AI and Games Conference: New Sponsors and First Talks Revealed
We welcome Arm and Kinetix as sponsors, plus a taste of what's to come on the day!
The AI and Games Conference is running for the very first time on Friday November 8th 2024 at Goldsmiths, University of London. It is the first event dedicated to professionals working on artificial intelligence in the games industry in Europe since 2017. Organised by the non-profit Game AI Events CIC, the event aims to foster opportunities for networking and knowledge exchange at a time when it is sorely needed. Visit conference.aiandgames.com to find out more and subscribe to AI and Games on Substack to keep up to date with all the updates straight to your inbox.
With the AI and Games Conference just weeks away, we have a bunch of exciting announcements to bring you. First in our new sponsors coming on board to help support the event, plus a quick work on tickets, as well as highlighting just some of the talks coming your way from across the game/AI sector. Without further ado, let’s get into it!
New Associate Sponsors
Today on behalf of the organisational team, I’m pleased to announce not one, but two new associate sponsors coming on board to support the event.
First up, pleased to welcome Arm as an associate sponsor of this years conference.
Arm technology is building the future of computing. Our energy-efficient processor designs and software platforms have enabled advanced computing in more than 290 billion chips and our technologies securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. Together with 1,000+ technology partners, we are enabling artificial intelligence to work everywhere, and in cybersecurity, we are delivering the foundation for trust in the digital world – from chip to cloud. The future is being built on Arm.
Plus, we’re also proud to announce that Kinetix is joining as an associate sponsor.
Established in 2020 by Yassine Tahi and Henri Mirande, Kinetix is an AI company headquartered in Paris. We boast a diverse team of over 40 experts, including leading AI researchers dedicated to 3D animation. Our goal is to push the boundaries of 3D animation with AI, delivering innovative and powerful technologies for the gaming industry and beyond.
We’re grateful to for the support from both of these companies in putting on the best event possible for game AI professionals in Europe. Speaking of attendees, lets talk about tickets.
Ticket Update
A quick note to say, that at the time of writing tickets are currently sold out! Early bird tickets closed earlier than planned, and our subsequent batch were gone within hours of release - so much so that they sold out before I could officially announce they’d gone live on our social media platforms.
We hope to release a final batch of tickets towards the end of next week. To keep up to date on when they go live, you can sign up to the waitlist available on the ticket page.
Rolling Out the Speaker Announcements
Now of course, what is an event without any speakers? I figured, let’s get started in celebrating the wonderful collection of talks we have coming your way. We have over 20 talks on the day, and I’ll try and give all of them their moment to shine!
Narrative-Driven Generation: Story to Game World using Large Language Models
First up, from Riot Games we welcome Rachel Dong; a research scientist based in the studios AI R&D teams. Rachel will be presenting about how to harness large language models like GPT into creating entire game worlds for play, with a particular focus on a playable murder mystery prototype. Including details on this approach can enable for dynamic characters with evolving memories, relationships and behaviours shaped by narrative.
Analytic Geometry Is Your Friend
Dr Eric Jacopin is not stranger to AI for game development, with decades of experience first as an academic researcher and now as a game developer at Hawkswell. Eric joins us to talk about analytic geometry equations that can be adopted to help developers find good points in space for interesting parts of gameplay behaviour, whether it be for navigation, for identifying areas of strategic relevance, or ensure an NPCs sense of self-preservation becomes evident.
We’re cutting WHAT? Actually Shipping a brand-new AI System
This isn’t the first time I’ll have had the pleasure of seeing Will present this year, no sir. Chambers presented a great deep-dive into the inner workings of the Hierarchical Goal Network (HGN) planning technology adopted for the recently released 4X title Ara: History Untold at this years AI Summit at GDC. In this talk, Will expands on the experiences working on Ara as the game approached launch.
AI and the Law: What You Need to Know
In the past ten years, the legislation on the adoption of AI technologies has continued to grow, and is beginning to manifest in concrete rules, laws, and regulations across different markets. We’re now in an age where not only do developers need to know what regulatory challenges may face them, but how their use of AI technologies might impact the viability of their production. To that end, I am pleased to announce the first of not one, but two talks from legal professionals who specialise in the gaming sector. Rupam Davé is a partner at Harbottle & Lewis LLP, and we met earlier this year as we both participated in a panel hosted by Barclays. It was a great conversation, and so I’m thrilled he’s joining us at this event to provide his expertise.
Learning Agents in Unreal Engine
AI tools for the most popular game engines continue to evolve, and so it’s great when we can encourage the folks that make them to come and bring us all up to speed on what they’re working on. So it’s a pleasure to welcome Brendan Mulcahy from Epic Games who is joining us to talk all about the learning agents tools in Unreal Engine that allow you to train NPCs using reinforcement learning and imitation learning.
The AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft
We recently had Christoph Salge join us on the AI and Games newsletter to talk all about the Generative Design in Minecraft Competition (GDMC), but here we’re going to get an ever deeper dive into this ongoing event, and the trends and technologies emerging from it.
Building the AI Behaviours for Flying and Swimming Machines for Horizon Forbidden West
I’m very excited for this talk for a bunch of reasons. The first, because the work that Guerrilla Games does to build interesting AI characters for their Horizon franchise always fascinates me. But in truth there is also some fun history with this talk and its speaker. The last time the game/AI community ran an event in Europe (Game AI North 2017), not only did Horizon Zero Dawn have two presentations at the event to discuss its inner workings, I also had the pleasure of meeting our speaker David Speck. David was already in games at that time, but was developing an interest in AI for game development. Since we saw each other last, Speck has completed a Masters degree in AI, became a senior AI programmer at Guerrilla and is now presenting the first of two talks at the AI and Games Conference all about Horizon Forbidden West.
Even More to Come!
That’s just a taste of what to expect at the AI and Games Conference this year. We have even more speakers and talks to announce next week. This programme looks amazing, I’m very excited, and looking forward to seeing some of you in person to check these talks out next month.
But of course, for everyone else we will be recording all of the talks and sharing them with you at a later date. So don’t fret if you can’t make it, we’ll be able to share these talks with you in early 2025.
Any sense for how many additional tickets will be offered to the waitlist?