Result of the 2014 Edition of the
IEEE CIS Student Competitions
We are happy to announce that the winner of the first CIS Student Competition is Swen Gaudl.
Hi, my name is Swen Gaudl and I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Bath, UK. I am working on enhanced tool support for AI design. One of my main interests is to focus on limited resource scenarios in this case I was focusing on games.
My application is a 3D third-person game for mobile phones and tablets. It is built upon the Unity3D engine and integrates my research, a dynamic planner, into a real-time game making it hopefully more interesting. The goal of the game is to escape an underground facility without being caught by “evil” robots.
Question 1: Where does this idea come from? The idea came to me after receiving feedback on a paper I wrote for a conference. The reviewer argued that it was hard to see how my approach, a bio-inspired augmentation of a dynamic planner, would work and if it would be able to scale to actual games. So I thought, I will make a prototype demoing that my approach would work.
Question 2: Which are the computational-intelligent aspects that have been adopted in your mobile app? Which are the main advantages these aspects provide? I have integrated a light-weight dynamic planner---POSHsharp---into my application allowing me to design agents in a more robust and intuitive way without loosing the power to implement complex behaviour. Additionally, I included a bio-inspired augmentation which alters the behaviour selection to offer more “natural” or motivation driven responses. A main aspect of my work was also to focus on providing not simply a good solution but also are the planner and the augmentation well separated with a less steep learning curve, making it easy for novices to use as well.
Question 3: How complex is the design and development of a mobile app? Which are the main difficulties? I was using Unity3D to design and implement my app, which made the design and test process lot easier than developing everything from scratch. However the man challenge for me when designing for mobiles the sheer difference of devices when it comes to screen size, CPU, RAM, user interaction and space. It is really hard to take all this into account and still provide a decently working app. A good analysis on the aimed audience is crucial, I think.
Question 4: In your opinion, what will be the role of mobile devices and mobile applications in the field of computational intelligence? I think those role of mobile devices is getting more and more important. The initial task of a simple phone/eReader is long gone. Now mobile devices such as tablets take over the role of our regular PCs ranging from organizers to game devices. For CI this offers the potential to provide systems which leave the regular work desk behind and integrate truly into the daily life by monitoring health, adjusting to user preferences in different environments and so on.
Download the winner app
