Alex Champandard is the founder of AiGameDev.com, the largest online hub for artificial intelligence in games. He has worked in the industry as a senior AI programmer for many years, most notably for Rockstar Games where he also worked on the animation technology of Max Payne 3. He regularly consults with leading studios in Europe, most notably at Guerrilla Games on the multiplayer bots for KillZone 2 & 3. Alex is also the event director for the Game/AI Conference, the largest independent event dedicated to AI in games.
Kevin Dill is a member of the senior technical staff at Lockheed Martin Rotary & Missions Systems and the chief architect of the Game AI Architecture. He is a veteran of the game and military simulation industries with more than 15 years’ experience, and has worked on AI for everything from games (including several major hits, such as Red Dead Redemption, Iron Man, and Zoo Tycoon 2) to military training to emotive avatars. His professional interests include improved techniques for behavior specification, tactical and strategic AI, spatial reasoning, and believable characters. He was the technical editor for Introduction to Game AI and Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI, and a section editor for “AI Game Programming Wisdom 4” and the “Game AI Pro” series. He is a prolific author and speaker, and has taught at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, and Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.
Damián Isla has been working on and writing about game technology for more than a decade. He is a cofounder of the indie game studio, The Molasses Flood, and was previously the president of Moonshot Games, where he directed Third Eye Crime, an innovative AI-based stealth/puzzle/telepathy game. Before joining Moonshot, Damián was the AI and Gameplay engineering lead at Bungie Studios, where he was responsible for the AI in the mega-hit first-person shooters Halo 2 and Halo 3. He also contributed to the AI of Bioshock: Infinite, and to the early development of Destiny.
Neil Kirby cofounded the IGDA Foundation and serves on its board. He oversees the Eric Dybsand AI Memorial Scholarship to GDC that is awarded each year and works with the IGDA Foundation Scholars and Ambassadors programs.
Neil is a section editor in the “Game AI Pro” book series. He is the author of An Introduction to Game AI. His other publications include articles in volumes I, II, and IV of AI Game Programming Wisdom. He cowrote “Effective Requirements Traceability: Models, Tools and Practices” for the Bell Labs Technical Journal. His 1991 paper, “Artificial Intelligence without AI: An evolutionary Approach,” may well show the first use of what is now known as “circle strafing” in a game. His other papers and presentations can be found in the proceedings of the Computer Game Developers Conference from 1991 to present as well as the 2003 Australian Game Developers Conference.
He is a member of technical staff at Nokia. He currently develops .NET solutions used to support requirements traceability. He also provides software architecture consulting services. His previous assignments have included building speech recognition software and teaching at the university level. He has been the head judge of The Ohio State University’s Fundamentals of Engineering Honors robot competition for many years.
Neil holds a master’s degree in computer science from The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his spouse in central Ohio. There he chairs his local village planning commission and volunteers for the historical society.
Steve Rabin has been a key figure in the game AI community for more than a decade and is currently a principal software engineer at Nintendo Technology Development. After initially working as an AI engineer at several Seattle startups, he managed and edited seven game AI books in the “Game AI Pro” series and the “AI Game Programming Wisdom” series. He also edited the book Introduction to Game Development and has more than two dozen articles published in the “Game Programming Gems” series. He has been an invited keynote speaker at several AI conferences, founded the AI Game Programmers Guild in 2008, and founded the GDC AI Summit where he has been a summit adviser since 2009. Steve is a principal lecturer at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, Redmond, Washington, where he has taught game AI since 2006. He earned a BS in computer engineering and an MS in computer science, both at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.
Nathan R. Sturtevant is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, where he works on AI and games. He began his games career working on shareware games as a college student in the mid-1990s, and returned to the game industry to write the pathfinding engine for Dragon Age: Origins. In addition to his work collaborating with the game industry (through work on “Game AI Pro” books, speaking at GDC, and other projects), Nathan guides capstone game projects at the University of Denver and develops games in his free time.