Mixed-initiative PCG systems provide a way to leverage the expressive power of algorithmic techniques for content generation in a manner that lowers the technical barrier for content creators. While these tools are a proof of concept of how PCG systems can aide aspiring designers reach their vision, there are issues pertaining capturing designer intent, and interface complexity. In this paper we introduce CADI (Conversational Assistive Design Interface) a mixed initiative PCG system for creating variations of the game Pong that utilizes natural language input through a natural language interface to explore the design space of Pong variations. We provide a motivation for the creation of CADI and discuss the implementation and design decisions taken to address the issues of designer intent and interface complexity in mixed-initiative PCG systems.

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.

AI and machine learning tools are being used with increasing frequency for decision making in domains that affect peoples' lives such as employment, education, policing and loan approval. These uses raise concerns about biases of algorithmic discrimination and have motivated the development of fairness-aware machine learning. However, existing fairness approaches are based solely on attributes of individuals. In many cases, discrimination is much more complex, and taking into account the social, organizational, and other connections between individuals is important. We introduce new notions of fairness that are able to capture the relational structure in a domain. We use first-order logic to provide a flexible and expressive language for specifying complex relational patterns of discrimination. We incorporate our definition of relational fairness to propose 1) fairness-aware constrained conditional inference subject to common data-oriented fairness measures and 2) fairness-aware parameter learning by incorporating decision-oriented fairness measures.

Interactive systems have taken over the web and mobile space with increasing participation from users. Applications across every marketing domain can now be accessed through mobile or web where users can directly perform certain actions and reach a desired outcome. Actions of user on a system, though, can be representative of a certain intent. Ability to learn this intent through user's actions can help draw certain insight into the behavior of users on a system. In this paper, we present models to optimize interactive systems by learning and analyzing user intent through their actions on the system. We present a four phased model that uses time-series of interaction actions sequentially using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based sequence learning system that helps build a model for intent recognition. Our system then provides an objective specific maximization followed by analysis and contrasting methods in order to identify spaces of improvement in the interaction system. We discuss deployment scenarios for such a system and present results from evaluation on an online marketplace using user clickstream data.

Game generation and analysis has commonly relied on hand authored rules and heuristics.  This authoring task comes with a high authorial burden, both in the amount of rules and heuristics that need to be authored for decent coverage and in the complexity of authoring these rules.  In this paper I present early work on \textit{Leda} and inductive logic programming system designed to learn these rules, so as to support further generation and analysis.  I present Leda, describe its process, and finally show a sample set of the rules that it learns.

Mixed-initiative game design tools combine intelligent agents and human input as collaboration to create novel and interesting content. Traditionally, these systems utilize graphical control-based interfaces. These interfaces can be complex and not reflective of designer intent. Given these issues we propose exploring conversational interfaces for mixed-initiative game design tools. We propose a case-study involving a system for co-creating variations of the game Pong as an initial step towards the exploration of the topic. In addition, we present some of the issues involving the design and implementation of conversational interfaces in mixed-initiative game design tools.

Artificial Intelligence has had an outsized impact on our daily lives, from curating the movies we watch to recommending the books we read. There has been an interest in bringing AI techniques to the kitchen since long before the modern resurgence in AI interest. This is a domain filled with potential victories, with technologies and techniques that are applicable to nearly everyone. In planning a meal, grocery shopping, and even meal preparation, computational systems can assist and empower people to make healthier choices. However, this domain has a unique set of UI and UX challenges that need to be considered that separate it from other applications of artificial intelligence.

This project aims to compose background music in real-time for tabletop role-playing games. To accomplish this goal, we propose a system called MTG that listens to players' speeches in order to recognize the context of the current scene and generate background music to match the scene. A speech recognition system is used to transcribe players' speeches to text and a supervised learning algorithm detects when scene transitions take place. In its current version, a scene transition occurs whenever the emotional state of the narrative changes. Moreover, the background music is not generated, but selected based on its emotion from a library of hand-authored pieces. As future work, we plan to generate the background music considering the current scene context and the probability of scene transition. We also consider to retrieve more information from the narrative to detect scene transitions, such as the scene's location and time of the day as well as actions taken by characters.

General videogame playing has come a long way in a short period of time, but remains at the level of solving relatively short games made up of distinct and isolated episodes. Even simple console role-playing games (RPGs) are far beyond the reach of current techniques, requiring the synthesis of cultural knowledge with compositional reasoning over several interconnected sub-games. We explore how the challenges of playing these games could spark new advances in compositional analysis of games and common-sense reasoning. General RPG playing can leverage advances in episodic general game playing and in areas like text understanding, image classification, and automated game design learning. It has direct applications in design support and AI-based game design, and the techniques used to enable it could generalize to other families of games such as adventure, open-world, and simulation games. In this paper, we describe the motivation behind general RPG playing in a sub-domain of Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) RPGs, some promising approaches to some of its fundamental issues, and immediate next steps; we conclude by describing a few concrete benchmark problems on the path towards automated play of these complex games.

This paper describes the accepted entries to the fifth Playable Experiences track to be held at the AIIDE conference. The Playable Experiences track showcases complete works that make use of artificial intelligence techniques as an integral part of the player experience.