white illustrations of a cloud, game controller, gear, brain, and mouse in green circles on a black background for Microsoft Research & XBOX's AI and Gaming Research Summit
February 23, 2021 - February 24, 2021

AI and Gaming Research Summit

Location: Virtual

All recorded talks for this event are now available to watch on the Videos tab.

Engage, Learn and Share at the Microsoft AI and Gaming Research Summit 2021

This virtual research summit brought together researchers and innovators from academia, creators from the gaming industry, Microsoft Research (MSR), and Gaming teams at Microsoft, to share ideas and discuss how AI and machine learning is transforming the landscape of gaming. The event was focused around four themes.

  • AI Agents for gameplay and game testing
  • Responsible Gaming, including ethics, safety, and inclusivity
  • Computational creativity and content generation
  • Understanding Players, player engagement and analytics

This exciting new Microsoft Research event aimed to facilitate open discussion and critical dialogue by bringing together academia and industry to better understand each other’s perspectives at the intersection of AI and gaming research.

Plenary speakers include:

  • Catherine Varner (Director, Strategy and Monetization, Dreamhaven)
  • Kareem Choudhry (Corporate Vice President, Gaming Cloud, Microsoft)
  • Katja Hofmann (Game Intelligence Lead, Microsoft Research) 
  • Mark Riedl (Director, Entertainment Intelligence Lab, Georgia Tech) 
  • Peter Lee (Corporate Vice-President, Research and Incubations, Microsoft) 
  • Phil Spencer (Executive Vice President, Gaming, Microsoft)

The full list of speakers is here.

Event committee:

CJ Williams (Cloud and AI), Gabriel DesGarennes (Xbox), Haiyan Zhang (Xbox), Jessica Mastronardi (MSR), Katja Hofmann (MSR), Kenji Takeda (MSR), Mikhail Jacob (MSR), Noburo Kuno (MSR), Philip Rosenfield (MSR), Sam Devlin (MSR)

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