Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment 2017: Travel Support for the Doctoral Mentoring Program and the Playable Experiences Track

2017 年交互式数字娱乐中的人工智能：博士生导师计划和可玩体验轨道的旅行支持

• 批准号: 1747455
• 负责人: Brian Magerko
• 金额: $ 2万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-07-01 至 2018-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1747455&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Artificial; Intelligence; Interactive; Digital; Entertainment

AAAI's Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) is a yearly conference that brings together representatives from both academia and industry to present novel research and discuss interesting problems in the area of human-centered artificial intelligence and interactive media. AIIDE 2017, the 13th conference in the series, will take place October 5-9 at the Snowbird Resort in Utah. This is funding to provide scholarships to support participant travel for two tracks at the conference that both have the goal of strengthening and diversifying this growing research community: (1) the AIIDE doctoral mentoring program and (2) the AIIDE playable experiences track. The organizers expect to have 10 students participating in the doctoral mentoring program, and 5 playable experiences showcased in the playable experiences track. Artificial intelligence in digital entertainment is an inherently interdisciplinary research area, including artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, psychology, digital media, and modeling/simulation, as well as humanities and the arts. AIIDE serves an important role as an interface between AI and society, through its focus on digital entertainment and related applications. The conference investigates not just how to make intelligent machines, but how to produce transformative technology that impacts engineers, designers, and authors on potentially large scale projects with broad cultural visibility. The conference also endeavors to grow relationships between academic research and industrial practice. More information about the conference is available online at https://sites.google.com/view/aiide2017/. The AIIDE doctoral mentoring program and playable experiences tracks are crucial to the health and growth of the AIIDE community. Supporting participants to attend enriches the conference experience for all attendees, not just those who receive travel scholarships. By providing underrepresented students with mentoring opportunities early in their career, the doctoral mentoring program will serve to broaden the diversity of the whole AIIDE community (and the other communities it interacts with). The playable experiences track also offers an opportunity to broaden participation in AIIDE. By offering travel support to independent scholars, practitioners, and artists in communities that have greater diversity than core computer science/AI, it is possible to promote diversity by easing financial barriers to full participation in the community. The organizers are committed to improving diversity; to these ends, they will be specifically be doing outreach to underrepresented groups, and they will also be limiting the number of accepted students to at most two per institution,The AIIDE doctoral mentoring program will invite early-stage (ideally just before thesis proposal) students to receive feedback on their proposed research program. The purpose of the program is to foster connections between student peers at different institutions, establish faculty mentoring relationships that can lead to participation on committees (including thesis proposal committees), and provide other contacts that can help guide students early enough to have a large impact on the trajectory of their research. The mentoring program begins with lunch on the first day, asking mentors and mentees to get to know each other before their presentations and give the mentees the opportunity to deepen their professional network during the conference. During the doctoral consortium, students will each give brief presentations of their proposed thesis topic followed by conversation and questions with the mentors and conference attendees. These presentations will serve as encouragement for interested attendees and mentors to provide 1-on-1 feedback at the poster session. The committee will select students who are early in their career so that mentors have an opportunity to help shape the future of their research and so students may begin to build their professional network. Mentors for the doctoral consortium will be invited based on the research areas of the accepted students, and will be selected from senior faculty and respected industry leaders in the field. To facilitate external feedback, mentors will be selected from outside the student's thesis committee and institution. After students are accepted to the cohort, DC co-chairs will ask them to provide more information about their professional goals in order to best match them with academic and/or industry mentors. During the doctoral consortium, all mentors will be invited to the presentations and poster session to encourage discussion across research areas.The AIIDE playable experiences track aims to integrate research and practice through showcasing innovative, AI-based games and interactive media. This track aims to bring independent game developers, students, industry practitioners, and researchers together. The track fosters discussion of applications of the AI research shown in the main conference towards designing new kinds of playable experiences, and encourages interdisciplinary collaboration between conference attendees and the broader interactive digital entertainment community; it consists of published short papers about the work, a panel with representation from each playable experience to discuss the role of AI in design, and a conference session where attendees are able to play the games and discuss the work 1-on-1 with participants. The playable experiences track is especially valuable to students in the doctoral mentoring program who are interested in pursuing careers in industry, since designers and technologists who attend the playable experiences track can be excellent mentors. For all students, especially in the early stages of their research, it is useful to see high-quality examples of how their research might be used in polished, complete games. To ensure the health of this track, it is important that independent developers, artists, and practitioners outside of the traditional academic AI research community have the financial means to attend and show their work; often, those who are most qualified to submit work to the playable experiences track do not come from traditional computer science backgrounds, or do not have access to travel funds of their own.