Murray Campbell
Title: The Evolving Role of Games in AI

Abstract: From the earliest days of the computer era, games have been considered important vehicles for research in artificial intelligence. Over the first few decades, progress was slow and steady, and, for the most part, narrowly focused. But in recent years there has been an explosion of interest in games in a much wider variety of research contexts. In this talk I will examine the evolving role of games in AI research, and explore the characteristics of games that have made them so useful to present-day researchers.

Bio: Murray Campbell is a Distinguished Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where he is a manager in the AI Foundations Lab. He was a member of the team that developed Deep Blue, which was the first computer to defeat the human world chess champion in a match. Campbell received numerous awards for Deep Blue, including the Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence and the Fredkin Prize. He has applied his expertise in artificial intelligence to a number of areas, including finance, public health, and workforce. Campbell received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Joanna Bryson

Title: We all have a role to play: Games and AI Ethics

Abstract: AI Ethics is very hard because hardly anyone has a coherent vision of either AI or Ethics. Fortunately, you and I build AI routinely as part of our jobs, so we just need to get on top of ethics. In this talk I will describe ethics as the behaviours that create (including define) a society, and go over the science (mostly biology!) of social versus individual investment. Then I’ll show two very different games being developed at University of Bath. We examine ethics from a first person perspective by allowing advanced undergraduates to consider the priorities of bots playing Capture the Flag, and we examine it from a god’s eye view in The Sustainability Game. I’ll also talk a little about consciousness in game characters and conscious and unconscious bias in AI developers. Work with a number of collaborators, but particularly Andreas Theodorou.

Bio: Joanna Bryson is a Reader (tenured Associate Professor) at the University of Bath, and an affiliate of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). She has broad academic interests in the structure and utility of intelligence, both natural and artificial. Venues for her research range from reddit to Science. She is best known for her work in systems AI and AI ethics, both of which she began during her PhD in the 1990s, but she and her colleagues publish broadly, in biology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, cognitive science, and politics. Current projects include “Public Goods and Artificial Intelligence”, with Alin Coman of Princeton Psychology and Mark Riedl of Georgia Tech, funded by Princeton’s University Center for Human Values. This project includes both basic research in human sociality and experiments in technological interventions. Other current research include understanding the causality behind the correlation between wealth inequality and political polarization, generating transparency for AI systems, and research on machine prejudice deriving from human semantics. She holds degrees in Psychology from Chicago and Edinburgh, and in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh and MIT. At Bath she founded the Intelligent Systems research group (one of four in the Department of Computer Science) and heads their Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence.

Mitu Khandaker

Title: Telling stories with AI

Abstract: Forthcoming

Bio: Mitu Khandaker is Chief Creative Officer at Spirit AI, and an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Game Center, and runs amd indie game development microstudio, The Tiniest Shark. She has a PhD in games & the aesthetics of interactivity from the University of Portsmouth (UK).