i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 23 May 2011

Previous Newsletters

Robotic Fish featured on The Naked Scientists

Popular science news website The Naked Scientists featured a video report on Professor Hu and the EU SHOAL project earlier this month. The Robotic fish, which have previously been on display at the London Aquarium, will be used to measure pollutants in the port of Gijon, in northern Spain. The video and interview transcript are available on the Naked Scientist website.

Robotic fish at the London Aquarium

AWS Job Opportunity in Cloud Computing

Graduating this summer and still looking for an exciting job opportunity? Active Web Solutions (AWS), one of our close industrial partners, is looking to fill a permanent position and are keen on getting a good Java or C# programmer with good communication skills who is up for a challenge and willing to learn fast. You will be working on cloud computing related projects using technologies such as Windows Azure, REST APIs, claims based identity and Windows interoperability with non-Microsoft stacks.

AWS is a modern company based in Suffolk with a refreshing, no-nonsense approach to harnessing technology for the benefit of their customers. CSEE has had close links with AWS for several years now and a number of our students have taken up summer placement opportunities with them. If you want to know more about our collaboration with AWS, please talk to Udo Kruschwitz or Simon Lucas.

For more information about AWS projects and customers, see the company website. Applications: In the first instance, please send your CV and letter of application to Lucy Finlayson.

Tuesday Tasters: Digital Living: using the iSpace Living Laboratory

The iSpace is a state of the art living laboratory housed in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. It comprises a suite of facilities, supported by a team of experts, which allow for the technical assessment of both new and existing technologies in an intelligent home environment. Trials can take place in real-life settings in a controlled environment, ranging from short trials through to longer studies in which participants can live in the iSpace for weeks or months. The iSpace team support the unobtrusive observation and collection of data from trial participants for further analysis. This is further supported by academic expertise in Intelligent Environments, Immersive Virtual Worlds, Converged Network Services, User Experience, Technology Evaluation, Co-creation and Service Innovation.

Come along to the Tuesday Taster event on 7 June from 13.00 to 14.00 in the iSpace. You will hear about how we have used the iSpace to evaluate a range of different products and services, and see examples of some of the smart home technologies and research which have been carried out within the department. The iSpace team would like to work with other departments at the University involved in aspects of digital living, business and innovation as well as social and media studies. This is an opportunity to find out more about the iSpace and explore how we can work together on future research projects.

Click here to book your place.

CSEE Visiting Professor at the 3DTV World Forum

David Crawford, Visiting Professor to CSEE, participated in two panel sessions at the 3DTV World Forum at the Thistle Hotel, Marble Arch on the 18 May, discussing bandwidth requirements for 3D media services and the long term future of 3DTV. This activity links in to the work of Dimitra Simeonidou’s Research Group in the Advanced Media Lab.   

Papers Published by the Game Intelligence Group

The Game Intelligence Group has just published another two papers on various AI aspects of Ms Pac-Man.  Ms Pac-Man is one of the classic videogames of all time, and also makes an engaging test-bed for AI research.

Spyridon Samothrakis and David Robles and Simon M. Lucas, Fast Approximate Max-N Monte Carlo Tree Search for Ms Pac-Man, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (2011), to appear – already available on IEEE Xplore

Abstract—We present an application of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for the game of Ms Pac- Man. Contrary to most applications of MCTS to date, Ms Pac-Man requires almost real-time decision making and does not have a natural end state. We approached the problem by performing MonteCarlo tree searches on a 5 player max-n tree representation of the game with limited tree search depth. We performed a number of experiments using both the MCTS game agents (for
pacman and ghosts) and agents used in previous work (for ghosts). Performance-wise, our approach gets excellent scores, outperforming previous non-MCTS opponent approaches to the game by up to two orders of magnitude.

        The iconic four maze designs  of Ms Pac-Man.

Philipp Rohlfshagen and Simon M. Lucas, Ms Pac-Man Versus Ghost Team CEC 2011 Competition, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (2011), pages: to appear, draft pdf available here.

Abstract—Games provide an ideal test bed for computational intelligence and significant progress has been made in recent years, most notably in games such as GO, where the level of play is now competitive with expert human play on smaller boards. Recently, a significantly more complex class of games has received increasing attention: real-time video games. These games pose many new challenges, including strict time constraints, simultaneous moves and open-endedness. Unlike in traditional board games, computational play is generally unable to compete with human players. One driving force in improving the overall performance of artificial intelligence players are game competitions where practitioners may evaluate and compare their methods against those submitted by others and possibly human players as well. In this paper we introduce a new competition based on the popular arcade video game MS PAC-MAN: MS PAC-MAN VERSUS GHOST TEAM. The competition, to be held at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2011 for the first time, allows participants to develop controllers for either the Ms Pac-Man agent or for the Ghost Team and unlike previous MS PAC-MAN competitions that relied on screen capture, the players now interface directly with the game engine. In this paper we introduce the competition, including a review of previous work as well as a discussion of several aspects regarding the setting up of the game competition itself.