Georgios N. Yannakakis is Director and Professor at the Institute of Digital Games,

University of Malta The University of Malta (, UM, formerly UOM) is a higher education institution in Malta. It offers undergraduate bachelor's degrees, postgraduate master's degrees and postgraduate doctorates. It is a member of the European University Association, ...

and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Games. He is one of the leading researchers within player affective modelling and adaptive content generation for games. He is considered one of the most accomplished experts at the intersection of games and AI.

Career

Yannakakis received his Diploma in Production Engineering from the

Technical University of Crete The Technical University of Crete (TUC; , ''Polytechneio Kritis'') is a state university under the supervision of the Greek Ministry of Education which was founded in 1977 in Chania, Crete. The first students were admitted in 1984. The purpose of ...

, Greece, and in 2006 his PhD from the Department of Informatics,

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

, UK. He was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at the

IT University of Copenhagen The IT University of Copenhagen ( Danish: ''IT-Universitetet i København'', abbreviated ITU) is a public university and research institution in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is specialized in the multidisciplinary study of information technology with ...

from 2007 to 2012, and from 2012 he has been an Associate Professor and then a Full Professor at the University of Malta.

Research

Yannakakis has pioneered the use of

preference learning Preference learning is a subfield of machine learning that focuses on modeling and predicting preferences based on observed preference information. Preference learning typically involves supervised learning using datasets of pairwise preference com ...

algorithms in combination with player questionnaires to create statistical models of player's experiences when playing computer games. Additionally, Yannakakis has made significant contributions to procedural content generation in games, in particular the Search-based Procedural Content Generation and Experience-driven Procedural Content Generation frameworks. In Search-based Procedural Content Generation, evolutionary algorithms are used to create content through search in content space. In Experience-driven Procedural Content Generation, a model of player experience is used as an objective function to create game content that is adapted to the player's preference and/or behavior. Another area which Yannakakis has contributed to is

computational creativity Computational creativity (also known as artificial creativity, mechanical creativity, creative computing or creative computation) is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence, cogni ...

. In particular, he has co-invented the DeLeNoX algorithm for automatic transformational creativity through combining deep learning with novelty search, and the surprise search algorithm, which is an algorithm related to novelty search but based on a model of the psychological notion of surprise. Some of his research on computational creativity has also focused on how to create content across multiple facets of games. Yannakakis' research has attracted attention from Danish newspapers and TV. It has also attracted attention from games press such as

Kotaku ''Kotaku'' is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier. History ...

. In 2018, Yannakakis (together with

Julian Togelius Julian Togelius is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Career Togelius holds a BA from Lund University, an MSc from the University of Sussex, and ...

) co-authored a textbook on artificial intelligence and games, simply called Artificial Intelligence and Games and published by

Springer Nature Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macm ...

. Together with Togelius, he also organized a summer school on the topics of the book. He has also co-edited a book on Emotion in Games.

References

External links

Georgios N. Yannakakis' homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yannakakis, Georgios N. Living people Video game researchers Year of birth missing (living people) Academic staff of the University of Malta Maltese academics Place of birth missing (living people)