Simon Lucas

2021 personal highlights, a🧵. Despite being a challenging year globally due to the pandemic 😷🦠, but thanks to many incredible collaborators, it's been an exciting year research-wise 🤖 Some highlights below.👇

Ok. This is awesome. What a great use of AI! Bringing delight to children. :-)

The iGGi Team is wishing all of you a *relaxing* + *fun* + *festive* Break🌟 and a **happy 2022** !!!🎆 See you back in the new year! 🖤🎮📓🎓 #iggiphd

Cell explodes after getting bitten by another single-celled organism: #biology

Nice blog; I really agree with the main message. I hope people can link this to with why I'm obsessed with distributed optimisation; especially Gaussian Belief Propagation with its `magic' properties of convergence despite ad-hoc, noisy, message passing. gaussianbp.github.io

Wow - symbolic systems, much maligned in recent years, crushed deep learning by a 3:1 margin❗️ #nethackchallenge21 reminds us that the quest for AGI ain’t over yet, and that there is more than one pony still in the race. my bet: hybrid models will pull ahead next year.

@togelius Nice place for a keynote

I received yet another one of those spammy invitations for for-profit (or possibly non-existent) conferences. The email claimed that the organization had an address in Sweden. Being Swedish, I had to map-google it. It turns out to be a bucolic village in the middle of nowhere?

"Queen Mary University of London is the sole example of a member of the Russell Group of leading universities with an outstanding record in both admitting a high proportion of students who had received free school meals and boosting their career prospects" theguardian.com/education/2021…

27 MILLION VIEWS! 27 MILLION!!! Working TOGETHER we have sent a powerful message to UK News shows if they won’t hold this Prime Minister to account for his rampant lying in Parliament we will do it ourselves! How long can you ignore it now @BBCNews?

Michael Cook @mtrc and I have just delivered a lecture course on #ComputationalCreativity at @QMEECS. It has a deep learning technical focus, but also covers evaluation, philosophy, non-DL approaches and everything in between. We'll be making it available on YouTube very soon!

Version 1.0.0 of Griddly is out! * Support for RLLib! @raydistributed * Single-agent and multi-agent IMPALA on every environment (thats like 30 games each with multiple levels and configuration options). * More documentation! * Loads of testing and bug fixes! * MORE GNOMES

Recordings from the #AIGamingResearch Summit are now live! Catch the plenary talk and opening remarks from @XboxP3 and @katjahofmann: msft.it/6010VGe6r @o_saja & @nancybaym discuss responsible gaming: msft.it/6011VGe6T Watch all the videos: msft.it/6012VGe6p

Happy #InternationalWomensDay For #IWD2021 we are celebrating our first female Head of School Professor Hazel Screen Hazel gave her Inaugural Lecture on Friday 8th January 2021, the recording can be viewed: youtu.be/srv8ARPoD2s

Such a pleasure to watch @XenNeu nailing her PhD Viva today, and an honour to have collaborated with her in the past years. If you haven't checked Xenija's research, you should :) is.ovgu.de/Team/Xenija+Ne… Big congrats, Dr. Neufeld! 🎉🥳

Time for #COG2020 this week! I'm presenting our paper on Self-Adaptive RHEA for GVGP with Chiara Sironi, Mark Winands, @diego_pliebana and @SimonMarkLucas (tinyurl.com/rhea20-paper) Something went interestingly wrong with the auto-generated transcript. :)

@togelius I thought Hinton's talk was great! Not flashy but a lot of great content in there...

The AI community is terrible at giving presentations. There's almost always too much detail, too few images, and too little information. Too boring, simply. When preparing a presentation, you should aim for that everyone in the room understands everything you say, and is inspired

Meet our guest lecturer Duygu Cakmak(@aphrael) Senior Programmer at @CAGames! Duygu has diverse background in AI and software engineering & joins #GameAISchool2020 with a lecture on AI Decision Making in Turn-Based Strategy Games! Registration is now open! #registration" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">school.gameaibook.org/#registration

Current special issues: Team AI in Games (deadline: Feb 29, 2020) Evolutionary Computation for Game Playing (deadline: Feb 29, 2020) For details please visit : #special" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">transactions.games/#special

Our IJHCS paper "Measuring perceived challenge in digital games: Development & validation of the challenge originating from recent gameplay interaction scale (CORGIS)" now available at authors.elsevier.com/a/1aPUc3pfaRfS… We present a new tool for measuring challenge as player experience!

Look what the cat dragged in :) @diego_pliebana @togelius @_JialinLiu @Amidos2006 @SimonMarkLucas @b_gum22