April 19, 2005 Industry visionaries Wil Wright and Bing Gordon are among those to present at the first annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, where developers and researchers converge. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), is pleased to announce the launch of the first annual Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE). The conference will be held June 1-3, 2005 at the Marriott Hotel in Marina del Rey, California, with industry leaders Wil Wright and Bing Gordon among the presenters.

AIIDE is intended to be the definitive point of interaction between entertainment software developers interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers. Sponsored by the AAAI, the conference is targeted at both the research and commercial communities, promoting AI research and practice in the context of interactive digital entertainment systems with an emphasis on commercial computer and video games.

Inviting developers and researchers to share insights and cutting-edge results from a wide range of AI-related problems, AIIDE encourages the presentation of results from core AI research areas applicable to interactive digital entertainment, as well as AI approaches developed and fielded in commercial systems. With invited speakers, paper presentations, demonstrations and exhibits – this year’s event features the following top game industry visionaries and key researchers (among others):

• A Design Perspective on AI Wil Wright, Maxis
• AI Tools for Generating Player-Driven Emotional Experience in Videogames Doug Church
• The Turing Test for Game AI W. Bingham (Bing) Gordon, Electronic Arts
• Blending Real Intelligence With Artificial Intelligence Chris Crawford
• Spatial Competence Damian Isla, Bungie Studios
• Sequence Learning by Backward Chaining in Synthetic Characters Peter Gorniak and Bruce Blumberg, MIT Media Laboratory
• Increasing Replayability With Deliberative and Reactive Planning Michael van Lent, Mark O. Riedl, Paul Carpenter, Ryan McAlinden, and Paul Brobst, University of Southern California / Institute for Creative Technologies
• Search-Based Drama Management in the Interactive Fiction Anchorhead Mark J. Nelson and Michael Mateas, Georgia Institute of Technology
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“There are so many reasons for the game industry, academia, and the commercial community to share knowledge,” notes Ian Davis, Ph.D., CEO of Mad Doc® Software and AIIDE Publicity Chair. “With the incredible growth of the game industry, many universities are starting to put a lot of resources into the study of game technology, and game developers will find that a lot of the hardest AI problems they’re starting to encounter have already been tackled by some of the brightest researchers. I think that the best games moving forward will do a great deal more with both established advanced AI techniques and cutting edge research.”