< Back Dr Henrik Siljebråt Goldsmiths iGGi Alum Henrik has a background in IT/DevOps and a Masters in Cognitive Science from Lund University. Based on established neurobiological correlates of reinforcement learning (RL), I investigate animal learning and decision making using cognitive modeling techniques, such as probabilistic programming and machine learning. Animals somehow manage to create useful representations of incoming sensory information, representations then used for learning and decision making. How these representations of states of the world are integrated into task structure and models of the world is an open question, which I investigate using behavioural experiments with humans and bumblebees and modelling said behaviour using RL combined with hidden state models for representing states and task structure. The potential findings of these experiments have promise to not only elucidate the workings of the animal brain but also provide valuable contributions to artificial intelligence, where improved models of state representations could vastly improve data efficiency and generalizability over current generation systems. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email h.siljebrat@gold.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Featured Publication(s): On State Representations and Behavioural Modelling Methods in Reinforcement Learning The Effect of State Representations in Sequential Sensory Prediction: Introducing the Shape Sequence Task Towards human-like artificial intelligence using StarCraft 2 Themes - Previous Next

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games & Game Intelligence (IGGI) is the world's largest PhD research in games programme. The annual IGGI conference showcases students' work. Based at Uni of York & Queen Mary Uni of London, IGGI collaborates closely with 80+ industry partners. Welcome to iGGi !!! We are a group of people doing research in games... Read More Follow us on social media: (if you musk) BiGGi Con 2026 >> REGISTRATION OPEN! - iGGi THEMES - Game AI Game Data Design & Development Immersive Technology Esports Accessibility Creative Computing Game Audio Player Research Applied Games Check out the latest iGGi NEWS 23 April 2026 BiGGi Con 2026 - REGISTRATION NOW OPEN! Don't miss this year's iGGi Conference >> *BiGGi Con 2026* << 15-17 September 2026 at Queen Mary University of London Click the article for registration details! Read More iGGi GAMES iGGi COMMUNITY PG Researchers Staff Industry Partners Management Team Alumni

< Back Dr Ben Kirman University of York iGGi Training Coordinator Supervisor Available to supervise non-iGGi students for 2024 intake Ben is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Prof) in Interactive Media at the University of York, who has over 20 years' experience as a creative technologist. Since his first programming job fixing Y2K bugs (you're welcome), he has worked with dozens of organisations, large and small, in design and prototyping playful experiences. His research uses game design and playful design as a way to explore the complex effects of emerging technologies through novel and unexpected interactions and experiences. Most often, this is through the design and development of games, digital/physical prototypes, and design fictions. Ben has applied this in topics ranging from immersive theatre, dog technology, non-league football, radical cycle delivery, and time travelling robots, to educational games, esports, new situationism and magic. The unifying theme is play – as a topic of study, a way of working, for research insight, and as expression or output in games or playful experiences. This work, especially the more bizarre stuff, has often been covered by traditional media, including the BBC, New Scientist, Wired, The Guardian, TIME, Metro, the New York Times, and Your Cat magazine. Ben is keen on supervising students with strong creative drives, with an interest in making, design, experimentation, and a broad perspective on games and play. This might be a project about playful props in immersive theatre, or a project about context in locative and site-specific games, or any other project that looks to explore new possibilities and new implications of emerging technology through the lens of play. Research themes include: Game Design Applied Games Computational Creativity Sports with an E and without an E Player Experience Email ben.kirman@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Applied Games Creative Computing Design & Development Esports Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Perception of emotions in knocking sounds: An evaluation study Link Author(s) M Houel, A Arun, A Berg, A Iop, A Barahona-Rios, S Pauletto Abstract More info TBA Link

iGGi PhD Projects - listing iGGi PhD Projects 2022 Industry-led Projects This page displays industry-proposed PhD projects on offer for our 2022 intake: If you are interested in any of the projects listed and would like further details and/or to discuss, please email the respective project supervisor. Please note that you can also frame your own project independently as long as that you have secured a supervisor's support. For a list of available supervisors please see the accepting students section of our website. While iGGi has ensured that the projects listed below are within iGGi's scope, we wish to highlight that supervisor-framed projects are not prioritised in the application selection process: they are judged by the same criteria as applicant-framed proposals. Navigate to other Projects on offer: Game AI Design & Development Player Research Game Audio Game Data Immersive Technology Creative Computing E-Sports Applied Games Industry-led Projects Back to ALL Projects Design and Development Realistic physical interaction of 3D point cloud objects This project will investigate geometric and machine learning approaches to developing 3D game assets. Price Design and Development Duration Miles Hansard, Changjae Oh Read More Load More

< Back Dr Memo Akten Goldsmiths iGGi Alum Real-time, interactive, multi-modal media synthesis and continuous control using generative deep models for enhancing artistic expression Real-time, interactive, multi-modal media synthesis and continuous control using generative deep models for enhancing artistic expression. This research investigates how the latest developments in Deep Learning can be used to create intelligent systems that enhance artistic expression. These are systems that learn – both offline and online – and people interact with and gesturally ‘conduct’ to expressively produce and manipulate text, images and sounds. The desired relationship between human and machine is analogous to that between an Art Director and graphic designer, or film director and video editor – i.e. a visionary communicates their vision to a ‘doer’ who produces the output under the direction of the visionary, shaping the output with their own vision and skills. Crucially, the desired human-machine relationship here also draws inspirations from that between a pianist and piano, or a conductor and orchestra – i.e. again a visionary communicates their vision to a system which produces the output, but this communication is real-time, continuous and expressive; it’s an immediate response to everything that has been produced so far, creating a closed feedback loop. The key area that the research tackles is as follows: Given a large corpus (e.g. thousands or millions) of example data, we can train a generative deep model. That model will hopefully contain some kind of ‘knowledge’ about the data and its underlying structure. The questions are: i) How can we investigate what the model has learnt? ii) how can we do this interactively and in real-time, and expressively explore the knowledge that the model contains iii) how can we use this to steer the model to produce not just anything that resembles the training data, but what *we* want it to produce, *when* we want it to produce it, again in real-time and through expressive, continuous interaction and control. Memo Akten is an artist and researcher from Istanbul, Turkey. His work explores the collisions between nature, science, technology, ethics, ritual, tradition and religion. He studies and works with complex systems, behaviour, algorithms and software; and collaborates across many disciplines spanning video, sound, light, dance, software, online works, installations and performances. Akten received the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in 2013 for his collaboration with Quayola, ‘Forms’. Exhibitions and performances include the Grand Palais, Paris; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Royal Opera House, London; Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; La Gaîté lyrique, Paris; Holon Design Museum, Israel and the EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email memo@memo.tv Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Featured Publication(s): Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2021 Deep visual instruments: realtime continuous, meaningful human control over deep neural networks for creative expression Deep Meditations: Controlled navigation of latent space Learning to see: you are what you see Calligraphic stylisation learning with a physiologically plausible model of movement and recurrent neural networks Mixed-initiative creative interfaces Learning to see Real-time interactive sequence generation and control with Recurrent Neural Network ensembles Collaborative creativity with Monte-Carlo Tree Search and Convolutional Neural Networks Sequence generation with a physiologically plausible model of handwriting and Recurrent Mixture Density Networks Deepdream is blowing my mind All watched over by machines of loving grace: Deepdream edition Realtime control of sequence generation with character based Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks Themes Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Utilising VIPER for Parameter Space Exploration in Agent Based Wealth Distribution Models Link Author(s) OJ Scholten, RJ Spick, KA Hawick Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back How Boardgame Players Imagine Interacting With Technology Link Author(s) T Farkas, NGJ Hughes, R Fiebrink Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Dr Guifen Chen Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Dr Guifen Chen is a Lecturer in Neurobiology at QMUL. Her work focuses on the neuronal basis of multisensory integration, spatial cognition and memory. Her lab uses state-of-the-art techniques such as immersive virtual reality and in vivo electrophysiological/probe recording in mice. Her research is currently supported by funding from BBRSC and the Royal Society. Dr Chen completed her undergraduate studies in both biology and computer science at East China Normal University in China. She then pursued PhD in neuroscience, conducting research at both East China Normal University and Boston University in the USA. Following that, she undertook postdoctoral research at University College London in the UK. Her work has been published in high-impact journals such as Nature Communications, eLife, and Current biology. Email guifen.chen@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Immersive Technology Player Research - Previous Next

< Back “The game doesn't judge you”: game designers’ perspectives on implementing failure in video games Link Author(s) C Foch, B Kirman Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Tamsin Isaac University of York iGGi PG Researcher Tamsin has been a lifelong gamer ever since receiving her first Game Boy and has long been fascinated by how people engage with games emotionally, socially, and behaviourally. She joined the iGGi CDT in 2023 after completing a BSc and MSc in Psychology at the University of Plymouth, where she developed a growing interest in player motivation, disengagement, and live-service game design. Her PhD research focuses on limited-time events (LTEs) in digital games—temporary content designed to encourage engagement and re-engagement in live-service games. Through this work, she explores how LTEs shape player behaviour, routine, anticipation, disengagement, and return play across platforms and genres. Tamsin’s research combines large-scale content analysis with qualitative diary-and-interview methods to investigate both the structure and lived experience of LTEs. She is currently developing a cross-platform taxonomy of LTEs using data from over 2,600 Steam and Google Play games, alongside player-focused research exploring how individuals decide whether events are “worth” participating in during everyday play. Her work aims to support more ethical, sustainable, and player-friendly approaches to live-service game design by helping researchers and developers better understand how event structures influence player experience and long-term engagement. She is open to collaboration opportunities with game studios interested in live-service systems, player behaviour, engagement design, and event analysis using player data or design insights. When not researching or analysing games, Tamsin enjoys baking, reading, playing cosy indie games, and quietly grinding dailies. Email tamsin.isaac@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor: Prof. Paul Cairns Themes Applied Games Design & Development Player Research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n32ngtGYNQ8 Previous Next

< Back A local approach to forward model learning: Results on the game of life game Link Author(s) SM Lucas, A Dockhorn, V Volz, C Bamford, RD Gaina, I Bravi, ... Abstract More info TBA Link