i++ School Newsletter

professor gives talk at gamification summit

Professor Richard Bartle recently presented a talk at the Gamification Summit in San Francisco, on the topic "A Game Designer's View of Gamification".  Having successfully managed to survive his inclusion of the line "Game designers find Gamification weird: we would be appalled if our games were so bad we had to bribe people to play them", he was able to upload his talk here: http://mud.co.uk/richard/GamificationSummit.pdf.  A clip from the talk can be found here: http://dai.ly/LOZ2Pk.

winners of the sharescope prize 2012

As part of the Industry Expert Lectures, Tim Clarke, General Manager of ShareScope, gave an Expert Lecture on 16th March 2012 on "How investors evaluate company performance". He has also kindly offered two prizes, one for the best report summarizing the lecture, and one for the best submission for his assignment.
http://www.bracil.net/ccfea/SharescopePrize.html
 
Shortlists were recommended by the CCFEA Director, approved by Tim. We are pleased to announce that the winner of both the Best Report and Best Assignment Prize is Han Ao (surname 'Ao' is pronounced like 'Owl').
http://www.bracil.net/ccfea/Ao-SharescopePrize.html
 
Tim has kindly upgraded the prize to one year's subscription of ShareScope Plus, worth £390.
 
Well done, Han!

game competitions at essex

Submissions for the "Ms Pac-Man vs Ghosts Competition" and the "Physical Travelling Salesman Problem Competition" are now open!  The next deadline for both competitions is September 1, 2012. You can participate by visiting the following URLs:
 
www.pacman-vs-ghosts.net
www.ptsp-game.net

phd success

Anil Khuman passed his viva with minor corrections.  His thesis, titled "Investigating Portfolio Insurance Strategies including Applications of Heuristic Optimisation and Evolutionary Artificial Neural Networks", examined Constant Proportion Portfolio Insurance (CPPI) type products for investors using cumulative prospect theory with the introduction of an adaptive reference point.  The work demonstrated that strategies extending the CPPI floor and multiplier components significantly outperformed the original model.  Finally, an evolutionary artificial neural network (EANN) framework was developed that replicated the trading strategy of CPPI.  Many thanks to the external examiner, Andrea Tettamanzi from the University of Milan and the internal examiner Wing Lon Ng.  Anil was supervised by Nick Constantinou (EBS) and Steve Phelps.