Raluca D. Gaina, PhD

Reflections On First Teaching Experience

2019-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

I’ve now finished my first teaching experience for the term: 5 lectures of 2 hours on Artificial Intelligence in Games to a group of about 80 Master students. And I wanted to go back to the advice received before starting this whole adventure (thank you Twitter!) and reflect on my own experiences in relation to that, while it’s still fresh in my mind. I’m hoping this would serve as partly an interesting read and partly a nice collection of advice for new teachers (or those eager to learn from the experience of their peers!).

Advice received

Let’s start first with the advice received through either Twitter or in person, grouped in 4 rough categories. Find the original thread here: https://twitter.com/b_gum22/status/1166721916088061957

General teaching

Things will not always go exactly like you wanted, but that’s OK. The key here is reflection.
You can show vulnerability without losing command of the class. It makes students comfortable to know you make mistakes too, and sets a good example that you don’t panic when it happens. Let them see you solve problems in real-time.
Be both a drill instructor and a big sis. Be tough on them. They have to do as you say. But sometimes they cannot do it in one trial. Then comes the big sis, telling them it’s alright to fail at a first attempt.
Don’t worry about breaking out from the “stand in front of the class and talk” model. It’s 100+ years old, it wasn’t designed for modern days subjects, and arguably the first teachers that implemented it cared more about disicipline than learning.
You know more than enough to teach others. It is really easy to be intimidated by the responsibility, but you can absolutely do it! Also, don’t be afraid to make it your own and be passionate. Students appreciate teachers who love what they are teaching! And have fun! :D
It’s common to run through the material too fast. Take it slowly, and repeat yourself a lot.
If you don’t know the answer to a question, just say so. Ask the student to help find the answer for you.
Any class is easier to teach the second time around.
The vast majority of times when you make a mistake, say something wrong, etc. Nobody noticed other than you, do not sweat the small stuff.
Also, don’t try to teach like anyone else. Be honest in front of your students.
It’s easier to start strict and then loosen up than the other way around

Teaching material

Preparing lectures / course material /etc takes way longer than expected… but it also gets better pretty rapidly…
Whatever material you get from the previous teacher will be useless. You have to do your own thing.
A lot of things that seem like common sense are absolutely not. It never hurts to go over the “why”. A lot of training that colleagues dismiss as “nonsense they make you go through” is useful if you invest your time in it.
Whatever you planned to teach, teach less. It is hard to memorize a lot of informations. Teach less breadth but more depth and get your students to do as much learning as possible.
The material might or might not seem easy to you, but it seems much harder to most of the students.
You can start from someone else’s material, but it’s good to adapt it to your own teaching style.

The students

They will believe everything you tell them.
The difficult students are the ones you can really make a difference to (quite often years after ^^). So if they annoy you, hold on!
Don’t confuse tasks and learning outcomes. A student can perform a task without learning, and can learn in unexpected ways. Grade the learning, not the task completion!
There might be students to attempt to derail your teaching somehow, often because they want to show how much they know. If they bother you, tell them you’ll take it offline.
The students you’ll hear most from are not necessarily representative of the majority of the class.
Never ever ever violate trust. Never tell a student (s)he is not intelligent enough, makes dumb remarks or other degrading things. Do it once and you’ll lose your whole group, instantly. They won’t listen to you, won’t ask questions.
Let them talk to you, especially in full class. Drop a question, a silence, and break your gaze by looking out the window. Count to ten, real slow. They will talk back to you, and this is the moment to build trust. If you succeed, they will talk more, also with each other. … and that’s when your group starts to prepare for launch. Get this process going for a few weeks and you’ll have a shark tank full of problem-hungry fish that will devour anything you feed them.
It’s really the culture that attracts them, not the content.
And remember to look at the window and keep your mouth shut occasionally. ;-)
People look grumpy when they are concentrated so it’s sometimes a good sign if they do
I wish I had known after winning “favourite teacher” awards that learning is hard work, and these awards are at best silly, and most likely a bad idea
Set class rules from day 1, possibly with a hand-out
They will beg for extra points claiming a disaster will happen to them, train your resistance
They can smell fear - use cologne if necessary
Share why you are excited by your topic - if you don’t find the material exciting then your students won’t either. If you clearly love it then that love will spread! Have fun! Time with students is inspiring!

Resources

McKeachie’s Teaching Tips is your bible.
The lecturer’s toolkit: a practical guide to assessment, learning and teaching by Philip Race , 2007

Personal experience

This includes more lengthy discussions of the main topics that came up during my teaching. For context, I’ve only taught half of this module (and not as module organizer, so I didn’t have much say in how things were done for this year) using mostly materials from the previous year. All of these sections will include descriptions of my experiences with possible examples, as well as how I dealt with problems and advice I’ll take forward.

Preparing lectures.

The lectures I did had a lot of material from the previous year: 3 of them I did not change much, other than transfer to PowerPoint and add animations and visualisations to counteract the sometimes heavy logical thinking target. This in the beginning took quite a lot of time, I probably spent more or less a full week getting the first lecture done and figuring out the pipeline, and then rehearsing it as well. The others came easier, although I had to do a bunch of background study on some to be able to explain all the concepts appropriately in class, and with some I had to refresh some of the material. I also took into account the general questions and paid attention to the parts causing most confusion among the students and I added some new material in subsequent lectures to try to cater to that and better explain those concepts that were only glanced over before, but were harder to grasp for this class.

The last 2 lectures, however, had a large overlap in the previous year and also an incomplete picture of the topics (PCG). And with these I decided that I wanted to tell the whole story properly and I ended up completely restructuring and reorganizing materials, as well as introducing a variety of new topics that would tie everything together. That was a very intersting exercise of creating content for lectures (almost) from scratch and I thoroughly enjoyed having complete control and knowledge of what I was going to talk to the students about. Here again I tried to include high-level concepts descriptions, equations, visualisations and code to cater to as many learning styles as I could. I also panicked more during class, as this was my own material now that maybe was not good enough. But I am very happy with the end result!

Sadly my contract did not take into account the many hours I put into lecture preparation, and I believe in general this is given way less attention and credit than it should: especially with research-led teaching, making sure material presented to students is up to date and tailored to the specific class you’re teaching should be a priority, and the students would be much better for it!

Test tech before class in the class you’ll be teaching in.

I mean, sometimes you learn things the hard way, even though you probably should’ve known better. I wanted to use fancy polling software (PollEverywhere embedded in PowerPoint) for my lectures, which worked fine when I tested it on my laptop even in presentation mode - but come lecture and projector extending my display, and it all blew up in flames. Or well, the question they were supposed to answer didn’t actually show up on the slides, nor the information they could use to navigate to the question to answer it, or the fun visualisation of answers as they came in. That’s a horrible way to start a first lecture that you’re already panicked about, I’m fairly certain I turned the brightest shade of red known to humanity in those few minutes of trying and failing to get it to work. Eventually I went with the best option: I gave up on the idea and ignored all subsequent slides, going for the old fashioned waiting for raised hands and speaking outloud. So… if you’re doing any demos or using any software that’s not just very basic presentations (or even then!) visit the lecture room before the lecture and try it all out.

They believe everything you say.

I didn’t think this was completely true before I got silly proof of this and I became a lot more careful about thinking outloud. I was talking about Bellman equations in one lecture and I had spent a long time explaining these, so my brain gave up for a second and when I looked at the slide behind me before moving to the next one, it seemed like some variables were swapped as (s,a) instead of (a,s) and I mentioned that outloud, ignoring the roomful of students taking notes of everything I was saying. A few minutes later, one student asks to go back to the guilty slide and asks if those variables should be swapped in all equations, or only in that one. That made me pause, because I didn’t think much of it when I spoke it in the first place! So I had to backtrack and apologise for the brain break - but I wasn’t too hard on myself for that; after all, the order of the arguments in the function don’t even really matter, beyond usual notation. I did wonder, however, that if I insisted long enough that deep learning was overrated they’d believe it and stop saying they want to do it without knowing anything about it.

Different learning styles.

This was also most clear while discussing Reinforcement Learning, which comes with a bunch of equations. I had a visual example on one of the slides, and it seemed that I should’ve had more of those, as I kept going back to it for every face that frowned at the complicated notation in the equations! Not all students learn the same way, and this also applies to lectures: the attention of some is captivated by logical thinking, equations, diagrams. But others like visuals, images, videos, animations and understand a lot better the concept through those ways. And others like clear sign-posting of where you are in the lecture, in case they dozed off and their classmate shoves an elbow in their ribcage to wake them up. Making a concious effort to explain the different concepts in various ways is not easy, and also time consuming to repeat yourself: but it is worth it in the long run, as you see most of the eyes in the room lit up with understanding.

Pacing.

I feel like this one comes with practice, as I got a lot better at it by my 5th lecture than I was in the beginning. Keeping a slow pace, allowing space for questions, interaction and discussion with the students, while also finishing the lecture on time without rushing through the last parts of the material you intended to go through is not that easy at first. The only way to improve on this though is to practice and give many talks to get used to your general speaking speed and the content you can fit in the given time.

Mindset.

I’m still working on this, and I’ve been told this before as well, but there really is a difference in giving research presentations, and giving lectures. With the first you’d expect experts in the room to question the small details you maybe don’t remember or didn’t think of very much, and there’s the pressure of your work being presented to be “good enough” for the people listening. With lectures, the students will most likely not know much about the topic you’re talking about; if they do, they’ll understand things more easily. But the students are there to learn, not to question the vailidity or quality of the work you’re dicussing.

Also, with lectures, you’re doing it for the students: you’re sharing your knowledge so that they can do well in tests, assignments, and any future adventures that might be related to the lecture topic - you’re doing them a favour, really! As opposed to research talks, which are mostly for yourself, to get your work out there, discuss the ideas with a larger number of people and get feedback - it can also be for the audience, depending on the possible applications of your work, for example; but they’ll still question what you’re trying to sell them.

So getting into the right mindset helps relieve some of the pressure that comes with tens of eyes locked on you for 2 hours.

Grabbing attention.

This is something I struggled with in the beginning, as a small and quiet person trying to get a room of 80 people to shut up and pay attention so I could do my thing. Especially after the break between the 2 hours (we’d do 10 minutes break halfway through) - it was impossible for me to raise my voice high enough, so it was mostly waiting for them to realize I was waiting for them to shush so I could start again, or that I’d already started talking and they should be listening instead. But there can be things to be done to grab their attention when not loud enough; something I started doing is turning off the display during the break, and then turning it back on when I was ready to start the second part. That, paired with my loudest attempt at “Right, let’s get back to it!” seemed to do the trick once they learned how I used this signal!

Validate and encourage their opinions and questions.

There were occasionally questions I didn’t know how to answer immediately, or questions that don’t have an answer yet (i.e. research!) - some of them seemed to struggle with the idea of the second type in general, seeming to believe I knew everything. So I think it was good that they sometimes saw that wasn’t true, that there were things I didn’t know, and things that possibly no one knew and someone had to go look for an answer - I’d encourage those questions the most, even though they didn’t exactly like the reply of “let me know if you find out the answer!”.

With the first type of question, I found that if I directed attention off myself for a while to give myself time to think I would manage to come up with the answer after a little while - so I’d do this by passing on attention to the other lecturer on the module, if he was in the room; and if he wasn’t, I’d turn it back on the student and ask them to think outloud some reasoning for the thing, while I did my own thinking. And everyone did end up happy with answers there, in the end.

And I tried my best with any question asked, even if they were asking clarification on something very small and straight forward to me, I tried to encourage all of those and applaud the question asking, as well as the question replying from others, or the discussions that would sometimes stem from that. And that all led to some fairly interactive lectures, with many students getting invovled and speaking up, which I absolutely loved!

Anxiety.

This topic didn’t come up that much when I asked for advice before starting to teach, but it is something I always deal with when giving any sort of talks. The pressure of standing in front of a crowd and speaking your knowledge or your ideas is daunting! Doing it a lot definitely helps, but I still deeply dislike my past self when I remember she signed up for speaking gigs (not that it ever stops my future self from doing this more and saying yes to all sorts of crazy opportunities). My heart starts racing, my hands get sweaty and shaky and my throat feels like it’s closing up with a huge knot building to stop my voice from coming out. And this comes from fearing my talk will not be good, or that my ideas will be found as flawed, or that I’ll say things that don’t make sense or that I won’t know enough.

That last part is the easiest with lectures and I’ve been repeatedly told this: you do know enough. To make that actually true, I’d spend a few hours the week before each lecture making sure I understood every little detail in the slides that anyone might question: if I didn’t, I’d either go searching for a solution, and if that didn’t help, that detail would be taken out of the material. I definitely wanted to be as much in control of what I did and did not know for the lecture. As for some of the other things, it’s them who should be more scared that I’ll say things that don’t make sense after all!

There are things that I do before talks that generally help with the whole anxiety issue though, the biggest one being to get moving! Jumping around, stretching, moving my body - this all helps in muscles relaxing instead of being stiff, locked up and making life hard while talking. Visiting the talk location beforehand is always good as well, as you can get an idea of the space and your presence within that space. And belting out a song is great to get your voice working and place your voice in the right register: you don’t want to be using head voice for 2 hours of lecturing, so being comfortable with chest voice and used to using that is key.

Extreme anxiety.

This is a thing that is not always an issue: sometimes I’m relaxed and confident enough that the anxiety melts away once I actually start talking. There have been 3 instances, however, when it got so bad that it very closely turned into a panic attack right there, in front of everyone (fortunately I didn’t completely break down and I’m pretty sure no one really noticed). This is when the anxiety stuck with me, made my voice crack multiple times, made me worry about what I was going to say next while zoning out on what I was saying in the moment. It made it very difficult to get words out, to breathe, to control my face or my body language and it even brought tears to my eyes that somehow didn’t spill over my cheeks.

2 of these times were research talks, and 1 was during a lecture. With talks, it wasn’t too bad - at least I knew that I had only a few more minutes of enduring this and I could then run off to a bathroom to cry it out. With the lecture, it was 2 hours of my heart racing, my brain fogging up and my voice barely escaping my throat. And it’s funny to think that nobody else noticed, how could you not notice that my body was loudly screaming at me to stop doing what I was doing!

No advice on this one so far, other than that breaks are okay. Someone told me that taking breaks to breathe between slides is the best thing you can do: they won’t even notice since you’re transitioning slides anyway, even if you take a good few seconds to yourself. Breathe, plant feet firmly on the ground, have a drink of water, shake hands. Whatever works to keep you focused in the zone.

Confidence and projection.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s important to speak in the right register to be able to sustain that for longer periods of time. It’s also important to do so loudly, so everyone in the room can actually hear you! And that comes with projection of voice which, for some, comes naturally, and others (like me!) they have to consciously focus on it. One more thing to focus on, if anxiety wasn’t high enough already! But projecting your voice properly can also add more confidence to your presence: fake it till you make it, on that one.

I’m not a confident person, and I’m usually very quiet and prefer to not speak more than I have to, I like to listen instead - and if someone asks for my opinions, then I’d share them, because they asked and it’s their problem if the opinions they want are wrong! Confidence is a thing I’m still working on, but I’ve found it improved so much with teaching! There’s something about explaining a piece of knowledge and seeing lights in the audience light up with understanding, or answering a specifically difficult question and the student looking satisfied with the answer, that leads to a huge boost in confidence which lingers for a while.

The last lecture.

I walked away from my last lecture fabulously happy and proud of myself. I’d paced it perfectly, I’d had exciting discussions and inquisitive questions. I’d gotten them to listen to me and to look interested in what I was talking about and I’d even had time to tell them off for some generic mistakes in their first assignments. Life was glorious and all my efforts had paid off.

Snapshot 4

2018-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

Last week I had the great opportunity to give a talk alongside other QMUL Game AI Group members Simon Lucas, Vanessa Volz and Simon Colton. But this was not just any talk, it was within an event organised by the IET meant to share our work, inspire and engage with young people (even some really small humans!). I’m not sure if they all walked away actually inspired, but I hope they did. And although sometimes it’s really hard talking about research to an incredibly mixed audience of general public, children and researchers in your field, it was overall a great evening with much laughter, great conversations and a pleasant buzz of activity. Many thanks to the organisers for doing such an amazing job!

If you’d like to know what I talked about or giggle at over-the-top Christmas slides filled with animations, check out these: (PDF) or (PPTX).

Snapshot 3

2018-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Get asked to do an interview.
Freak out!
Why are they asking me?! Impostor syndrome to the max!
Show interest in the invitation, but keep your option of saying ‘no’ open while asking for more details: what’s the expected audience, what sort of things are they going to ask you about?
Tell friends and family and watch them get super excited.
Freak out!
Recognize it’s a nice opportunity and, worst that can happen, they won’t use your recording/footage. But you still get to keep your experience.
Happily accept and settle all details about when and where.
Ask for advice: best from someone in a similar situation, or who was in a similar situation before.
Pretend you’re not freaking out anymore until 1 hour before the interview.
Freak out!
Babble your way through the interview, hoping they have a damn good editor to make you sound smart.
Laugh at their silly mistake asking if you have anything else to add: then babble for double the time about your own research area.
Find out how they discovered you / who recommended you, go and thank them!
Wait until it airs and hope it’s magically sounding smart… and that you’re in there as well.
Breathe.

Check out Command Line Heroes, where I may or may not be featured in a future episode (I’ll share more when I know myself!).

Special thanks to Tommy Thompson for giving great advice (Step 9!) and Katja Hoffman for throwing this opportunity at me (Step 14!). Very greatful to know awesome people. :)

Science Welcomes Girls

2018-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

I submitted this a while ago to a competition for short ‘motivational’ pieces meant to encourage and inspire young girls to pursue a path in science. I didn’t win (or I assume I didn’t, since I never heard back), but I wanted to share this still.

Main picture credit: Comfreak on Pixabay

Dear you,

All I would like to say is that it’s okay.

It’s okay to like science. You may be told by those around you that science is not for girls. That’s because they do not know the truth. They were told the same by others before them, but it does not make it true. Girls can do it all. You can. You can love art, music and writing, yet still excel at mathematics. You can be pretty and humorous, yet still ponder physics and think in equations. You can enjoy video games and sports, yet still find engineering fascinating. These features are not contradictory, they build upon each other. Be proud of who you are.

It’s okay to be scared. Trying something new always is – will you like it? Will it be right for you? Even more, it’s overwhelming to think of the world of science – what if you don’t fit in? The only way you’ll find an answer to those questions is to simply try it. Take that fear and transform it into something special. Show to yourself, before the world, that you can beat your fear and discover the beauty within. Comfort is the opposite of progress, but breaking out of comfort is always accompanied by fear.

It’s okay to feel not good enough. All people do at one point or another – so much so that it even has its own term often spoken about, “imposter syndrome”. But all you must do is believe that you are good enough, be confident in your abilities. There is always going to be someone better, that is how the world works. Someone else will come up with a solution to the problem quicker than you do; someone else will present their solution better than you do; and someone will see a new problem that you completely missed. But there is no one else who can do those things quite the way you do. You are unique and special. And you can do whatever you put your mind to, if you keep trying and pushing to achieve your goals.

It’s okay to fail. Failing is inevitable, as you do not have the answers to all the questions. If you did, there would be no point in life, mystery solved! It would take away the excitement of finding things out, the surprise of getting things wrong. Without fails, success loses all meaning. That’s the best part. Because when you fail, you can learn from it and improve. Learn, and grow, and be brave in your adventures.

It’s okay to follow your dreams. Even if you are the only one who believes in them for now, others will understand in time. It is you who matters. Make your dream matter. Cherish it, nourish it and build it up into something that makes a difference. Or simply something that you are proud of. No one else is going to do that for you, but no one else needs to either. You have all the tools you need to pursue your path. There may be pressure to do something grand with your life – that’s what scientists do, right? They invent new technology to revolutionize our understanding. However, all big technology always starts small; the smallest idea, the smallest intention, the smallest dent in our current way of thinking. And that’s where you come in. You have dreams, and ideas, and intentions, to create your small dent for a better world.

Discover the world, question the world, dissect it to find its secrets. That’s what science is all about. And you can do it. It’s okay to want to. In fact, it is quite inspiring that you do.

With hopes for the future you represent,
A fellow girl breaking into the world of science.

Never Alone Game Review

2017-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

This game’s a cute one. Released in 2014 by Upper One Games. Two characters, Nuna (a girl) and Fox (a fox, who would’ve guessed) are involved in a traditional story told through platformer co-operative puzzles. It can be played as single or local two-player in co-op mode, of which I’ve played the second so I’ll talk more about that.

Never Alone makes it clear from the beginning that it is all about telling a nice story through atmospheric scenes. It relies a lot on environment to create interesting experiences for the players, be those peaceful soaring through the air, swimming through deep waters or evading and fighting enemies in tense scenes. It does a great job at keeping you immersed in this beautiful world, with small things added to enhance the mood that don’t really have any effect on gameplay, but once you notice them you go “ooh, look at that!”

If you like beautiful games that take you on peaceful adventures, you’ll love this one.

It is quite simple in terms of gameplay, though. There is a lot of running, jumping and bracing against the occasional strong wind. Very rarely, more interesting things are introduced. The fox can climb taller walls and control spirits to help Nuna on her way. And Nuna can drag boxes around or throw her Bola (I am quite a Bola expert myself!). This weapon Nuna has appears to have two uses so far (I’ve played about 2 hours of the game): breaking obstacles or waking up sleepy spirits so the Fox can interact with them. It’s also very useful at pissing off one of the other characters or smacking bears (for amusement purposes only, no actual effect).

The puzzles themselves are very simple as well, but they are a nice break from the constant runner the game would turn into otherwise.

I am not sure if I will finish this game, but I did enjoy playing it. I give it a mid mark for being pretty, with a 0.5 added for Nuna crying when Fox dies, Fox whining cutely when Nuna dies and later facepalming at the silly girl.

Check it out on Steam if interested!

And brace against the wind!

Snapshot 2

2017-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Second supervisory board all done today. It definitely went a lot better than my first one in terms of nerves. I only had a big panic 5 minutes before, but it was all good once I got to the office and sat down. Then I found out my big supervisory team would be all present in one form or another, with 2 joining by Skype. That’s a lot of people very focused on what I’m doing and assessing it.

It went really well though! I told them nice stories about my work so far and plans for the future which they seemed to like, discussed some things in a bit more detail and got some nice suggestions and things to consider.

Then I got kicked out. Very short and efficiently being told to leave so they could talk.

… Okay.

On the bright side, it seems all is good and happy, I shouldn’t have to resubmit.

And this concludes my adventures in Essex, as I am now transferring to Queen Mary University of London. This was my last thing to finish in Essex and everything is wrapped up. A proper longer post to come in saying goodbye to the university where I spent 5 years (exactly 5 years in 4 days!). Good times, bad times, a lot of growing up.

I already got the sniffles.

Her Story Game Review

2017-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

I’ve not done a review before. How hard can it be?

(Those were her last words)

I want to talk to a game that I finished playing with a friend last night at 1am. We finished it in two 2-hour sessions which started very confused about what to do, then confused about what was happening, then confused about what else to do. Released in 2015 by Sam Barlow.

A lot of confusion. Not much gameplay time. And no replayablity, once you know the story it’s kind of pointless going back and doing it again. If you have strong feelings about all of those, you probably won’t like this game very much. And that’s why I only gave it a 5. I probably should’ve gone even lower as there isn’t much “game” aspect to it at all, unless you count the hidden mini-game inside. But I’ve kept it at 5 because there is one big good thing that I enjoyed.

And that’s the way the story was told. I don’t think I’ve experienced anything similar before, so I found it very intriguing and very suitable for the genre it is representing. The main idea of the game is that you’re investigating a crime and are given a database of interviews nicely separated into small chunks and labelled so you can find them by searching for different things (e.g. “MURDER”, the default search word you start with). You only get to see the 5 videos that come up, even if your search returns more, which can bug you to know what else is there that you can’t see?

Game starts with a screen like this:

Old school computer, a bar to type database queries in, some random files and folders to explore on the desktop. The instructions are not very clear, but you get the hang of it as you play. I think it’s one of those games that you get into slowly and you just want to know more and more. I very much enjoyed the story telling design part of the game, great idea. And the performance/quality of the videos, very nicely done. Deserving the awards received there.

The big disappointment was the ending. In the sense that there was none. You got to watch all the videos and walk away with the satisfaction that you know what happened. Only intrinsic rewards available. No pat on the back for doing a good job, no nicely ordered videos for you to watch to revisit the story in order.

Fortunately the internet does contain all that. And spoilers too / help with search terms, if you’re into that. This includes a hack of getting to see all videos in order, which defeats the one great thing about this game, thus making it pointless - I would strongly recommend staying away from that one. But I will say that tagging videos is good practice, so you’re not lost in the pool of information you’ll have to dive in.

Recommended for the story telling design part of it, if you’ve got some time to kill.

Check it out on Steam if interested!

Snapshot 1

2017-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes putting together a long post convering a big multi-day event is a lot of work. Getting the text right, sorting through the images, editing them to fit in the theme, sorting out all the layout and alignment issues. Quite a lot goes into one simple thing. So I’ll introduce a new type of post I’ll call snapshots. They’ll probably not have fancy titles or carefully selected pictures and design to them. They’ll be a simple collection of thoughts onto one particular topic or some small thing I find interesting and I’d like to add here. They’ll also share the same pictures to save me from editing each post’s meta data - an easy way to identify these is if they have my face on them. They’ll also all live in the same category, even though they may fit in some other ones. I’ll do my best to distinguish them with tags.

So if you like quick random thoughts, look out for these.

I’ll still do the normal more carefully designed posts, but this is a way to get myself to post more and not find it a pain to get things done.

Networking With Tears

2017-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

Buzz slide: (PDF). GVGAI, RHEA & heuristics presentation: GDrive. Poster: (PDF)

Mid September is the time when IGGIs from all over the country pack up their bags, say goodbye to their cats and beloved homes and jump on long train journeys to one of 3 locations. Well, now one of 4, as Queen Mary University of London has been added to the mix. That’s actually where I’ve now ended up, but that’s a completely different story. The option used to be between Essex, York and Goldsmiths Universities. And this year it happened to be York. Possibly one of the prettiest places I’ve visited in the UK so far. Two and a half days later, everyone’s very happy to be heading back home. But let’s start at the beginning.

One thing that’s great about this conference (just now upgraded from a symposium!) is that it does bring all the people involved in this big IGGI programme together. That’s almost 50 students now in 4 cohorts, plus supervisors and staff otherwise involved. And every year we get a new bunch of awesome people joining us. Last year it was me and it was completely terrifying. This year it was still so.

I enjoyed the keynotes this year, those I could focus on anyway, be it because of nerves with my talk coming up, or because of being exhausted at the end of the last day. But they were good. Very nice energy from the speakers, highlighting enthusiasm for academia to be collaborating with the games industry. That’s one interesting topic that should be spoken more of. And it links back to my previous post about impact. There is a lot of pressure of our research work being industry relevant. Which makes sense, we do want our work to actually be used and lead somewhere interesting, right? But I don’t deal well with this kind of pressure.

I won’t go into details now, but there was a breakdown here too, cushioned by two great people. I didn’t think what I did mattered, I didn’t think anyone would care about what I do.

That was proven wrong rather quickly, though. After my buzz talk (these 1 minute talks of all the students squeezed back to back in just an hour for a concentrated doze of research), a bunch of people caught me on the way out of the room to ask more about my work. Up at my poster, more people stopped to chat and point at things, making it hard for me to not go over and see what interested them. My external supervisor grabbed me for a meeting with a company interested in my work and potentially offering me a placement (I hope I didn’t mess that one up!). More people popped by to talk after my GVGAI talk on the last day. And after the rough start, it actually ended up being one of the most productive conferences in terms of networking, I was swarmed with attention.

That’s something I still have to work on, the other extreme of getting a lot of attention. It’s quite tiring actively trying to convince people what you do is cool and they want to know more about it than just the title that caught their eye, or the car racing picture thrown on a slide in the presentation. And I always forget to ask for business cards. I need to step up my game there, I did meet some very nice people and I should’ve gotten a way to contact them. Here comes the stalking on the few details I know about them. And if you’re on of them reading this, do say hi!

I’ve left links to the buzz slide (quick snapshot of my research), poster (based on the CIG paper) and GVGAI presentation (including a brief overview and motivation of my work; unfortunately it’s a bit lacking in terms of slide content, but it was recorded, maybe that will be available at some point for a better understanding) at the top of this post.

I’ll also want to talk more about networking and the struggles that come with it for me in another post in more detail. Maybe someone will find it useful.

Until then, keep being awesome, IGGI!

And complain less, please.

Escaping Unconscious Bias

2017-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

I attended my first games conference aimed at women. You could tell this was the case by the title: “Women in Games”. Kind of gives it away, doesn’t it? And it also makes anyone not associating with being a woman shy away. Why should they attend a conference for women? That’s a very good question indeed.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea behind the event is great. I’ve been to a few diferent academic conferences (evolutionary computing or games themed) now and in all of them there’s one aspect that’s pretty clear: the world is male dominated. So it’d obviously be nice to see a few more women around to even out the presence of both genders (even though this would mean saying goodbye to the queue-free toilets, a great perk ladies benefit from at these conferences!).

But my question is this: why not promote games conferences more to blonde people, as there’s too many black-haired? Or to Italians? Or to cat-owners? Or to left-handed people? Or to those who like pineapple on pizza (seriously, this is a crime)?

It seems a bit silly if I put it this way, doesn’t it?

My point is this: how come the gender of a person is taken into account when considering if they’re good at something? Does the fact that they like cats affect whether they can program? No. I’m sure someone could come up with a great study that says cat-owners are more likely to be good at programmers because 80% of subjects identified with both criteria. But is there really a correlation there? Sure, maybe my “woman-brain” works differently to a “man-brain”. I look at an algorithm and cringe if it’s not indented and structured in a pretty way. I look at creative solutions to problems of twirls and bows, when a straight line drawn through the right path would’ve done the trick.

But is that because I’m a woman? It’s because that’s me. That’s me as an individual. The lady sitting next to me could have a completely different view to the same problem. And the man sitting at the desk across from me and poking his legs under my desk (so not cool) might agree with my twirls and bows.

The way one person thinks, what they’re good at, that’s 100% because they’re them. One individual. The gender, likes and dislikes, sexual orientation, race, the way they tie their shoelaces, all together they define this individual. And maybe they have some part to play in how he thinks. But taking one of them and singling it out as THE cause for this person being themselves is wrong. Equality is not obtained by highlighting one small aspect of who an individual is. Equality is obtained by treating people as individuals and highlighting ALL of who they are.

Now this ramble does actually come back to this conference and why the idea was executed poorly. They did highlight it as a conference for women. As a result, the attendees were 95% women, with some men lost in the mix. Besides the annoying bathroom queues, I consider that as missing the point. Equality is what should be aimed for, not swapping the genders while keeping the same ratio. So that’s one black ball.

The next one comes from adding talks on feminism. Making it seem like women get together and talk about being women more than science. A big slumber party that men would obviously feel bad for intruding on.

And a final black ball comes from a keynote which started well. Talking about unconscious bias. Doing a little exercise with the audience, turning them into mumbling robots, to prove this point. I recorded a little bit of this because I found it absolutely hilarious, the monotonous choir that would reply to the speaker’s cues.

The part where this talk went wrong was when the speaker introduced unconscious bias in his unconscious bias presentation (you’d think he’d actually be more aware of what he’s saying, given his talk topic). That’s when he suggested there’d be more gender balance in tech companies if they introduced relaxing rooms for women too, not just for men. That companies should not just have rooms with video games and pizza, but also rooms with puzzles, flowers and tea, which would be more enjoyable for women.

To this I say, I hope the next delivery woman throws pineapple on your pizza and that the pizza sauce will smear all over your keyboard.

Do I like flowers? I love them. Would I stuff my face with pizza while repeatedly smashing my car into a wall in a rancing game (oh you wouldn’t imagine how bad I am at those)? Yes I would. And if you’re going to give a talk at a conference entitled WOMEN IN GAMES, then you’d better remove slides saying women don’t like games off your presentation.

As to what I actually learned at this conference? …

… That I should not attend women in games conferences. And that the current approach to equality is not aligned with my definition and views on the matter.

Here’s to ladies who love games. And to the people who tie their shoelaces with their left hand only and still love games just as much.

Simply, to people who love games. And animals too, my kitten will be a renowned hacker one day.

Starry Lights

2017-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

Presentation: (PPTX) (PDF) (Youtube) (Youtube-Full-Stream)

(A lot of pictures from NY, still sorting through them. Pictures to come.)

I’d never been on a plane for more than 3 and a half hours. Even that sometimes feels like a lot. But this time, after lots of running around for a visa, I jumped on a plane for 7 hours, heading west and over an ocean. US was so far away from little me once. But then my excited feet got to walk around in the JFK airport and later stumbled around Brooklyn trying to find my temporary home for a week. Yep, little me got all the way to New York. Who would’ve thought, huh.

Thing is, the kid in me expected to be walking around in a magical land where you’d turn a corner and poof! there’s one dream you’d had for a long time and now it’s come true. That’s how the stories go, don’t they? And don’t get me wrong, I did like it there. I love lights at night and Manhattan does have plenty of those shining and challenging the stars for a spot in the sky. I love impressive views and the skyline of super tall buildings did impress me. And there were so many little things that I’d seen in movies and I could relate that to the real world, right in front of my nose. I may have slightly injured my neck staring up at the top of the sky scrapers.

But there was a lot of very greasy food. And very sweet food too - even meatballs in tomato sauce tasted bloody sweet! There was so much traffic. There was an old looking and confusing tube system. And Brooklyn, where I stayed, was not very well kept. I think my street was one of the prettiest in the area, so I lucked out on that front. Above all, it was just another city with some very tall buildings and yellow school buses. I didn’t get any dreams poof!-ed. And I probably wouldn’t be very excited to live there (but hey, I used to say that about London and guess where I’ve ended up now).

I still liked the trip. I got two days after the conference to explore the place: the first day we checked all the tourist points, full on walking day morning to evening. The second day I could barely move and we went for a relaxing day on Governor’s Island instead. Some highlights of these two days would include a doggie park, the Friends appartment, Central Park (this one was a big disappointment, I had very high hopes for this magical place before it turned out to be just a park), getting dizzy in Times Square (so many things and lights everywhere!), donuts that I was told were amazing but I couldn’t try, a jazz festival with everyone dressed and acting like in the 20s and a hot dog. I really wanted a hot dog.

As for the conference, which is what I’d actually gone to New York for, that was good too. It was probably the first one that I’ve gone to where most talks are either relevant to what I do, in some way relatable or just interesting. I particularly enjoyed that there were several talks on generating games of strategic depth, something I myself dabbed in a bit. There were also a bunch of people I knew there, which was very cool. It’s nice going to a conference where you know people!

The social events were quite cool too. The first was going to a place filled with old school arcade games and a bar as well. We got quarters served in a bucket for free use of the machines which turned out to be great fun! And the second was a fancy dinner where the waiters were waaay too happy to keep serving wine.

And for the first time since new people joined the crew, we could have a nice big GVGAI meeting with everyone currently involved. That ended up taking 3 hours, maybe we should have those more often so we don’t end up losing a whole evening for it. Lots of ideas thrown around, some ideas kicked out. Do look for cool new things coming up though, there are many plans to improve both the framework and competition.

I also got to do a presentation on my latest paper, Rolling Horizon Evolution Enhancements in General Video Game Playing. This was recorded and streamed live, for the whole world to see. Which is actually pretty cool, although I still cringe when I see it. I guess that happens with everyone. So this time I can share not only my slides, but also what I spoke on top of them and the Q&A section at the end!

My mum watched the stream. She didn’t understand much. She thought I was amazing.

Develop'ing Games

2017-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

In the 5 years I’ve been in the UK, I’d never gone to Brighton. A lot of people say it’s one of THE places to go in the UK and I should definitely go. So I did, for the Develop conference this year. It rained and it was very cold in the first couple of days. But I didn’t see much of the outside anyway, I had only a half day to visit around when I arrived. And I wasn’t impressed. There was a big UFO on a stick, a stoney beach, a big pier I personally don’t care much about and the Lanes were very narrow and crowded. I guess there’s some beauty in that, but I didn’t quite see it. I’ll blame the bad weather for that.

An interesting experience was getting a small flat just for myself to stay in for the 2 conference nights. That was also during the time I was searching for new place to live in London and very much wanting an appartment just for myself (which didn’t happen). This place, it was exactly what I wanted, and more. Big bed, two TVs and its own little kitchen. So pretty. Bit of a waste of money, but very pretty nonetheless.

The first afternoon was setting up the IGGI stand in the expo place. I happened to be one of the lucky ones that got a full pass for the conference, meaning the others in the group that only had expo passes had to bribe me to let them go attend the various talks. If we weren’t in the talks, we’d be at the IGGI stand, talking to potentially interested industry people or potential new students. In my experience, the latter happened more often.

One thing I didn’t enjoy about this event was the amount of Virtual Reality promotion everywhere. Considering they do a specific Develop:VR later in the year, it felt a bit silly and exaggerated to see 1 of 5 expo stands being VR specific. A lot of VR talks as well. And not much AI - only one given by my external supervisor, which was great to see. But I would’ve liked more. It’s fairly difficult to promote myself and my work in this environment when there’s so little to relate to.

The keynotes though, the keynotes were great. The Romeros in particular, those were really cool to hear and very inspiring. If I were to go again, it would be for the keynotes, they’re probably the best I’ve encountered so far in my experiences of travelling around to various conferences.

More photos:

Trip To Cec 2017 In San Sebastian

2017-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

Presentation download: (PPTX) (PDF).

A few weeks ago (I know, I’m slow at updating this blog) I was in Spain for the Conference on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2017, which happened to take place in San Sebastian this year. Considering my timing issues in Amsterdam, for this one I arrived a few days early just to be sure I’d make it on time to my presentation. And also to enjoy the city and a little holiday a bit more before the conference. One other student and friend from the University of Essex, Kamolwan Kunanusont, who was also presenting at the conference, joined me for these early days. There was one day that was warm and sunny and we did get to enjoy the beach before the cold and the rain arrived. It was a great experience regardless, San Sebastian is absolutely gorgeous and a recommended visit for anyone who’s not been there, I will definitely have to return at some point.

I had two jobs at this conference (besides meeting certain key people, some of which are now my Facebook friends, win!): presenting the results of the 2017 2-player GVGAI Competition and presenting my paper entitled “Population Initializaion Techniques for Rolling Horizon Evolution in General Video Game Playing”. (Yes, I do have some long titles in my papers).

I’ll start with my presentation first. I’ve had a comment in the past from someone who came across my blog post about my EvoStar presentation that they would like more than my slides. But hey, your loss for not being at the conference, it was a great presentation! (I think I’d also had some cider right before, oh dear). But I do want to add something to the slides (which can be found at the top of this post). And that is the questions that I was asked (or part of them, my memory may be worse than I thought; I’ll definitely have to write them down right after next time for this purpose.) I’ll also add quick answers to them all, although discussion is highly encouraged if you are interested in knowing more!

Have you considered modifying the budget given to the MCTS seeding (paper presented it as 0.5 seeding and 0.5 evolution)? We have briefly experimented with several different budget allocations in the beginning, but no in-depth study on this has been performed; it will definitely be a point of further work.
(One of the problems with the algorithm described in all papers so far is it is not able to search the solution space efficiently enough, therefore Random Search sometimes outperforms it due to simply having more options to choose from). Have you tried using novelty search and how do you think it would help the algorithm? We have not tried that, the work so far has been focused on gathering different things tried in literature and see what actually works on this problem. Novelty search has not been applied to a RHEA algorithm so far, but it might indeed be the thing we need to break the performance limit we seem to be bumping against.
(We use a 900 Forward Model call budget for all algorithms in the experiments, the average vanilla RHEA can achieve in GVGAI games in 40ms execution time). What if the budget was increased? Firstly, that would not be a real-time game anymore and that is the problem we are trying to solve. We do have increased budgets in the EvoStar paper where we are analysing the vanilla version and performance does increase - but our goal is to make the search efficient enough within the limited budget.
Some open room discussion that everyone in the room joined in (slightly less traditional Q&A session, this one), although I can’t seem to remember what was the main topic.

Next presentation on RHEA will be at CIG 2017 in August for our latest paper, some very interesting work in there that I’ll be happy to present.

For the other item on the list, I joined (or really, he joined me, I should say, since I am the chair of this track!) Diego Perez-Liebana, the big GVGAI boss and my supervisor, to present the results of the competition. The full results can be found here.

And these are the winners!

Winner: ToVo2 {Tom Vodopivec (University of Ljubljana), Slovenia.}
1st runner up: ehauckdo {Eduardo Hauck (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora), Brazil.}
2nd runner up: not2048 {Piers Williams, Joseph Walton Rivers (University of Essex), Damien Anderson (University of Strathclyde), UK.}

Congratulations! And thank you to everyone who participated this year, it turned out to be a very close competition. :)

We also made a last minute decision right before presenting the results: someone (cough Diego cough) forgot about a private Spanish league we had run early this year for a course at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), which included 15 other entries! So we will be running these on the still hidden test set, and select the best from the private league and CEC for a final showdown presented at CIG 2017!

So as a summary, I’ve met some great people at this conference. It was very exausting, I made myself go out every night to socialize and get to know different people. I’ve listened to a few interesting presentations, got new ideas for my work and a deal for another project. And on the last day I got to see the big bosses fighting the huge waves and the sand storm that popped up out of nowhere. Very entertaining, had it not been for myself being dragged under by the strong current. San Sebastian recommended, attempting to swim in big waves in San Sebastian, not recommended.

Oh, I also ate fish. A new rule was discovered: everything tastes great after 2 glasses of wine!

Check this album for more pictures from the conference, this and this for more pictures from my Spain trip (San Sebastian and Madrid) before and after the conference.

Impact

2017-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

A few weeks ago I was in York, for the second to last IGGI training module. I’ve mentioned this in a previous post and how it was all about making an impact out in the big world thorugh our research. The outcome of this module was made up of multiple things: a press release, a poster and 3 minute talk on the poster, a development plan and something else that I am missing at the moment - blaming the current exposure to Spanish sun for that (another story I’ll share soon).

Oh, right. The last thing we had to submit as part of the assignnment was a lecture plan - including slides, notes and overview. No biggie. I did mine on Rolling Horizon Evolution too, but I wouldn’t want my future students to get a head start if they accidentally find it shared here.

This post I’ll keep short. I just thought I’d share the video submitted, including the poster and short presentation on my paper published at EvoStar. And yes, it does make me cringe every time I listen to it, recording yourself is so not fun.

Enjoy!

Audio Games

2017-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

A couple of weeks ago I participated in the IEEE Present Around The World Competition at the University of Essex and I came second. I’m terrible at answering questions and this was particularly difficult because what I presented was (and is) still in the stage of a project idea, with very little background research behind it. But I am quite proud of the presentation - I plan to record it to show it off in its whole glory, but for now I’ll offer the slides and my notes for it here. What this form of sharing will miss is the main part of the presentation, the sound effects and music. So look out for the updated recorded version.

A quick overview of the project, I plan to start working on this end of June, hopefully in partnership with more knowledgable people in the areas of interest, particularly sounds and the Deaf community. To get the main idea, I’ll let you look at and read the following notes.

This next part I signed in American Sign Language. Good thing about doing an introduction in ASL, nobody notices if you completely mess up because of the nerves and by the end of it you’re all good to speak for the rest of the presentation!

Many think that the way we experience the world defines us. And sounds, music, play a big part in that. When you’re driving your car, turning on the radio and that one song - one song - sticks into your mind for the rest of the day. You’re doing work later, sitting at your desk, scrolling through endless documents and that song comes back in your mind. song playing But you have to go out and walk the dog and song playing. And then you’re back home, cooking dinner for the kids, but that song… playing song. Some people don’t get that.

quick comment: the song chosen for the PAWT presentation was along the lines of “I like to move it move it”… -

A bunch of us like to play games. How many of you have actually done that - playing games? Hop scotch, tic tac toe, that crazy game where you form lines and you gotta run max speed into the other line and break your teeth - maybe that’s just me. Imagine how being in the court yard as a kid would be, unable to hear the others shouting that a ball is about to hit you from behind. Unable to hear the mean kids sneaking up on you.

Then there’s those of us that like to play video games. And these are becoming more and more incredible, with Virtual Reality bringing you into different amazing worlds. But even without that, you can get so immersed into one game, because of its story, or the fun things you get to do, or maybe just because it looks so much like your life, your story, that you can’t help feeling part of the game. Modern games, they rely a lot on music and sound effects for immersion. They build these incredible soundtracks that lift your spirit or terrify you, designed to evoke emotions and challenge you to pour your soul into the game. Some people don’t get that.

But it’s not about a defect. No, I’ve learned that the Deaf don’t think of themselves as less and we shouldn’t either. They have a rich beautiful culture and they are proud. They reinvent the world and make it work for them, instead of against them. Movies, theatre, songs… they still enjoy that, in such an expressive manner it can move you deeply.

It’s about being a community. And often, it is games that brings us together. So why do we limit their access to this world, why not bring them in instead?

There are efforts in the games industry for Deaf accessibility. Subtitles are used in some games for character dialogue, comic book style expressive words or screen flashes and colours in time with the beat of the music in others. But in the majority of games, the game experience is so much more than that.

I’ve discovered recently that the facilities offered for the blind are much greater in this regard. It’s hard to portray pictures in sounds, but there can be games of sound only. And there is a large collection of such very specific games, ranging from shooters to adventure and even puzzle games.

The Blind are actually very good at understanding sounds in video games and navigating by them. One example is the gamer Sightless Kombat, who climbed the competitive ladder to the top in the game “Killer Instinct” - a fighting game. He is able to identify gameplay by sounds only.

The project I am going to kickstart uses the larger library of games meant for the blind to understand sounds and translate them into visual cues and emotions for the Deaf.

Work in AI focused a lot on screen capture these days. Google DeepMind is everywhere and their work IS fascinating, how their algorithms learn to respond to pixels.

But having an agent learn and react to audio stimuli, that is more of a niche subject. In order to provide an interface for the Deaf regarding the dimension they miss, we first need to understand this dimension.

So let’s start with isolating it. We reduce the games to only sounds. The sound of footsteps as you move around. A narrator telling their story. A clock ticking in the background. Shouts from the left. A whoosh of a sword. A pulse from the right. Can an agent understand they are being attacked and they need to hurry to the exit at their right?

Then can we translate this understanding to visual information? Something as basic as an animated character in a corner reacting to the environment as you play the game. The ultimate goal is to create a tool that can be easily applied to any game, without the need to specifically tailor games for it. This would make all games accessible for the deaf community and not make game designers crinkle their nose at the thought of extra work in placing audio cues in key spots.

My area is game-playing Artificial Intelligence, but I know nothing of sounds and little of accessibility in games. So I’ve asked for help from two students in the same programme who are much more experienced in these areas than I am, hopefully turning this into a great collaboration. A community effort for another community.

This next part is something I didn’t do in PAWT, fearing the time limit. But the plan was to ask the audience to close their eyes, listen to the sounds I played and raise their left hand if the sound they heard they thought of as bad (endangering, annoying, would like to run away from etc.), raise the right hand if the sound seemed good or clap their hands if they identified the exit of the level in our little escape game we’d be playing …

… And of course the clapping would lead perfectly right to this!

The Habit

2017-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

This is a very random post, not related to anything in particular.

One of the evenings in York during the IGGI training module was a break from the ordinary. One of our fellow IGGI students (depicted in the pictures in this post) was to perform at an open mic night in a small little pub called The Habit. A bunch of us went to support him.

Starting with the place. It was very small, unable to handle the crowd that had actually gathered that night. At least on the bottom floor where the main action was going to happen and where the bar was, it was full, people even standing to talk to one another. Suffocating. So we went upstairs, in an area with cute little round tables with comfy sofas around. There was something about the place that was very welcoming and warm. Possibly the twinkly lights which caught my eye immediately. I like little lights.

We listened to the music up there for a bit, before a couple of us went to see the show better downstairs. Or so we tried, but we ended up sitting on the stairs and peering under the first floor to be able to see the musicians doing their thing. There was quite an assortment of people there. Men, women, young and old. And even a guy with a banjo. I liked listening to the elder performers in particular - they may have not been the best, but there was something in their voices, something in their eyes when they sung, that showed deep emotions of a long beautiful life lived. And it was great that they had the courage to stand up in front of such a big yet intimate crowd to tell their stories. Lovely and inspiring to see.

And Sam Hughes, our IGGI person? He was amazing! He sang two covers, Jolene and another one I did not recognize. His voice shook on the first song, but got more and more confident with our cheering. And the guy can sing. Lots of cheers for a powerful performance, quite a stark contrast to the previous slow quiet small pretty emotional songs. An interesting night, a break from the ordinary.

Why Bother

2017-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

Those who know me personally would probably not expect this post. Or maybe it’s just me that has the impression that everyone around me thinks I have it all figured out. I have a great PhD topic, an awesome supervisor, writing papers in my sleep and getting things published. Chairing a competition and involved in lots of other projects, working all the time on all sorts of different bits and pieces. I may even appear confident in what I’m doing, as I’m mostly going for a “fake it till you make it” approach.

But this week was a difficult one. I am currently in York on one of the IGGI training modules that is all about communication skills. And one thing they keep drilling into our heads is that we must have an impact in the games industry. That, in the context of my academic life being a whirling tornado at the moment, led to a breakdown. Maybe it’s because I have been working so hard on so many things and not pausing to breathe. Or maybe I can blame it on others stirring up chaos. But this week I experienced what possibly a lot of PhD students do at least at one point in their years of study: what in the world am I doing and what for?

Normally, that’s easy to answer. I’m on a great program working in an area that will make a difference. Sure, there’s a long way to go and I’m only leaving small footprints in the sand at the moment, but at least I’m walking and at one point or another, I’ll get there - the games industry will want to use my AI in many ways and all will be happy. But this week, I did not believe everything I was writing down. I did not believe my tiny footprints would have an impact. I did not believe I could even continue walking this path. So I crashed down on my metaphorical beach and had a spontaneous chat with my supervisor, telling him I didn’t know how to answer the question, I didn’t know why bother do this at all.

That’s probably the first thing I’d recommend doing in this scenario: talk to the supervisor. They’ll be surprised at first - but that’s not unexpected, since you’re acting crazy, talking about running off to Mexico again, but this time seriously. But then they’ll support you in whatever you want to do. And you’ll also get stories of crazy things they did during their PhD. It’s not that out of the ordinary to panic and think you’re on the wrong path. Talking with someone who knows of your journey though, that helps.

It took a few days for my brain to get back on track, my heart to fall back into place and my feet to start moving again in the sand. To mean what I was saying and to get the will power to do my assignment which is all about that: why bother, what’s the end goal.

In the middle of all this mess, when I was lying awake in bed contemplating every decision I’d ever made, I had a random idea though. An idea of a project that got me excited again. That’s the second thing that helped me get out of the big hole: finding something else to get excited about. This particular something is very complicated and will need a lot of help to happen; I’m having a meeting tomorrow to this end, hoping it won’t turn out to be an impossible plan. Maybe soon I’ll reveal what the great idea is, when more things fall into place.

But in the mean time, I’m not quitting. And I’m not changing my PhD topic either. This time. (Just joking, of course!)

I bother because my small footprints in the sand are important to me. And they have to be important to me before they become important to someone else with bigger feet.

Analogy turned weird there. I don’t like feet.

P.S. This post was kept clean of noise in the memory of PhD topics actually dropped. I’ll also take this opportunity to mention that all images used on this blog are personal pictures that I am happy to share.

Trip To Evostar 2017 In Amsterdam

2017-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

Presentation download: (PPTX) (PDF).

This week I had the great opportunity to travel to Amsterdam! It was for my first international conference, EvoStar. I returned yesterday evening and today I was on a train to York. But that’s another story for another post. I’ll split this one in two parts: the conference and the Amsterdam adventures.

Conference first, as it should come. I arrived late, barely in time for my own presentation. So here’s a tip: fly in the day before the conference, especially if there’s a chance your presentation will be scheduled in the first session on that first day. I had troubles in the morning, it was a fairly rocky start, but eventually I found the venue and the room where I was to pretend I’m smart and show off my work. I had to wait a while to not interrupt the presentation that was happening at the time (with one to go before mine). In that time when I was outside the room, nervously chasing my tail, a bunch of other people started gathering. Probably for the presentation before mine on MsPacman and StarCraft balancing, or maybe even mine! Needless to say, I got even more nervous and wondered how many people did a double check after reading my name tag and the list of presentations on the door. Then my supervisor showed up and nerves really cracked up.

But it actually went great! A room of over 40 seats overflowing with people. My throat was terribly dry and words got stuck in there, but I got through it, made eye contact with the audience and some of them even nodded along or chuckled at random jokes I threw in there. The session chair was great, he laughed at every one of the jokes! The questions weren’t too bad either, nothing to put me on the spot and tell me I’m talking crap. So I think I did alright.

And that was it! First session, first day, and I was free to enjoy the rest of the conference without worrying about screwing up in my talk. There was lunch, which I devoured for the sake of my empty stomach. There was an attempt to understand the following session and not let my sleep deprived brain lose track of information. And then I ran off to check in at the hotel and drop my luggage off. The poster session was interesting when I returned. I met one of the IGGI cohort due to start the next year, Ivan Bravi, and I was happy that the rest of the IGGIs would stop bullying me for publishing in my first year, when this guy already has 3 publications and hasn’t even started the PhD! I also had a chat with another fellow IGGI student from the Essex University, Mihail Morosan, a very nice guy who was in the running for the EvoApps best paper award. Most of the posters contained way too many words that made no sense to me, but there was one cool project by Nuno Lorenzo who evolved shoes! Very expensive shoes, but a very fun project. There wasn’t much food at the reception, which was highlighted by the excited synchronous “MEATBALLS” squeak, as a lady with a food tray rounded a corner, produced by me and Ivan. They did serve good meatballs. And wine, the wine was good too.

The following day I went to the first two morning sessions. The first one was for the EuroGP best papers. Most of the presentations were good, making some sense of very confusing terminology and equations. But the paper I was there for was one on tangled graph representations for Atari game playing agents (here). It was actually a very good paper, some interesting things done there that I would like to have a better look at, as it could help my own research. And they did actually win the award, well done! This, compared to another GP screen capture work in GVGAI, where the guy didn’t even know much about the framework and a lot of things he did seemed fishy (here).

There was the conference dinner on the second day as well. Soup was served in a glass, which split the conference crowd in half, worse than the dress debate: there were some that drank it and some that used a spoon - I went for the drinking it directly option, it was so much easier. The rest of the food was good, but I was already quite full after the lunch I’d had out in the city, so I did not have much of it. I did have two glasses of wine, which resulted in a tipsy me. Oops. Apple pie for dessert, yum! Then the whole thing ended in song, like any good musical.

On the last day I decided to skip the morning session, as nothing looked inviting enough and I needed the extra sleep, but the keynote was great - on the links between academia and industry and how we suck at it. The closing ceremony awarded all the best paper prizes (which Mihail unfortunately didn’t win, but a nomination is fantastic in itself!) and the details of the next conference were announced. EvoStar 2018 will apparently take place in Parma, Italy! Maybe I’ll visit Parma next year then, I had a great time at the conference and met a few interesting people. Though most of them I do not remember the names of, so I cannot give them proper mentions.

Now for the fun part. In the first day I realized my hotel was not in a good location. And by that I mean it was right on the edge of the Red Light District. And that came with shocking shops surrounding the hotel, suffocating smells and catcalling. Next time I should definitely make a more informed decision! But the rest of Amsterdam was lovely. I did not explore much on that first day, although I did stop a few times for pictures (of which I ended up with over 400!). In the evening, we rounded up a nice little group to go out to dinner with, at an Argentinian tapas place close to the conference venue. It wasn’t authentic and good enough, as judged by the Spaniard among us, but I still enjoyed my steak - which, yes, I did have well done, and I am not a monster!

On the second day we had more time for exploring, about 5 hours spent around the city. Started south at the Rijksmuseum, where so many people were on top of the famous “I amsterdam” sign that you could barely see the letters. Even more south with Vondelpark, where a bunch of dogs excitedly raced for balls in the water; only one of them would actually cross the water to get the ball, while the others barked from the dry lands; there was one fun time in which the retrieval dog did a breadth-first search for the ball and ran around in lines around the spot the ball was until he finally found it - he would’ve benefited from the conference, there are much smarter ways of doing that! Then up to the Westerkerk tower, around which there was at least a 2 hour wait for the Anne Frank house. And up to a pancake place which will be remembered for many reasons; the pancakes there are amazing though, I had a bacon and apple one, with a delicious caramel sauce!

On the third day, after the conference closed, we made our way up near the Centraal station to find the starting point for the canal tour sponsored by the conference. That was quite a cool experience, even though we queued wrongly with a huge group. Eventually we did make it to the right boat and off we went, getting some nice views of the city from a different angle. We ran off to explore some hidden corners in the west part afterwards, finding some beautiful secret gardens and a cute little woodwork shop. Dinner was Italian with some pizza, followed by a traumatizing walk around the Red District - must be done, if even just once. One guy was spotted asking one of the ladies in the windows how much he was supposed to pay - and what for. Protect your innocence, young one.

The last day we spent exploring some more before the flights. Starting at the Begijnhof, then going up to the botanical garden and NEMO for a nice view of the city on the roof of the science museum. Some little streets were found and we stopped for dessert in a small shop called Sweetella, which lived up to its name. I had a waffle topped up with Nutella, white chocolate and smarties and I think part of me died there. A hunt for water was necessary, followed by the sad fareweel to Amsterdam.

And in the four days spent there, I surprisingly did not get run over by one bicycle.

Check this album for more pictures.

One thing I noticed, I complain a lot about having to travel too much, as now I am off on another adventure. But how lucky am I to be able to go to beautiful places!

First Supervisory Board

2017-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

Today I had my first supervisory board. I had quite a few days notice of it, unlike others. And I put together a presentation which I’ll insert here (or part of it, there’s one other slide that has about 200 animations on it and it looks like a complete mess in .png form). Now, for some context, I was actually in a brilliant place for this first milestone, as one of the slides shows off. I had papers published, journal paper in the making, more submitted, conference presentations coming up, I’d done IGGI modules and GLA marking work and am one of the chairs in a successful competitions.

Promo break: deadline for GVGAI2P submissions is 15th May! It’s very easy to enter and there may be prizes involved for the winners, so why not give it a go!

Back to regular program. I was also involved in different projects, collaborating with students and, although not included in my report, I got one nomination for best paper from one of the reviewers for the EvoStar paper (which was ignored and I’m not actually in the running, but it was a big thing for me!). So really, I should’ve walked in there with not a worry in the world!

… But of course that’s not what happened. You see, I’m a very anxious person. You tell me I’m supposed to present my work in front of people who already know it (and therefore know if I’m talking crap) and one other person who has no idea what it is (and I have to make it sound good), and I’ll freak out. There was panic. There were almost tears. There was talk of running to Mexico.

In the end, I did cancel my flight to Mexico and showed up at the meeting. Arrived a few minutes early and I ran into one of my supervisors who was just going off to get some coffee, but invited me in the room anyway. My other supervisor was there and he was trying to find the documents I’d submitted for this meeting. Yeah, they don’t all actually read them. Huff! I fumbled with the HDMI cable for a while to connect my laptop to the monitor for a better display of my few slides. Then the board chair walked in. He didn’t say much until the coffee supervisor returned. He didn’t say much after either and instead asked me to do the presentation I’d prepared. So I did.

Introductory slides. I assumed they knew who I was so I skipped saying my introduction. Was that the first mistake? I got through saying my main research topic though, as well as adding that the rest of that slide was just me showing off because I’d been busy. (hint, hint, be impressed and save the torture for others). My legs were crossed defensively, my hands were clamped in my lap, sweating. My heart was trying to jump out of my chest. I wondered if my hair looked all fluffy from the wind outside.

The missing slide was before these two, explaining my algorithm and how it works in the context of games. I babbled so much on that one slide, words were not my friends this morning. The board chair stopped me at some point to clarify something (so I was clearly not making any sense) and they were all scribbling in their papers, even my supervisors! That panicked me more, it must mean I was talking nonsense, so I babbled more. I focused mainly on the board chair, since the other two supposedly knew what I’d been up to. And somehow I got through these slides. Those two pictured here are implying general game AI: one AI that is not able to be brilliant at only one game, but any given to it.

Then came the time to say what I actually used this algorithm for. I started getting my hands involved a bit at this point to cover my babbling. Gesturing is a great cover up! I went slowly through all the papers and explained what happened in each one, doing my best to give details so it makes sense, while not spending hours presenting them. The corners of my eyes were focused on my supervisors who looked intrigued by what I was saying. Another time to panic, but at least they had friendly faces on. Eventually I finished and I could breathe again.

Then came the questions from the board chair. They asked some details about the algorithm and framework, to understand what I was trying to explain better. Fair enough, that one’s easy. Then he asked some more details which confused one of my supervisors a bit, but they both chipped in to help. Then came the tough question on how I was going to achieve what I had written in my plans. But at least it wasn’t posed necessarily in a “tell me a good methodology or you’ll regret it”. It actually came with problems I should consider and suggestions for what to focus on and where to start. There was a question addressed to one of the papers that the board chair wasn’t convinced by and I should have defended that better. And then the three of them had a little chat on more things that could be done, trying to fish from the board chair’s experience outside games for methods that could be applied to make things more effective.

There was praising all through the questioning, I did do well. Somehow though, in my panic, I was on the brink of tears the whole time. Especially when the board chair was saying nice things. All my nerves bubbled up at my silliness and I almost cried for absolutely no reason in the middle of my first board meeting. I didn’t though!

And I was kicked out after less than half an hour. Celebratory chocolate! And a hunt for campus cat, who I’d spotted in the morning before the meeting and received some good luck cuddles from him. It didn’t last long though, he soon ran off to lie in the sun. Maybe I should too.

Hello World

2017-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Hello and welcome.

I was totally forced to do this blog, but I’m determined to enjoy the process. I have some ideas of what I’ll do and how to make it fun. And maybe someone will even read it! Weird hopes, I know…

Quick introduction about myself. I’m guessing you’ve already read my “official” bio on the main page of the website (if you haven’t, go check it out!). So let me tell you more about the me who isn’t an academic paper writing bot, as some assume I am. I’m a woman stuck in the world of Computer Science and games at her own will. Originally from Romania, but moved to the UK about four and a half years ago to look for a better future for myself. Back at my parents house, I have a cat called Mia, which I adore, but hey, she’s a cat, so the feeling is not quite obviously mutual. She’s usually cranky at least for the first few days when I visit, seeming to say “I know you, human. I know you’ll leave again.” Which is fair enough, my life is here now. But I do miss her loads! (And my family, of course, to whom I owe a lot of where I am today.) There’s another little kitten at home which my parents decided to name Mini (when the other is usually called Mimi), to avoid any confusion. I met him for the first time this past winter and he’s the cutest naughties kitten. There will probably be pictures around here at some point. I like cats. And chocolate, baking, taking pretty pictures and books.

But now we’re getting off track. Did I mention I’m very easily distracted? So, as I was saying, I came to the UK for university. I did a Bachelors in Computer Games at the University of Essex in Colchester and it was quite cool. Lots of stones thrown in my way, making walking this path painful, but then I was doing a Masters in Computer Games! And that’s when I found out about this cool thing called research. You should try it if you haven’t yet. It’s what the academics do when they’re not replying to that urgent email you’ve sent. It’s a cool way to try things without people screaming at you you’re wrong (well, they might write that in a review instead) and sharing your work with others so together you build stronger and better science. You can be part of history, like the DeepMind people. Or you can just travel to nice places, present your work and pretend you’re smart in front of a bunch of people who probably know a lot more about what you’re trying to sell to them than you do. But that’s how you learn, isn’t it?

So that’s where I am now. I am trying to be a Ph.D. student in Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence (IGGI), I dropped a link on my main website in case you’re curious and you would like to get involved. We’re cool people, really. Doing research and games and intelligence, putting them all together to hopefully make an impact in both academia and the UK games industry. I am still in my first year, though my supervisors often forget that and overestimate me. And I am part of this awesome cohort of IGGI, which means I get to not only play games and call it research, but also travel to York and London regularly as our partner universities, attend the Gobal Game Jam every year and have a guaranteed amazing team, liaise with industry in Symposiums and go to fancy conferences. Soon I’ll be going to Amsterdam for EvoStar, then Spain for CEC and in August hopefully to New York for CIG! So I’ll write about that.

And many more. I’ll do my best to keep this blog professional, but it won’t be just that. Some of my current ideas for categories you might expect include:

Random - stuff that doesn’t fit in any other category
Paper Club - like a book club, but instead commenting and reviewing academic papers, with you joining in the discussion in the comments! (If there even is a you… hellooo?) I have to do it anyway to pass to the next year, so why not make it fun.
Conferences - thoughts on conferences, presentations I make or other cool conferency things
PhD Life - general experiences related to being a PhD student
Side Projects - there are always some of those, I might share what I’m up to when my supervisors are not looking
Travel - if I do go somewhere nice, I’ll be sure to rub it in your faces
Baking - just to make you hungry
Games - I do play games every now and then, they’re cool!
Books - I also read as much as I can; recently started the Dragonlance Chronicles, I might let you come along for the journey

I hope something there peaked your interest and you’ll stick around. I’ll try to vary things as much as possible, so there aren’t just cats floating around or talk of papers. Thank you for reading!