AI and Games Conference

Ian Shaw is Founder/Director of Games Technology Consulting, with a history ranging from Computer Science at Cambridge, through Indy-dev published by Sony, Head of R&D at Bullfrog Productions, CTO at Electronic Arts, Publishing Development Manager for Microsoft/Xbox, Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths. Games from clients and employers have multiple GoTY and $1B-sales, with franchise credits including: Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Theme Park, EA-Sports-F1, Harry Potter, Quake, Battlefield, Monopoly, Kinectimals, Fable, JX3 (China MMO), JX-Pocket (China iPhone #1).

Maciej Celmer is a Senior AI Engineer at CD PROJEKT RED with eight years of game development experience, primarily focused on Game AI. Before joining the company, he contributed to the development of Dying Light 2, among other games. At CD PROJEKT RED, he has been engaged in developing multiple AI systems for Cyberpunk 2077 and its expansion Phantom Liberty. Currently, Maciej works on the development of Project Polaris, the next game in The Witcher series. He also works as a lecturer across various Polish universities

Bitpart AI's CEO Jeff Orkin has built AI systems for games at Monolith Productions and Sierra, including FEAR, and No One Lives Forever 2. FEAR was the first commercial game to use automated an planning system, called GOAP, inspired by robotics research. Founded in 2022, Bitpart AI builds on Jeff’s PhD research at the MIT Media Lab exploring creating socially intelligent characters from data. Jeff is a Contributing Author of the AI Game Programming Wisdom book series, has presented at the Game Developer's Conference, AIIDE, and AAMAS, and holds degrees in Computer Science and art from MIT, University of Washington, and Tufts University.

Olga Titova is a former cognitive psychology researcher and AI product specialist who explores the intersection of human psychology and machine intelligence. After helping shape emotional AI at Replika.ai and Blush.ai, she now leads AI initiatives at Wargaming as an AI PM.

Florian Fuchs is a Senior Research Scientist at SEED, the research and development lab within Electronic Arts. His work focuses on applying Reinforcement Learning and other Machine Learning approaches to interactive and dynamic games to enhance the gaming experience and support game developers to unleash their creativity. Before that, he was a founding member of Sony AI where developed GT Sophy, the first racing agent competitive with the world’s best e-sports drivers, that is now part of Gran Turismo 7.

I'm super passionate about accessibility, especially in games and game development! My passions have led me to pursue my MSc in Computer Science, where I'm researching the topic of applying AI to video game accessibility. This novel idea has earned me the prestigious Vector Scholarship in AI. I love the creativity that goes into game-making, and I believe that more creative uses of AI in games can improve game experiences for everyone!

Pursuing my PhD in Computer Science, I have worked with game engines for over a decade, both in industry and academia. I've taught game development and AI for games at universities, and I love seeing the excitement and creativity of my students. In industry, I've applied Unity to robotics and manufacturing, creating digital twins and simulations. I believe that game development and AI intersects very strongly with other industrial problems, and I love coming up with creative solutions for them!

After obtaining his computer science degree (M.Sc. equivalent) at RWTH Aachen University, Martin joined Ubisoft Düsseldorf in 2011. Having worked on "Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2013" for WiiU and "Assassin's Creed Identity" for Mobile, he later joined the "Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora" team. There he engineered and maintained various core NPC AI systems of the game. Avatar released in December 2023. Martin is currently working as Senior AI Programmer at Ubisoft Düsseldorf.

Alessandro Sestini is a research scientist at SEED, the research and development lab within Electronic Arts. His work focuses on the application of deep reinforcement learning (RL), inverse reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and large language models (LLM) to game AI and playtesting. Alessandro contributed to the game AI landscape, for instance helping develop LLM-based agents for the new Battlefield game. Alessandro published several academic papers and gave several talks about the intersection between machine learning and video game development, helping researchers and practitioners in adopting such technology.Prior to joining SEED, Alessandro obtained his PhD with honourable mention in Smart Computing and Computer Engineering from Università degli Studi di Firenze

Phil Mansell is an angel investor focused on the intersection of interactive entertainment and emerging technologies. Formerly CEO of Jagex, one of the UK’s most successful games companies, he led the rejuvenation of the RuneScape franchise for over a decade and guided the company through multiple private equity transactions.  Drawing on over 25 years in games, he now partners with founders aiming to build strong community-driven businesses.

Patrick Palmer is a Principal Solutions Architect for Games, Immersive, and AI/ML at AWS. He has led in the real-time 3D technology space for 25+ years, developing cutting-edge technologies and helping entertainment industry customers to navigate their greatest challenges.

Andrei Muratov is a Games Industry Specialist BD, specializing in Game Analytics and AI in games. He leverages his 20 years of game development and publishing experience to deliver industry-focused solutions to AWS customers.

Pablo Rodríguez is a Senior AI Programmer at Avalanche Studios Group, specializing in ambient character simulations that empower environmental storytelling within dynamic open worlds. His expertise stems from developing Living World AI for Assassin's Creed Nexus VR at Ubisoft Reflections, where he previously also worked on an AI-driven automated testing framework for Tom Clancy's The Division 1 & 2.

Vincent Martineau is a veteran game developer with over 18 years of experience in the video game industry, where he specialized in AI systems for non-player characters. In recent years, he transitioned to machine learning and is now pursuing a Ph.D., focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence and interactive entertainment. His work explores how modern machine learning techniques can complement and expand upon classical game AI to create richer, more dynamic player experiences.

Gaetan is a Senior AI Programmer with over a decade of experience in AAA game development. He was instrumental in building Cyberpunk 2077's vehicle AI from scratch, utilizing Behavior Trees, and developing tools for designers at CD Projekt Red. Currently, Gaetan is a Match Engine Senior AI Programmer at Sports Interactive, focused on enhancing player decision-making. He specialises in pragmatic AI solutions that boost gameplay and empower creative teams on large-scale projects.

A passionate and results-driven Staff Software Engineer with over 20 years of experience pushing the boundaries of technology in the gaming and entertainment industries. With a career spanning roles at Google, Ubisoft, and 2K, Gabe has been a key technical leader and architect on groundbreaking projects like Google's Immersive View, Google Stadia, Assassin's Creed Origin, Far Cry and Top Spin. His expertise lies in software architecture, engine optimization, and solving complex technical challenges. As an engineer, co-founder, manager, and teacher, Gabe thrives on building not just innovative products, but also empowering teams to achieve excellence.

Batu Aytemiz is a researcher and engineer focused on using AI to enhance the games we make and how we make them; not for the sake of games, but for the people who play them. With a PhD in Computational Media from UC Santa Cruz, Batu has contributed to AI research and game projects at Ubisoft La Forge, Microsoft Research Game Intelligence, Agentic.ai, Regression Games, and now Fundamental Research Labs. His work bridges cutting-edge AI research and practical game design, prioritizing reliable experimentation, workflow improvement and user driven development.

My passion is to create immersive AI experiences. Lead Gameplay engineer from Unknown Worlds currently working on AI systems for the open-world co-op survival Subnautica2 sequel using Unreal Engine 5 with a strong focus on Behavior Trees, Utility AI and the Gameplay Systems. Passionate gamer.

Joey Faulkner is a Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer at PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions, currently focusing on delivering landscape generation in Prologue. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning & Astronomy from the University of Edinburgh and a Master's in Physics from the University of Oxford. After 10 years working on various Machine Learning projects, he has started working in game development with a focus on using ML to improve player experience, firstly at Epic Games and now at Playerunknown Productions.

Rupam is a lawyer who specialises in advising on the commercial relationships and key technologies which underpin the games industry. He sits on the technology and interactive entertainment groups at Lewis Silkin (an international law firm with deep sector experience in the games industry).

Tom is a game designer whose work focuses on turning speech and language into gameplay mechanics. He is the developer behind the critically-acclaimed voice-controlled game “Unknown Number” (2022) - and he has spoken extensively about his ambition to create an all-new genre, the First Person Talker. Building on the success of “Unknown Number”, he co-founded Meaning Machine to explore the creative possibilities unlocked by conversational AI. In his role as Creative Director, he oversees the development of multiple experimental projects that all use generative AI in their core mechanics. Dead Meat, "the game where you can say anything", is the studio’s debut.

Ben Ackland is the Co-Founder and Tech Lead at Meaning Machine, a creatively-driven game tech start-up unlocking all-new gameplay experiences through generative AI. With 20 years of experience in innovative software development, Ben specializes in creating deep, meaningful NPC interactions through Meaning Machine’s Game Conscious™ technology - empowering both developers and creatives to explore bold new storytelling possibilities, while respecting privacy and enhancing accessibility.

Petr Smrček is a game engineer primarily focused on AI. He has been working at Warhorse Studios for almost 10 years, participating on both Kingdome Come: Deliverance and its sequel.His contributions were mainly to the realistic world simulation, combat behaviors and item system. He enjoys games that reward player for clever ideas and allow natural decisions.

I’m a Data Engineer at RawPowerLabs with a focus on building intelligent systems that bridge machine learning and software infrastructure. My work spans across language models, graph databases, ML Ops pipelines, and backend cloud engineering. I’m particularly passionate about applying Generative AI to the games industry, with the goal of unlocking new creative and interactive possibilities.Beyond engineering, I enjoy hiking, travelling and gaming. Whether it’s video games, board games, or tabletop RPGs. I’m driven by a vision to see the same ingenuity and storytelling I enjoy in my leisure time flourish through cutting-edge technology in game development.

I’m a Data Engineer at Raw Power Labs, specializing in data pipelines and standards. Passionate about knowledge representation and ontology design, I look to bring explainability and interpretability to everyday AI systems.I’ve presented at IDA on LLMs as a judge alignment, and served as an advisor on AI and copyright for the Danish Ministry of Culture. I also contributed to the Open Security & Safety Alliance (OSSA), developing cross-cutting semantic standards for interoperable systems.As an avid gamer, I draw inspiration from card games and tabletop RPGs to shape how I approach modeling player decisions and game logic.

A lifelong gamer, Huntting has served game companies for the last decade starting with Google Cloud and now at Databricks. Huntting leads global strategy for games and works with game developers of all sizes across the globe. You can reach Huntting on LinkedIn here and see his publications on Games+Data here

Duncan Davis recently rejoined Databricks after spending some time at Mojang. In addition to his work with game developers at Databricks, Duncan is the CEO for Happy Cauldron Games: the creators of Fractured Online. A data developer, indie developer, Ducan has worked with dozens of game developers in the US and EU.

Based in the UK, Kyra Wulffert is an AI Solutions Architect with a data-science background and years of experience building AI-powered systems. She specialises in agentic architectures. In her work, she defines behavioural models, performance metrics, and production pipelines that align with design goals and technical constraints.

Research Scientist @ Meta since 2020, previously Professor of AI and Head of School at Queen Mary University of London.

I work on Game AI, Reinforcement Learning, Automated Testing, Neural Networks, Optimisation, Evolutionary Algorithms.

> 200 research articles, > 11k citations

Wesley Kerr is the Head of Technology Research at Riot Games, where he leads the company’s long-term AI strategy across Game AI, Next-Generation AI Games, and Foundational Models. He founded Riot’s first AI research center, advancing agents that learn to play games and forging collaborations with academia and industry. His current research spans embodied agents, reinforcement learning, and large language models, with projects like bots for first-person shooters and next-generation AI gameplay. Wesley holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Arizona and previously worked at Google Research on game search and discovery.

Nick is a Games Industry veteran and founded The Games Angels, a collective of industry veterans investing in and supporting early stage gaming companies, which has made 33 investments to date, as well as being named as UKBAA Angel of the Year 2024. Nick is co-Chair of the UK Video Games Council as well as being on the Board at Ukie (a games industry representative body). Nick is currently Chair at Outright Games Group and Coherence; and a Board Member at Adinmo and 10Six

Curtis leads European investments at Makers Fund, a global gaming VC with over 120 portfolio companies. Makers typically invests at seed/series A across all platforms of gaming content, as well as in infrastructure and consumer platforms related to games.

As part of his role, Curtis works directly with 10+ of the Makers portfolio supporting on a wide range of topics. He's based in London.

Sikander invests in early stage gaming startups as a Principal at Transcend Fund, which leads investments across content, platforms, and technology with 35+ portfolio companies. His work spans sourcing, diligence, and founder support across strategy, go-to-market, and fundraising.Prior to Transcend, he held roles at London Venture Partners and Newzoo, advising publishers and developers on game and product launches, market strategy, and investor diligence including GDEV’s $1.9B public listing. Earlier he was a public internet equities analyst at BIT Capital covering the gaming sector, after starting his career in investment banking.

Piero Molino, PhD is CEO and co-founder of Studio Atelico, a company building generative AI video games and technology that runs on device. He is also the Chief Scientist and co-foudner of Predibase, a company that specialzies on LLM/SLM fine-tuning and serving. He previously worked as a research scientist exploring machine learning and natural language processing at Yahoo!, IBM Watson, Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber), Uber (where he was a founding member of the Uber AI organization), and Stanford University. At Uber he worked on research topics including Dialogue Systems, Language Generation, Graph Representation Learning, Computer Vision, Reinforcement Learning and Meta Learning. He also worked on several deployed systems like COTA, an ML and NLP model for Customer Support, Dialogue Systems for driver hands free dispatch, on the Uber Eats Recommender System with graph learning, and on collusion detection. He is the author of Ludwig, a Linux-Foundation-backed open source declarative deep learning framework with more than 12k stars on GitHub.

Dr. Yetunde Folajimi is an Associate Professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, USA, with a Ph.D. in Computer Science and over two decades of experience teaching and mentoring in higher education. Her research spans artificial intelligence, educational games, recommender systems, machine learning, and natural language processing.She has presented at leading venues including ACM Foundations of Digital Games, SIGCSE, Grace Hopper Celebration, DiGRA, and the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, where she serves as Program Committee Chair for the Annual International Workshop on the Social Impact of AI. She has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in ACM, Elsevier, IEEE, and Springer, and has served on numerous program committees and as a reviewer in AI and game design.Her professional honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the MacArthur Foundation, Commonwealth of the UK, IIE WeTech, The Schlumberger Foundation, Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program, and the Fulbright Program (as Host Fellow). She is a Senior Member of ACM and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. A passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion in technology, she founded the Geek Girls Collaborative, empowering thousands of African girls through camps, hackathons, and training programs.

I am a Senior Software Engineer as part of Arm’s Developer Advocacy team, focusing on AI based use-cases. Our mission is to help developers make the most of Arm-based technology, by building and sharing deep expertise in AI. We also represent the voice of developers back into Arm, ensuring that their feedback helps us improve our technology. I’m passionate about empowering developers to bring cutting-edge AI to mobile platforms and beyond.

Vadim Petrov is a game developer specializing in AI and audio programming, with a passion for creating responsive, immersive systems. From designing intelligent NPCs to implementing adaptive music and real-time sound behaviors, Vadim loves to create environments that draw the audience in. In his free time he develops custom software tools for live musical performance — crafting interactive environments and reactive visuals that respond to musicians in real time.

Richard Kogelnig is a software engineer at Havok, currently working on the Havok Navigation SDK after contributing to Remote Rendering services for HoloLens 2 and performance engineering for 3D immersive meetings in Microsoft Mesh. Previously, while at Mi'pu'mi Games, Richard was part of a team that collaborated with IO Interactive on the acclaimed Hitman series. He contributed to the development of the Glacier 2 engine/editor and Hitman 1 (2016) and Hitman 2 gameplay systems. In addition, in the past Richard was an active member of the Game AI community. He worked at AiGameDev.com and helped co-organize several game AI-focused conferences, including GameAIConf, NuclAi, and GameAI North.

Miguel Lopez-Bachiller is a Senior Technical Designer at Creative Assembly passionate about building and designing gameplay systems that players will love for years to come. With a degree in Mathematics at University of Salamanca and 9 years of gamedev experience he now supports the design and code teams developing the next generation of Total War games.

James Kwan is a Machine Learning Scientist at Creative Assembly and is passionate about statistics, data science and machine learning. He holds a Masters in Statistics from the University of Warwick and has several years experiences working as a researcher within industry. His work focuses on building a machine learning battle system in the production video game Total War to aid the AI decisions making.

Earned his PhD in Computer Science at King's College London, where he researched AI Planning. During his post-doctorate, he worked on various robotic projects where he used AI Planning to create autonomous robots.He left academia seven and a half years ago and joined Rebellion to work as an AI Programmer on Zombie Army 4. After that game shipped, he replaced the automated testing suite that Rebellion used internally with an autonomous system using AI Planning.For the last three years, he has been leading the AI development at Kythera AI. Building tools and solutions that enable others to realise their visions.

Playing (video) games. Collecting wargames. (Walking+Cycling+Skiing+Camping) - (Smartphone+TV). Planning x (games + life). Coding & Modeling & Analytics.

Juan David Hincapié-Ramos is a Senior UX Engineer at Google working on Live View, Street View, and Immersive View, and was previously the UX Lead for Lenovo's ThinkReality. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Engineering, with his research specializing in augmented reality devices and interaction. His work focuses on advancing AR, AI, and human-computer interaction.

Alan Zucconi is a Senior Lecturer, author and a passionate developer focused on the field of education. As a Science Communicator he is investigating the impact that AI has on society, from deepfakes to algorithmic bias. He currently works at Goldsmiths, University of London as Director of Postgraduate Studies, where he also directs the MA/MSc Computer Games programmes.

Duygu Cakmak is the R&D Director at Creative Assembly for the BAFTA award-winning Total War series. She oversees the R&D strategy and direction for the franchise. She joined Creative Assembly in 2015 as an AI programmer and after this, she moved into a Project Technical Director role.

Gabriel Robert has worked in Game AI since 1999 on titles such as Top Spin, Ghost Recon, and Assassin’s Creed. After earning his PhD in 2005, he focused on bridging academic research and production. Formerly a lead R&D Developer at Ubisoft La Forge, he now works on in-game AI at Final Strike Games.
A strong advocate for knowledge sharing, Gabriel is proud to support the AI and Games Conference.

George is the creator of Video Games Industry Memo and founder of Half-Space Consulting: a strategic consultancy that supports businesses as they seek to work within the video games industry.

Matthias is the head of AI at Splash Damage, and has worked as a programmer on titles including 'Sacred 3', 'Portal Knights', and was the AI lead on 'Gears Tactics'.

Sally joins the team with decades of experience in event planning and logistics. She has run large-scale international events over five continents. She’s calm in a crisis, always patiently waiting for the drama to show its face so that she can pull on her experience and come up with a solution, fast.

Shraddha is a marketing and advertising strategist with 10+ years of experience designing and delivering tailored solutions that drive measurable business outcomes - working with the likes of Viacom, Twitter and more recently in gaming with modl.ai.

The voice of AI and Games.

Tommy consults with games studios and tech companies around the world on how to utilise AI in their projects: providing development support, consultancy, and professional training services on artificial intelligence in the video games.

With 20 years experience in AI for video games, Tommy has become a trusted voice in the game AI community as he acts as a public speaker, science communicator, and industry advocate. His successful YouTube series 'AI and Games', has accrued millions of views since it began in 2014.