When: Wednesday, July 10, 2024, 5:00 PM - Where: Empire House Basement and online (Zoom), QMUL Whitechapel Campus
Speaker: Prof. Pedro A. González-Calero
Talk abstract: Behavior trees (BTs) have been a cornerstone of game AI for years. At Complutense University of Madrid we have been doing research and developing technology around BTs since 2008 trying to bridge the gap between academia and game industry through the extension of this technology, which is firmly established in industry, with different lines of academic research. In this talk I will describe our efforts in combining BTs with case-based reasoning, program by demonstration and reinforcement learning. I will provide some insights from the development of BehaviorBricks, a commercial BTs engine for Unity developed and maintained by our spin-of company PadaOne games. And finally, will provide some ideas on possible future developments of BTs.
Speaker's Bio: Pedro A. González-Calero is Professor of Computer Science at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, where he is the founder and director of the research group for artificial intelligence applications (http://gaia.fdi.ucm.es), and director of the master program on video game development since its creation in 2004 (http://www.videojuegos-ucm.es). He has developed most of his career in the University of Madrid where he obtained a BS on Physics in 1990 and a PhD on Computer Science in 1997 while assuming teaching duties in the School of Informatics since its creation in 1991. His research has focused on the confluence of software engineering and artificial intelligence and he is author of over 130 reviewed journal and conference proceedings articles on knowledge-based software engineering, software reuse and case-based reasoning, with applications to education, recommender systems and serious games. Visiting professor at University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), University of California Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, California, USA), and The Open University (Milton Keynes, UK). He is also the founder and CEO of PadaOne Games indie game studio (http://www.padaonegames.com).