of her papers and more information are available at nancybaym.com. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Talk title: Clippy Has Rejected Your Pull Request: Game Prototyping in the Age of AI. Spencer has held various roles across Microsoft including Head of Xbox, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Studios, and GM, Microsoft Game Studios EMEA. Josh Menke has spent the last 15+ years designing skill, matchmaking, and ranking systems, primarily for the Halo, Blizzard, and Call of Duty franchises. In contrast, success in the real world requires humans to collaborate and communicate with others, in settings that are, at least partially, cooperative. Facebook today announced that it plans to cancel its 2020-2021 in-person AI Residency program as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic. For online gaming to effectively bridge geographic and demographic differences, and thus sustain healthy social bonds, platforms need to offer better affordances that both support different modes of self disclosure and help gamers manage the possible impacts of doing so. To ensure the health and safety of our employees and community, OpenAI is temporarily allowing non-essential employees to work remotely through at least May 1, 2021. With machine learning fast becoming a … Example-based Procedural Placement. As such, we do not tolerate harassing or disrespectful behavior, messages, images, or interactions by any event participant, in any form, at any aspect of the program including business and social activities, regardless of location. 5 Microsoft AI Development Acceleration Program interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Reserve your virtual seat by registering by February 19, 2021: Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. While musical AI has only recently begun to enter industry, AI-based systems have been creating music for over 70 years. Upon completion of the residency, he returned to Vanderbilt to expand on his prior work. Although deep reinforcement learning has led to breakthroughs in many difficult domains, these successes have required an ever-increasing number of samples, affording only a shrinking segment of the AI community access to their development. We find people do say gaming with coworkers helps them build their social capital, especially those who report gaming more since the pandemic began. She is advised by Dr. Fei Fang and her research interests include sequential decision-making problems, with an emphasis on reinforcement learning. He is also Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. I also helped found and serve on the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and am a co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. Related to this is the challenge of making sense of large amounts of data generated by computer games, and on assisting human game designers in creating great game experiences. Before joining Microsoft in 2010, he was at DARPA, where he established a new technology office that created operational capabilities in machine learning, data science, and computational social science. He is especially interested in the application of Statistical Forward Planning methods (such as Monte Carlo Tree Search and Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms) to modern games, General Video Game Playing, and strategy games. IBM AI Residency Program : Fall 2021 ; Shell.ai Residency Programme ; 2020. Christoph Salge, University of Hertfordshire, Creating the 4D Digital Twin in Microsoft Flight Simulator with AI in Computer Science (2013) from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.E. Currently, she is a Principal Researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE) Group. She began her quest at S2 Games (Heroes of Newerth), then Carbine (Wildstar), Epic (Fortnite and Paragon), Blizzard, and now Dreamhaven. Applications Open: Fall 2020 for 2021 … During my studies, I have also taken a one year software engineering internship as part of the query formulation team within Bing, London. Her greatest achievement in that journey was creating and leading the incredible team of data scientists at Blizzard. Visual Studio App Center Security and Compliance. Now she’s found a way to combine her love of analysis and her love of video games as the manager of the Data Science team at Minecraft. In this follow-up iteration to the NeurIPS 2019 MineRL Competition, we implement new features to expand the scale and reach of the competition. Deirdre Quarnstrom, Microsoft, Extending Helping Hands for Accessible Player Experiences However, the real danger of automating creativity is not job loss per se, but the constitution of an underclass of technical artists, writers, and musicians, whose cognitive work are deemed “manual” and doomed to maintain and be managed by algorithms. He is a visiting industry fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and visiting associate professor at the University of Southampton, UK. Research at the intersection of Gaming and AI is extremely timely and fruitful. Her research, focusing on Computational Creativity and Cluster Analysis, has earned awards from the Association for Computational Creativity, US Office of Naval Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and many more. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine, and the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. Her work is internationally known and cited in several game industry books. He is also running the Live team for Halo 5. He is one of the inventors of the Accessible Player Experiences Design Patterns and has helped train hundreds of developers across the game industry in how to use this data-driven design language to make more accessible games. My current research focuses on understanding how AI can best support designers and developers with the creation of engaging game agents (non-player characters and bots) in real-world commercial games. Wayne is a data scientist at Blizzard Entertainment working on incorporating machine learning throughout the game development process to accelerate processes through automation, enable new opportunities for game designers, and ultimately improve the player experience. Remy is passionate about creating great experiences for customers and finding new ways to engage with them. Kittus tries to assist you by mimicking the way you setdress a scene: the agent analyses neighborhoods of the user-placed objects and finds similar-looking locations in the level. Maria Antoniak is a researcher and data scientist working in natural language processing, computational social science, and cultural analytics She is currently a PhD Candidate in Information Science at Cornell University and has a master’s degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington. The Microsoft AI Residency program is a 12-month role designed to advance your career in machine learning research and engineering. Haiyan has a Masters degree with Distinction in Interaction Design from the renowned Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, and has a Bachelor of Computer Science (1st-Class Honours) from Monash University, Australia. His leadership style is guided by his core values of integrity, empowerment, & inclusion. Facebook AI Residency Program [London 2021, US Locations] Apple AI Residency Program . He’s also led the expansion of cross-platform gaming with Xbox Live, which now counts more than 50 million monthly active users. At the end of each round, competitors submit containerized versions of their learning algorithms to the AIcrowd platform where they are trained from scratch on a hold-out dataset-environment pair for a total of 4-days on a pre-specified hardware platform.