< Back Dimitris Menexopoulos Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for post-PhD position Dimitris Menexopoulos, also known as Menex, is a versatile music composer, sound designer, audio technologist and multi-instrumentalist from Thessaloniki, Greece, currently based in London, UK. With an academic background in geoscience, electronic production and information experience design, he draws elements from a broad knowledge base across art, science and technology to inform his work. He has worked in film, games, XR, branding, fashion and the automotive sector for more than ten years. He is a full BAFTA member. A description of Dimitris' research: Procedural content generation supports the creation of rich and varied games, but audio design has not kept pace with such innovation. Often the visual aspects of every asset in the scene may be procedurally rendered, yet audio developers still largely rely on pre - recorded samples in order to carry out their tasks. However, much of the information required to determine smooth audio - visual interactions is already included in the game assets. For example, the size, shape, material and movement of assets offer potential types of data that can drive audio algorithms directly. This research explores how available graphics information in the game engine can be used to generate the sound effects produced when objects interact in real - time, by combining the affordances of procedural audio and sonification. Email contact@menex.world Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisors: Dr Josh Reiss Dr Tom Collins Featured Publication(s): Procedural Sonification of Environmental Phenomena for Realistic Sound Design Using texture maps to procedurally generate sound in virtual environments The State of the Art in Procedural Audio Themes Creative Computing Game Audio - Previous Next

< Back Connor Watts Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher I am a machine learning research engineer and software developer with commercial experience deploying and maintaining models for start-ups and larger organizations. I have experience researching and developing novel algorithms, as well as designing custom environments for application in domains such as combinatorial optimization, finance and games. Email c.watts@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor: Dr Paulo Rauber Themes Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Prof. Marian Ursu Goldsmiths Supervisor Marian Ursu has a first degree in Computer Science, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, and has worked over the past twenty years in the development of new forms of mediated expression and interaction, in the space of convergence of digital technology with creative practice. He worked at Goldsmiths, University of London, pioneering “creative computing”, a term denoting a fundamental link between digital technologies, the arts and media. At York, he led the development of the Interactive Media subject area in the department of Theatre Film Television and Interactive Media, inherently interdisciplinary, building on Computer Science, User Experience Design, Media Practice and Cultural Studies. He is a co-founder and the Director of the Digital Creativity (DC) Labs ( https://digitalcreativity.ac.uk ), a centre of excellence in impact-driven research in creativity for games, narrative media and the rich space of media convergence that lies in between, and Co-Director of XR Stories ( https://xrstories.co.uk ), a creative industries partnership working across film, TV, games, media arts, heritage, advertising and technology to champion a new future in storytelling, in which he leads on Research and Development. His personal research is situated in the area of narrative experiences in scree media – shared screens (film, TV), personal screens (games, social media), stories in VR, XR narrative experiences – drawing from and building on established narrative art-forms and media including film and TV, radio, theatre, and opera. One of his key research objective is to explore the creative process that emerges in dialogue between humans and machines (AI). On one hand, this is necessary for the authoring of more complex narrative experiences that truly exploit the affordances of interactive and immersive digital media technologies. On the other hand, this is a yet poorly untapped space of opportunities, potentially conducive to significant findings. He is particularly interested in supervising students interested in exploring creativity in dialogue with AI and/or the development of novel narrative experiences, in topics including: Conceptualising the space of interactive storytelling Developing authoring tools and techniques for interactive storytelling Creating new forms of narrative engagement Analysing the concept of creativity in interactive media which emerges in conversation with AI Research themes: Narrative Games; Narrative Experiences Storytelling with Convergent Media Object-Based Media Computational Creativity Live mediated experiences (performance, sports, esports) Entertainment media and mental health Games and Theatre Email marian.ursu@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Creative Computing Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Søren Riis Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Søren Riis has more than 15 years of experience in teaching computability, complexity and the art of creating fast efficient algorithms. He has a strong interest in reinforcement learning and generative adversarial networks (GANs) related to strategy games. Riis has been actively involved in computer chess, and is listed on the wiki of influential people in chess programming https://www.chessprogramming.org/ Søren Riis is a strong player of strategy games including Chess, Shogi, Go and Bridge at an internal level. He has worked as a consultant for an AI company and is involved in applying deep learning for the card game of bridge. For the last 5 years he has been working on technical projects related to machine learning and reinforcement learning. He has practical experience and interest in scientific computing on super computers, and in creating C and C++ libraries to run from within python. Søren Riis is particularly interested in supervising students with a strong technical and/or maths background. Aptitude for strategy games with an interest in one the following ares is an advantage. Games requiring inductive reasoning combined with exploration. Hidden identity games (Werewolf, Resistance/Avalon, Mafia etc) Using GANs to sample realistic scenarios during gameplay Deep Reinforcement Learning in multi-agent strategy games Building and analysing games for investigating evolution of communication. Research themes: Game AI Game Design Game Creativity Games and mathematics Email s.riis@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Creative Computing Game AI Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Prof. Mark Sandler Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Queen Mary University of London, Centre for Digital Music, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. Mark Sandler has been doing research in audio and music – with a little computer vision as a side line – for over 40 years. He founded the world-leading Centre for Digital Music and has been its Director since 2003 (with a 4 year gap 2010-14). The Centre is now one of the largest such research groupings in the world, with around 80 PhDs, PDRAs and academics. In his early career he invented the Digital Power Amplifier, researched Drum Analysis and Synthesis for Simmons Electronics Ltd, moving into Fractal and Chaos analysis and synthesis, Ambisonic modelling and Fine Grain Audio Compression before becoming one of the pioneers of Music Information Retrieval around 2000. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the IEEE, the IET and the AES. He is also a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He has supervised over 40 PhD candidates successfully through their studies and is currently involved in four other CDTs at QM - in AI and Music (Co-Investigator, Impact, in Data Centric Engineering (Co-Director, Partnerships), in Data-centric Engineering (Director) and Media & Arts Technology (of which he was founding Director 2009-16). Research interests are: Digital Signal Processing, Digital Audio, Digital Music Technology, Music Informatics, Semantic Audio, Music Data Science, Semantic Music Metadata, Auditory User Interaction, Immersive Audio. He is particularly interested in supervising students with a background in Acoustics, Signal Processing, Audio, Machine/Deep Learning in: Virtual acoustics for games Games engines for virtual and augmented reality music experiences Research themes: Games Engines for non-gaming interactive experiences Game Audio and Music Email mark.sandler@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Game Audio - Previous Next

< Back Dr Poonam Yadav University of York Supervisor Dr Yadav research is focused on making the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing-based distributed systems resilient, reliable, and robust. This is an interdisciplinary research area that requires expertise in system design and integration along with knowledge of sensor systems, wireless networking, and domain and contextual understanding. To achieve resilience and reliability in the area of resource constraints and distributed systems, I focus on coordination and collaboration using interactions among machines, humans and data entities. These interactions could be categorized as machine-to-machine (M2M), machine-to-human (M2H), and human-to-data (H2D), and involve many challenges such as collaborative trust, privacy, legibility and accountability. Dr Yadav is an active reviewer of many top-tier ACM/IEEE IoT and networking conferences and journals. Dr. Yadav leads ACM-W UK professional chapter and is featured as "People of ACM Europe" and among the top ten N2Women Rising Star in Computer networking and communications in 2020. Research themes: E-Sports Use of IoT in Games Gamifications Citizen Science Email poonam.yadav@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Design & Development Esports Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Sahar Mirhadi University of York iGGi PG Researcher Available for post-PhD position Sahar Mirhadi is a final-year PhD researcher investigating how video games support during challenging times. Her contributions have been published in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, and she has presented at Devcom on transforming the complexity of turn-based games into a strategic advantage. She is also a passionate Magic: The Gathering player, collaborating with competitive Magic team Worldly Counsel to convert tournament insights into a deeper understanding of player motivations and team dynamics. Sahar is also a Safe In Our World Ambassador, a recipient of the Magic: The Gathering New Perspectives Grant for Marginalised Players, and a member of the Birds of Paradise collective. A description of Sahar's research: Sahar's PhD research project investigates the specific aspects of games that facilitate coping for players during difficult life experiences. Building on earlier work that mapped broad links between game aspects and coping strategies, Sahar’s first study showed that games can support a variety of coping strategies, including emotion-focused, avoidance, and meaning-focused coping. However, questions remained about how these effects occur across different gaming contexts. To address this, her second study employed in-depth interviews and a grounded theory approach with players of Disco Elysium, Darkest Dungeon and Stardew Valley. The findings led to the development of the Games as Dynamic Coping Systems theory, which posits that specific aspects of video games scaffold a diverse range of coping strategies for players facing personal difficulties. The model highlights the dynamic interplay between what the player brings (e.g., prior experiences, needs, skills) and what the game provides (such as Narrative, Game Environment and Character Interactions). Through this interaction, players develop coping strategies, and the outcomes from coping feed back into their ongoing gaming and life experiences. While the grounded theory offered a deeper understanding of how specific game aspects support various coping strategies, it also revealed a gap: the temporal dynamics of coping. Sahar’s ongoing work aims to explore how players transition between coping strategies over time and what factors shape these transitions. Her overall aim is to provide a deeper understanding of specific aspects within games that support coping, shedding light on the potential benefits and limitations of video games during times of difficulty. Email sm2904@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisors: Dr Alena Denisova Dr Jo Iacovides Playing through tough times: Exploring the relationship between game aspects and coping strategies during difficult life challenges Themes Player Research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nTTCR25O0Y Previous Next

< Back Prof. Paul Cairns University of York iGGi Chair Supervisor Paul Cairns is a professor interested in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) generally and specifically on how games work to produce the experiences that players really value. He has looked extensively at immersion and engagement in games but is also developing new ideas on players experiences of challenge and uncertainty. He has been teaching HCI for over twenty years and is particularly interested in the rigorous application of research methods having co-edited the first book on research methods for HCI and written another about doing better statistics in HCI. He strongly believes in self-explanatory book titles. He is also Scholar-in-Residence at The AbleGamers Charity, based in the USA, through which he is working with players and game developers to inform and advance the development of accessible games. With his colleagues there, he produced the Accessible Player Experiences (APX) design patterns and card deck. He is particularly interested in supervising students with a HCI, behavioural sciences, media or computer science background on the following topics: Understanding player experiences Developing new measures of player experience whether based on self-report, physiological or other instruments Accessible player experiences Using games to understand and inform people’s experiences with other interactive systems Research themes: Accessible Games Games with a Purpose Player Experience Email paul.cairns@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Accessibility Applied Games Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Gorm Lai Goldsmiths iGGi PG Researcher Inspired by the works of Karl Sims and William Latham as well games such as a Spore and No Man's Sky, Gorm's main work is focused on using artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate creatures for use in video games. Combining this with his background as a virtual reality pioneer, his full doctorate is looking into how mixed-initiative co-creative interfaces in vr can assist in creating procedural generated creatures for use in video games. As a stalwart of the game development community, Gorm ran the Danish chapter of the International Game Developer Association (IGDA) for 5 years, started the London Indie Game Developers meetup group which currently features almost 3000 members, co-founded the Nordic Game Jam, as well as the Global Game Jam. The Global Game Jam has been recorded into the Guinness Book of World Records, and has more participating countries than the Winter Olympics. Gorm is a games industry veteran who has worked on 17 commercial video games since 2004, and has spoken at numerous games industry conferences such as GDC, Nordic Game & Develop Brighton. Gorm is a student at Goldsmiths, University of London, where is he is supervised by William Latham and Frederic Fol Leymarie. Email lai.gorm@gmail.com Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor(s): Prof. William Latham Featured Publication(s): Formal Constraints and Creativity: Connecting Game Jams, Dogma ’95, the Demo Scene, OuBaPo, and Renga poets What Is a Game Jam? The Dark Side of Game Jams On Mixed-Initiative Content Creation for Video Games Two decades of game jams Virtual Creature Morphology‐A Review Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry Introducing: the game jam license Trends in organizing philosophies of game jams and game hackathons The global game jam for teaching and learning Gplayer A compression method for spectral photon map rendering Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Dr Matthew Whitby University of York iGGi Alum Matthew Whitby is a games designer, and player experience academic investigating how games can shape our perspectives on a small or grand scale. In particular, his work considers how we can make the development of perspective challenging processes easier for game developers. Previously, Matthew has published his undergraduate dissertation within the Games Journal, which explored the creation and design of Games Installations. Games that make full use of their surrounding space, and in fact incorporate the real world with its digital counterpart. In addition, he’s worked with Motek Medical, a rehabilitation company based in Amsterdam, where he developed socially focused multiplayer applications. More recently, he attended CHI Play 2019 to present the foundational study of his PhD titled: “One of the Baddies All Along: Perspective Challenging Moments in Games”. He continues to develop this idea forward, while developing games (both digital and table-top) in his spare time. Matthew’s work hopes to answer; how games can challenge a player’s perspective, and if this is a phenomenon that can be intentionally designed for? Email matt_whitby@hotmail.com Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor(s): Prof. Sebastian Deterding Dr Jo Iacovides A Design Framework for Reflective Play "One of the baddies all along": Moments that Challenge a Player's Perspective “Conversations with pigeons”: Capturing Players’ Lived Experience of Perspective Challenging Games Themes Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Cristina Dobre Goldsmiths iGGi Alum Cristina Dobre has a background in Mathematics and Computing receiving distinction in her undergraduate degree in Computer Science. My current focus is on the nonverbal cues that influence and shape the social interaction in immersive VR environments. More broadly, I'm investigating autonomous agents (or virtual humans) in social settings in terms of non-verbal interactions with users. I'm interested in the underlying mechanics of social interaction that help developing an emphatic and engaging virtual human. At the moment, I'm working on ML models based on multimodal datasets to detect various social cues (such as gaze) or various human-defined social attitudes (such as engagement) in social interactions in VR. I'm also interested in generating more complex behaviour for virtual characters (NPCs) that will improve the user's experience with the NPCs in a social VR setting. Designing communication and other social interactions in immersive VR can be a challenging task, and aspects on this are addressed in my research. The findings from these studies can help game designers and game developers determine the appropriate non-player character's non-verbal (and verbal) behaviour in games, especially in VR games. Along with its applications in the games industry, the findings would be useful for other applications such as designing multi-modal human-machine interactions and other systems for medical purposes, for social anxiety disorders therapy, simulations, training or learning. Email cristina.dobre@uni-a.de Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Featured Publication(s): Avatars in mixed-reality meetings: A longitudinal field study of realistic versus cartoon facial likeness effects on communication, task satisfaction, presence, and emotional… Gaze for Dyads & Blinks for Triads: Task Engagement Predictors in Free-Flow VR Interactions Live Link's Awakening of a Humorous Real-Time Character Multimodal Generation of Contextualized Jokes for a Real-Time Virtual Character Social Interactions in Immersive Virtual Environments: People, Agents, and Avatars Rolling Horizon Co-evolution in Two-player General Video Game Playing Using machine learning to generate engaging behaviours in immersive virtual environments More than buttons on controllers: engaging social interactions in narrative VR games through social attitudes detection Nice is Different than Good: Longitudinal Communicative Effects of Realistic and Cartoon Avatars in Real Mixed Reality Work Meetings Immersive Machine Learning for Social Attitude Detection in Virtual Reality Narrative Games Direct Gaze Triggers Higher Frequency of Gaze Change: An Automatic Analysis of Dyads in Unstructured Conversation Themes Game AI Immersive Technology - Previous Next

< Back Dr Jeremy Gow Queen Mary University of London iGGi Training Coordinator & Industry Liaison Supervisor Jeremy Gow is a game AI researcher with a focus on computational game design, exploring ways in which AI can help us understand players and games, enhance the game development process, and contribute to the creation of game content. He has been a lecturer at EECS and a member of the Queen Mary Game AI group since 2018. He has a background in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction research, and a PhD in AI from the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly interested in supervising students with a game development or AI background on the following topics: Automated playtesting and QA AI-based game development tools Modelling player experience AI for the design of agents and procedural generators Computational creativity in games Research themes: Game AI Game Analytics Game Design Computational Creativity Email jeremy.gow@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Game AI Game Data - Previous Next