i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 31 October 2011

Previous Newsletters

ieee tciaig listed in thomson reuters jcr

The IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence in Games http://www.ieee-cis.org/pubs/tciaig/ will be included in the Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports and hence given an official impact factor.  The journal is in its third year of publication, and this is the earliest date at which it could have been included, since impact factors are calculated on the basis of citations in a given year to papers published in the previous two years. 

Professor Lucas, the founding editor-in-chief commented: “This is excellent news.  The official impact factor will be published next year, but prior to this we used a Google Scholar citation analysis to estimate it.  On this basis there were (as of mid-October 2011) an average of 8.4 cites per article to the TCIAIG papers published in volume 1 (2009).  By cross-checking the Google Scholar citation counts for articles published in other IEEE journals with known impact factors, we estimated the initial impact factor to be 1.8, which is very respectable for a new journal.”

ieee cig 2011 ms pac-man versus ghost team competition 

The IEEE CIG 2011 Ms Pac-Man versus Ghost Team Competition (http://www.pacman-vs-ghosts.net/ ) was held recently and attracted a total of 33 entries from all over the world with a mix of university researchers, students, and private individuals entering the competition.  Pac-Man is one of the classic arcade games of all time, and  provides an interesting real-time challenge for artificial intelligence researchers. 

Following the competition, the organisers (Philipp Rohlfshagen, David Robles and Simon Lucas) have now made all the ghost teams available for human players to play against using a Java Applet pictured left. 

This is to support research within the Game Intelligence Group into what aspects of AI controllers lead to the most rewarding experience for their human opponents.  Optimising player experience is a topic of great interest to the video games industry.
 
We encourage all readers to try the applet and rate the ghost teams: depending on how bad you are it may only take a few minutes!

phd success

Michael Kampouridis has passed his PhD viva with minor editorial corrections. He was examined by Xin Yao (Birmingham, External Examiner) and Steve Phelps (Internal Examiner).
 
In his PhD, Michael applied machine learning to economics and finance. His work demonstrates the synergy between finance and economics. Michael has benefited from visits to and supervision by Professor Shu-Heng Chen, Department of Economics, National Chengchi University.
 
Michael has generated 16 publications, including two journal papers (in press), from his PhD. Michael’s work can be found in: http://www.kampouridis.net/

forthcoming seminars

The next seminar will be:

9th November - Speaker: Neil Rayner, Title: Learning is Neither Sufficient Nor Necessary: A Dynamic Agent-Based Model of Long Memory in Financial Markets

Further details on this and future seminars can be found here.