evo* on the web: http://evostar.dei.uc.pt/2012/

extended (final) submission deadline: 7 december 2011

Games, and especially video games, are now a major part of the finance and software industries, and an important field for cultural expression. They also provide an excellent testbed for and application of a wide range of computational intelligence methods including evolutionary computation, neural networks, fuzzy systems, swarm intelligence, and temporal difference learning. There has been a rapid growth in research in this area over the last few years.

This event focuses on new computational intelligence or biologically inspired techniques that may be of practical value for improvement of existing games or creation of new games, as well as on innovative uses of games to improve or test computational intelligence algorithms. We expect application of the derived methods/theories to newly created or existing games, preferably video games. Especially papers referring to recent competitions (e.g. TORCS, Super Mario, Pac Man, StarCraft) are very welcome. We invite prospective participants to submit full papers following Springer’s LNCS guidelines.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Computational Intelligence in video games
• Intelligent avatars and new forms of player interaction
• Player experience measurement and optimization
• Procedural content generation
• Human-like artificial adversaries and emotion modelling
• Authentic movement, believable multi-agent control
• Experimental methods for gameplay evaluation
• Evolutionary testing and debugging of games
• Adaptive and interactive narrative
• Games related to social, economic, and financial simulations
• Adaptive educational, serious and/or social games
• General game intelligence (e.g. general purpose drop-n-play Non-Player Characters, NPCs)
• Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS)
• Affective Computational Intelligence in Games

Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings of evo*, published in a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, which will be available at the Conference.

Submissions must be original and not published elsewhere. The submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. The authors of accepted papers will have to improve their paper on the basis of the reviewers’ comments and will be asked to send a camera ready version of their manuscripts. At least one author of each accepted work has to register for the conference and attend the conference and present the work.

The reviewing process will be double-blind, please omit information about the authors in the submitted paper. Submit your manuscript in Springer LNCS format. submission link: http://myreview.csregistry.org/evoapps12/ page limit: 10 pages

Mike Preuss
TU Dortmund University, Germany
mike.preuss(at)tu-dortmund.de

Julian Togelius
IT University of Copenhagen (Center for Computer Games
Research), Denmark juto(at)itu.dk

Georgios N. Yannakakis
IT University of Copenhagen (Center for Computer Games
Research), Denmark yannakakis(at)itu.dk