I have some exciting news to report today!

Our very own AI developer and University of Alberta PhD student Dave Churchill has just won the Best Student Paper award at the Eleventh Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2015) for a research publication concerning his work on the Prismata AI.

Dave’s paper is entitled Hierarchical Portfolio Search: Prismata’s Robust AI Architecture for Games with Large Search Spaces. In it, Dave presents some of the techniques he has employed in developing Prismata’s state-of-the-art bots, and describes novel methods for overcoming the challenges of Prismata’s massive search space while avoiding the types of hard-coded heuristics that would make the bot inflexible to changes applied during balance patches.

Dave’s award is a pretty big deal as far as video game AI research is concerned, as AIIDE is one of the most important conferences in the field. AIIDE describes itself as “the definitive point of interaction between entertainment software developers interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers”.

Dave is also well-known in the video game AI community for his work on StarCraft AI. His very own UAlbertaBot took first prize in the 2013 StarCraft AI Competition.

Congrats, Dave!