The faculty at the Institute of Digital Games are regarded as some of the leading figures within their respective international research fields withover 22,000 citations and the h-index of 170 collectively across all staff members. Prof. Yannakakis ranks in the top 0.5% of Artificial Intelligence researchers in the world (ranked 1096th out of 215,114 scientists in the field in 2020).
Additionally making games is at the heart of the faculty with our staff and student games nominated and winning awards internationally as well as featuring in Kotaku, Atlas Obscura, and in Nicky Case’s Explorable Explorations.
Selected Awards
Best Paper Award: Nemanja Rašajski, Chintan Trivedi, Konstantinos Makantasis, Antonios Liapis, and Georgios N. Yannakakis. 'BehAVE: Behaviour Alignment of Video Game Encodings,' in Proceedings of 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024.
Best Paper Award: N. Yannakakis, R. Cowie, and C. Busso, 'The Ordinal Nature of Emotions,' in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2017.
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing -- Most Influential Paper Award: G. N. Yannakakis and J. Togelius, 'Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation,' IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, vol. 2, issue 3, pp. 147-161, 2011. (Selected from 168 papers published during the 5 first years of the journal.), 2015
Best Paper Award: A. Liapis, C. Holmgard, G. N. Yannakakis, and J. Togelius, 'Procedural Personas as Critics for Dungeon Generation,' in Proceedings of Applications of Evolutionary Computation, 2015.
Stibo-Foundation Award for doctoral studies for the doctoral work of Christoffer P. Holmgaard.
Best Paper Award: A. Liapis, G. N. Yannakakis, and J. Togelius, 'Designer Modeling for Sentient Sketchbook,' in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, 2014. IEEE.
P7 Marie Curie CIG AutoGameDesign project ranks 1st out of 1102 grant proposals across all disciplines with an evaluation score of 97.2 out of 100, 2014.
EEE CIS Outstanding TCIAIG Paper Award for the paper: N. Shaker, G. N. Yannakakis and J. Togelius, 'Crowdsourcing the Aesthetics of Platform Games,' IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, vol. 5, issue 3, pp. 276-290, 2013.
European Learning Game of 2013 Award: The SIREN Game. Games and Learning Alliance (GALA) Network of Excellence, 2013. (Rilla Khaled was the lead designer of the game; Georgios Yannakakis and Antonios Liapis contributed to the design).
Best Student Paper Award: A. Liapis, G. N. Yannakakis, J. Togelius, 'Towards a Generic Method of Evaluating Game Levels,' in Proceedings of AAAI Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE), 2013.
Best Paper Award: A. Liapis, G. N. Yannakakis, J. Togelius, 'Enhancements to Constrained Novelty Search: Two-Population Novelty Search for Generating Game Content,' Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Competition Conference (GECCO), 2013.
The game Will Love Tear Us Apart was nominated for a Webby Award - Games Category in 2014, an Experimental Award at SXSW Interactive in 2014 and an Innovation Award at the Festival Du Cinema Nouveau, Montreal, in 2013.
Construction BOOM! was a SaltCON 2021 Ion Award Board Game Finalist for the Strategy Category.
