Conference Details / Keynotes

Keynote Speakers

Three voices on games, intelligence, and the responsibilities that come with building both. The archive keeps the speaker record and a fresh set of notes on each session.

Keynotes: 3
Host: NYU Brooklyn
Dates: 22 to 25 August 2017

IBM Research
Deep Blue team

Murray Campbell

Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Research, where he manages the AI Foundations Lab.

How games shaped AI research

Campbell traced the changing place of games in AI research. Early work was narrow and steady; by 2017, games appeared across a much wider set of research questions. He used that shift to explain what makes games such useful test environments for search, learning, and decisions.

Campbell was a member of the team behind Deep Blue, the chess system that defeated a reigning human world champion in a match. His work has since applied AI to finance, public health, and workforce problems. He earned a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and is an AAAI Fellow.

IBM Research external site, opens in a new tab

University of Bath
AI ethics

Joanna Bryson

Reader at Bath and affiliated with the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton.

Ethics, games, and the roles we play

The talk began with a practical problem: conversations about AI ethics often run into vague definitions on both sides. Bryson offered a working account of ethics as the patterns that hold a society together, then used two Bath projects to show how those patterns can be studied. One put players inside the priorities of bots; the other looked at a whole system from above. The closing section turned to game characters, consciousness, and the biases that developers bring to their work.

Bryson works on systems AI and AI ethics, with research that crosses biology, psychology, philosophy, and politics. At Bath, she started the Intelligent Systems group and now leads Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence. Her degrees include psychology from Chicago and Edinburgh, and artificial intelligence from Edinburgh and MIT.

University of Bath external site, opens in a new tab

Spirit AI
NYU Game Center

Mitu Khandaker

Chief Creative Officer at Spirit AI, Assistant Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center, and founder of the studio The Tiniest Shark.

Narrative design and AI

The archived program listed the talk title but did not include an abstract. The session sits at the meeting point of narrative design and AI systems, a space Khandaker has worked in as a designer, researcher, and studio founder.

Khandaker leads creative work at Spirit AI and teaches at the NYU Game Center. She founded The Tiniest Shark, whose satirical simulation game Redshirt was released in 2013. She holds a PhD from the University of Portsmouth on the aesthetics of interactivity in games.

NYU Game Center external site, opens in a new tab

A note on the record

The speaker names and affiliations are taken from the archived 2017 site. The notes above are new summaries written for this rebuild. They are not transcripts and do not reproduce the original abstracts.