News

Colloquia

Scalability in Computer Games

Dr. Johannes Gehrke
Cornell University

February 26, 2009
4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Refreshments at 3:30 p.m.

Abstract:

Computer games and virtual worlds present the next frontier in digital entertainment and social interaction. An important aspect of computer games is the artificial intelligence (AI) of non-player characters. To create interesting AI in games today, we can create complex, dynamic behavior for a very small number of characters, but neither the game engines nor the style of AI programming enables intelligent behavior that scales to a very large number of non-player characters. I will talk about modeling game AI as a data management problem, providing a scalable framework for games with a huge number of non-player characters. This project is part of a larger effort on simple domain-specific languages that are easy to parallelize across multi-core architectures.

Bio:

Johannes Gehrke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Johannes' research interests are in the areas of data mining, search, data privacy, complex event processing, and applications of database and data mining technology to marketing and the sciences. Johannes has received a National Science Foundation Career Award, an Arthur P. Sloan Fellowship, an IBM Faculty Award, the Cornell College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Cornell University Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He is the author of numerous publications on data mining and database systems, and he co-authored the undergraduate textbook Database Management Systems (McGrawHill (2002), currently in its third edition), used at universities all over the world. Johannes was co-Chair of the 2003 ACM SIGKDD Cup, Program co-Chair of the 2004 ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2004), and Program Chair of the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2007). From 2007 to 2008, he was Chief Scientist at FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary.

Hosted by: Dr. Mohammed Zaki (x6340)

Last updated: September 18, 2008