Automated game design has remained a key challenge within the field of Game AI. In this paper, we introduce a method for recombining existing games to create new games through a process called conceptual expansion.Prior automated game design approaches have relied on hand-authored or crowd-sourced knowledge, which limits the scope and applications of such systems. Our approach instead relies on machine learning to learn approximate representations of games. Our approach recombines knowledge from these learned representations to create new games via conceptual expansion.We evaluate this approach by demonstrating the ability for the system to recreate existing games. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first machine learning-based automated game design system.

The ability of digital storytelling agents to evaluate their output is important for ensuring high-quality human-agent interactions. However, evaluating stories remains an open problem. Past evaluative techniques are either model-specific--- which measure features of the model but do not evaluate the generated stories ---or require direct human feedback, which is resource-intensive. We introduce a number of story features that correlate with human judgments of stories and present algorithms that can measure these features. We find this approach results in a proxy for human-subject studies for researchers evaluating story generation systems.

The ability to extract the sequence of game events for a given player's play-through has traditionally required access to the game's engine or source code. This serves as a barrier to researchers, developers, and hobbyists who might otherwise benefit from these game logs. In this paper we present two approaches to derive game logs from game video via convolutional neural networks and transfer learning. We evaluate the approaches in a Super Mario Bros. clone, Mega Man and Skyrim. Our results demonstrate our approach outperforms random forest and other transfer baselines.

This article presents a position highlighting the importance of combining artificial intelligence (AI) approaches with natural intelligence, in other words, involvement of humans. To do so, we specifically focus on problems of societal significance, stemming from complex, sensitive domains. We first discuss our prior work across a series of projects surrounding social media and mental health, and identify major themes wherein augmentation of AI systems and techniques with human feedback has been and can be fruitful and meaningful. We then conclude by noting the implications, in terms of opportunities as well as challenges, that can be drawn from our position, both relating to the specific domain of mental health, and those for AI researchers and practitioners.

The 13th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2017) was held at the Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort in Little Cottonwod Canyon in the Wasatch Range of the Rock Mountains near Salt Lake County, Utah. Along with the main conference presentations, the meeting included two tutorials, three workshops, and invited keynotes. This report summarizes the main conference. It also includes contributions from the organizers of the three workshops.

For individuals with anxiety disorders, maladaptive feelings and negative beliefs can interfere with daily activities and importantly, social relationships. Literature has examined both direct and indirect influences of an individual's anxiety on their social interactions, however, how they co-vary temporally remains less explored. As individuals appropriate social media platforms more pervasively, can anxiety play an equally significant role in impacting one's \textit{online} social interactions? This paper seeks to answer this question. Employing a dataset of 200 Twitter users, their timeline, and social network data, we examine the relationship between manifested anxiety and various attributes of social interaction of a user by employing Granger causality and time series forecasting approaches. We observe that increases in anxiety levels of an individual result in increased future interaction with weak ties, indicating a tendency to seek support from the broader online community. We discuss how our findings provide novel insights and practical lessons around the impact of an individual's mental health state on their online social interactions.

Student deaths on college campuses, whether brought about by a suicide or an uncontrollable incident, have serious repercussions for the mental wellbeing of students. Consequently, many campus administrators implement post-crisis intervention measures to promote student-centric mental health support. Information about these measures, which we refer to as "counseling recommendations", are often shared via electronic channels, including social media. However, the current ability to assess the effects of these recommendations on post-crisis psychological states is limited. We propose a causal analysis framework to examine the effects of these counseling recommendations after student deaths. We leverage a dataset from 174 Reddit campus communities and ~400M posts of ~350K users. Then we employ statistical modeling and natural language analysis to quantify the psychosocial shifts in behavioral, cognitive, and affective expression of grief in individuals who are "exposed" to (comment on) the counseling recommendations, compared to that in a matched control cohort. Drawing on crisis and psychology research, we find that the exposed individuals show greater grief, psycholinguistic, and social expressiveness, providing evidence of a healing response to crisis and thereby positive psychological effects of the counseling recommendations. We discuss the implications of our work in supporting post-crisis rehabilitation and intervention efforts on college campuses.

In this paper we propose the application of techniques from the field of creativity research to machine learned models within the domain of games. This application allows for the creation of new, distinct models without additional training data. The techniques in question are combinatorial creativity techniques, defined as techniques that combine two sets of input to create novel output sets. We present a survey of prior work in this area and a case study applying some of these techniques to pre-trained machine learned models of game level design.

A magazine, Moshe informed me, is a collection of miscellaneous pieces, with emphasis on "collection" and "miscellaneous." Thus, starting with this spring 2018 issue, we are accentuating the "magazine" in AI Magazine. Most issues of AI Magazine in the past have been special issues containing a series of technical articles on specific topics. While we will continue to have special issues from time to time, most issues going forward will contain expository articles on a variety of topics. This issue, for example, contains a letter from AAAI Fellow Edwina Rissland, two articles based on award-winning papers at AAAI 2017, two articles on deployed AI applications selected from IAAI 2017, one article based on an award-winning classic AAAI paper, two competition reports, an AI in Industry column, and a conference report, among several other items.

Our learning method is based on the following two facts: On one hand, MLE loss or KL divergence requires strict The ability of looking into the future is a challenging but luring matching between two probability distributions and is nonbiased task. People are willing to estimate the occurrence probability estimation of parameters, which is sensitive to sample for their interested events so that they can take preemptive noise and outliers; on the other hand, unlike MLE loss, action. For example, after reviewing the admission which does not consider how close two samples are but only history of patients, the doctors may give kind warning for the their relatively probability, Wasserstein distance is sensitive patients who are at high risk of certain diseases. When having to the underlying geometry structure of samples but has biased access to working experience of job seekers, headhunters gradients(Bellemare et al. 2017). To take advantage of can evaluate one's future career path and recommend a suitable the strengths of these two methods and mitigate the bias position at proper time. In these cases, the historical observations exposure in long-term prediction, our method incorporate always provide us with important guidance to predict Wasserstein distance besides MLE -- both the KL divergence future events -- not only the order of events but also the and the Wasserstein distance between generated and time span between them contain useful information about real samples are minimized jointly.