Professor Julian Togelius

Julian Togelius, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor, Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
 
Julian is working on artificial intelligence techniques for making computer games more fun.
 
His research aims to make computer games adapt to their players through finding out what players want (whether they know it or not) and creating new game levels, challenges, or rules that suit the players. Related to this is the challenge of making sense of large amounts of data generated by computer games, and on assisting human game designers in creating great game experiences. But he’s also working on how to make opponents and collaborators more intelligent and believable, research that has applications far outside of computer games. Additionally, he’s working on some more theoretical topics in learning and optimization.
 
Julian is interested in most topics in the intersection between computational intelligence and games. He currently focuses on search-based procedural content generation, which means using evolutionary algorithms (or other global optimization algorithms) to search the space of game content, such as levels, maps or game rules. A key problem here is how to evaluate the candidate content, i.e. how to create a fitness function for game content. He and his colleagues attack this problem in a variety of ways, e.g. by creating theoretically founded and/or data driven models of player experience, by simulated gameplay using heuristic agents augmented by behavioral models of human players, and by measuring the performance of learning algorithms on candidate game rules.
 
He coauthored Experience-driven Procedural Content Generation, Towards Procedural Strategy Game Generation: Evolving Complementary Unit Types, Evolving Interesting Maps for a First Person Shooter, Siren: Towards Adaptive Serious Games for Teaching Conflict Resolution, Towards Automatic Personalized Content Generation for Platform Games, Multiobjective exploration of the StarCraft map space, and Measuring and Optimizing Behavioral Complexity for Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Julian earned his B.A. in Theoretical Philosophy with a minor in Computer Science and Psychology at Lund University, Sweden in 2002. He earned his M.Sc. in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems at the University of Sussex, UK in 2003. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Essex, UK in 2007.
 
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