Learning-Based Video Game Development in MLP@UoM: An Overview * Ke Chen, Senior Member, IEEE Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. Email: Ke.Chen@manchester.ac.uk Abstract --In general, video games not only prevail in entertainment but also have become an alternative methodology for knowledge learning, skill acquisition and assistance for medical treatment as well as health care in education, vocational/military training and medicine. On the other hand, video games also provide an ideal test bed for AI researches. T o a large extent, however, video game development is still a laborious yet costly process, and there are many technical challenges ranging from game generation to intelligent agent creation. Unlike traditional methodologies, in Machine Learning and Perception Lab at the University of Manchester (MLP@UoM), we advocate applying machine learning to different tasks in video game development to address several challenges systematically. In this paper, we overview the main progress made in MLP@UoM recently and have an outlook on the future research directions in learning-based video game development arising from our works. I NTRODUCTION The video games industry has drastically grown since its inception and even surpassed the size of the film industry in 2004. Nowadays, the global revenue of the video industry still rises and increases, and the widespread availability of high-end graphics hardware have resulted in a demand for more complex video games. This in turn has increased the complexity of game development. In general, video games not only prevail in entertainment but also have become an alternative methodology for knowledge learning, skill acquisition and assistance for medical treatment as well as health care in education, vocational/military training and medicine. From an academic perspective, video games also provide an ideal test bed, which allows for researching into automatic video game development and testing new AI algorithms in such a complex yet well-structured environment with ground-truth.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." Another famous man (though not so much as an economist), George Carlin said, "I put a dollar in a change machine. In periods of disruptive change -- and we're smack at the beginning of one right now, driven by dramatic improvements in machine learning and artificial intelligence --one of the hardest tasks to accomplish is to move past the lip service to the disruption that's taking place, to actually change the way you look at the world. Within the content space, many of us are getting pretty good at talking about disruption. But at its core, our change in vocabulary from "enterprise content management" to "content services" is just that: giving lip service to change.

The ultimate goals of serious education games (SEG) are to facilitate learning and maximizing enjoyment during playing SEGs. In SEG development, there are normally two spaces to be taken into account: knowledge space regarding learning materials and content space regarding games to be used to convey learning materials. How to deploy the learning materials seamlessly and effectively into game content becomes one of the most challenging problems in SEG development. Unlike previous work where experts in education have to be used heavily, we proposed a novel approach that works toward minimizing the efforts of education experts in mapping learning materials to content space. For a proof-of-concept, we apply the proposed approach in developing an SEG game, named \emph{Chem Dungeon}, as a case study in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. This SEG game has been tested with a number of users, and the user survey suggests our method works reasonably well.

According to Pew Research Center's analysis of comScore data, at the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers. This fact is self -explanatory why service providers are moving towards news app. More and more apps are being launched worldwide each one claiming to be exclusive and original. But the truth is they are not, especially news apps. With the abundance of data being generated every second, there has been an excess of information.

In recent years, recommendation algorithms have become one of the most active research areas driven by the enormous industrial demands. Most of the existing recommender systems focus on topics such as movie, music, e-commerce etc., which essentially differ from the TV show recommendations due to the cold-start and temporal dynamics. Both effectiveness (effectively handling the cold-start TV shows) and efficiency (efficiently updating the model to reflect the temporal data changes) concerns have to be addressed to design real-world TV show recommendation algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid recommendation algorithm incorporating both collaborative user-item relationship as well as item content features. The cold-start TV shows can be correctly recommended to desired users via a so called space alignment technique. On the other hand, an online updating scheme is developed to utilize new user watching behaviors. We present experimental results on a real TV watch behavior data set to demonstrate the significant performance improvement over other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Procedural content generation (PCG) has recently become one of the hottest topics in computational intelligence and AI game researches. Among a variety of PCG techniques, search-based approaches overwhelmingly dominate PCG development at present. While SBPCG leads to promising results and successful applications, it poses a number of challenges ranging from representation to evaluation of the content being generated. In this paper, we present an alternative yet generic PCG framework, named learning-based procedure content generation (LBPCG), to provide potential solutions to several challenging problems in existing PCG techniques. By exploring and exploiting information gained in game development and public beta test via data-driven learning, our framework can generate robust content adaptable to end-user or target players on-line with minimal interruption to their experience. Furthermore, we develop enabling techniques to implement the various models required in our framework. For a proof of concept, we have developed a prototype based on the classic open source first-person shooter game, Quake. Simulation results suggest that our framework is promising in generating quality content.