Cameron Browne
Principal Investigator [CV] cameron.browne@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Cameron Browne is an Associate Professor at Maastricht University's Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE), where he is running the €2m ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project over the next five years. Cameron received his PhD from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 2009, winning a Dean’s Award for Outstanding Thesis and producing the world's first published computer-generated games. He is the author of the books Hex Strategy, Connection Games and Evolutionary Game Design, which won the 2012 GECCO “Humies” award for human-competitive results in evolutionary computation. He is a Section Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Games and the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) journal, and is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Game & Puzzle Design journal. Cameron is the designer and technical lead of the Ludii general game system.

Eric Piette
Postdoctoral Research Assistant [URL] eric.piette@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Eric Piette is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Maastricht University's Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE). In his doctoral thesis defended at the University of Artois in 2016, Eric paved the way for a new approach for combining Monte Carlo methods and a Stochastic Constraint-based Approach to General Game Playing, winning the AI 2017 Thesis award of the AFIA and the 2016 General Game Playing competition organised by Stanford University. His last paper published in IJCAI-2017, which established a tight relationship between symmetry detection in Constraint Satisfaction Problems and transposition detection in GGP, was selected as one of three finalists for the distinguished paper award out of 2,540 submitted papers. Eric is an active member of the French working group for Game AI.

Matthew Stephenson
Postdoctoral Research Assistant [URL] matthew.stephenson@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Matthew Stephenson is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Maastricht University's Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE). Matthew received a PhD from the Research School of Computer Science of the Australian National University (ANU). His Thesis focussed on procedural content generation techniques for physics-based game environments, particularly for the popular video game Angry Birds and the general video game AI (GVGAI) framework. His primary research interests and publications centre around various topics in AI for games, including general video game AI, procedural content generation, agent development, computational complexity analysis and deceptive game design.

Dennis Soemers
PhD Candidate [URL] dennis.soemers@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Dennis Soemers received the BSc degree in Knowledge Engineering in 2014, and the MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence in 2016, both from the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University. In 2016, he placed first in the Single-Player Planning track of the General Video Game AI competition, and second in the Two-Player Planning track. He worked for two years in the AI Lab of Vrije Universiteit Brussel on the C-CURE: Cost-Sensitive Dynamic User Authentication with Reinforcement Learning project. His research interests include Search, Planning and Reinforcement Learning algorithms.

Walter Crist
Postdoctoral Research Assistant (Cultural Stream) [URL] walter.crist@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Walter Crist received his PhD in Anthropology from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. His doctoral thesis used quantitative methods to demonstrate changes in the social context of play in Bronze Age Cyprus (2500-1050 BCE) as social complexity increased. His research focus is on how people play games in response to social change, and how the social element of play facilitates cultural and economic exchanges. He is the lead author of Ancient Egyptians at Play: Board Games across Borders, as well as other articles discussing the social aspects of play in the Near East, Mediterranean, and Caucasus. Recently, his research on Mesopotamian games in Bronze Age Azerbaijan was featured in The New Yorker.

     Cameron Browne
     cambolbro@gmail.com