The Workshop on AI in Games AIG-08 is targeted to both academic researchers and practitioners that actively try to use new technologies in game development. The event continues previous efforts to bridge the gap between the two communities.

From an academic perspective, games are an excellent testbed for many AI fields. Puzzles and board games are typical applications of areas such as heuristic search and learning. Video games contain a large diversity of domains for both single-agent and multi-agent problems. They may or may not include features such as uncertainty, dynamic environments, and hidden information. New ideas in fields such as planning, search and learning can be developed and tested using a game environment as a testbed.

On the practical side, games are a booming, multi-billion dollar industry. Recent years have seen an increasing focus on making the inhabitants of a game world smarter. The quality of a game is directly impacted by character skills such as navigating on a map, acting according to a meaningful plan, and learning from previous experience, which need to be implemented using AI algorithms.

Topics
Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

* AI in classical games
* AI in commercial computer games
* Representational issues: modeling games
* Game AI design: tools and methodologies
* Competitions
* Planning
* Interactive narrative
* Emotional modeling
* Path planning
* Affective systems, dialogue planning
* Learning and adaptation in games
* Opponent modeling in both classical games and video games
* Real-time decision making
* Execution management in real-time games
* Space and time inference in video games


Paper Submission

We ask authors to submit technical papers in PDF format. Papers should be formatted in accordance with the ECAI style template and may be at most 5 pages long, including figures and bibliography. Visit http://www.ece.upatras.gr/ecai2008/substyles.htm for formatting instructions. Please submit papers via email to submissions-aig2008 in domain lab.inf.uc3m.es

Please note that all submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by multiple reviewers, and that low-quality or off-topic papers will not be accepted. Also note that all workshop participants must register for the main ECAI-08 conference. For each accepted paper, at least one author is required to register by the early registration date and to present the paper at the workshop. Proof of registration fees payment should be provided together with the camera-ready version of the paper.

Workshop authors will maintain the copyrights of their papers (thus, following the workshop, they will be allowed to publish their work to another conference or journal). All that is required is that the workshop authors sign a permission allowing the local organizers to include their paper in the workshop's proceedings.

The journal of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence has shown interest in the workshop and will publish a special issue on the subject with the best papers under the authors' permission --- i.e, authors are free to either accept or reject this possibility.

Important Dates
Deadline for paper submission: May 1st, 2008
Notification of acceptance/rejection: June 1st, 2008
Deadline for camera-ready paper: June 12, 2008
Workshop Dates: To be decided between 21, 22 July 2008


Organizers

Adi Botea
NICTA, Canberra Research Lab and
the Australian National University
8001 Locked Bag
Canberra ACT 2601

adi.botea in domain nicta.com.au
+612 6267 6310 (office nr)
Carlos Linares López
Department of Computing Science, 2.2.B09
University Carlos III of Madrid
Avenida de la Universidad, 30
28911 - Leganés (Madrid)
Spain

carlos.linares in domain uc3m.es
+34 91 624 91 12 (office nr)

Program Committee

Yngvi Björnsson, Reykjavik University
Adi Botea, NICTA and Australian National University
Stefan Edelkamp, Dortmund University
Pedro Antonio González Calero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Jaap van den Herik, Maastricht University
Andreas Junghanns, QTronic GmbH
Akihiro Kishimoto, Future University, Hakodate, Japan
Michael van Lent, University of Southern California
Carlos Linares López, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Héctor Muñoz-�vila, Lehigh University
Alexander Nareyek, National University of Singapore
Dana Nau, University of Maryland
Jeff Orkin, MIT
Scott Sanner, NICTA and Australian National University