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SIG Seminar:”Behavior Modeling using Data from Games”
November 20, 2020 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Behavior modeling is an important area of research as it severs many applications and disciplines; it expands on our knowledge of human behavior as well as allows us to develop novel AI entities that adapts to its users or mimics them. This area of research is by definition interdisciplinary and has stimulated interest from multiple funding organizations. In the past few years, games have emerged as a new platform with large context-rich data that has the utility to advance behavior modeling. In particular, recently there has been much work investigating the use of MOBA games, such as League of Legends and Dota, and Massively Multiplayer games, such as Eve Online, for this purpose. Even though there are many exciting new results, the current techniques and methods for modeling player behaviors within these environments are still in their infancy. In this talk, I will discuss our current work towards developing a methodological platform to develop player models that leverages and builds on current theory and data-driven techniques, including machine learning and visualization methods.
Magy Seif El-Nasr
Professor and Vice Chair of Serious Games,University of California at Santa Cruz
Magy Seif El-Nasr is a Professor and Vice Chair of Serious Games in the Computational Media Department at University of California at Santa Cruz. Dr. Seif El-Nasr earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Computer Science. Her research focuses on two goals (a) developing automated tools and techniques for authoring, adapting, and personalizing virtual environments (e.g., interactive narrative, believable characters, and visuals), and (b) developing methodologies to model and understand players’ behaviors and motivations through the development of novel mixed-methods approaches that use machine learning and visual analytics tools. A few year ago, she published the first book on the subject of game analytics, called Game Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Player Data. This year she is working on a new textbook on the subject to be published by Oxford University Press. Her work is internationally known and cited in several game industry books, including Programming Believable Characters for Computer Games (Game Development Series) and Real-time Cinematography for Games. She has received several awards and recognition within the game research community. Notably, she was named HEVGA Fellow in 2017 and received several Best Paper Awards, honorable mentions, and exceptional paper designations Further, she was named as a HEVGA (Higher Education Video Game Alliance) Fellow. She also serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Games and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. https://magyel-nasr.net/