Support Team

The AI Interface Standards Committee (AIISC) support team consists of ten students enthused about game AI from all around the world. There are different characters in the team, some of whom try to take the initiative whenever possible, and others who prefer to be assigned to tasks explicitly. Last year, Paul-Etienne Belloncik hold the position of the group coodinator but has left the AIISC due to time constraints founding his own game developing company (named "Unlikely Games"). Bjoern Knafla was elected the next coordinator and builds the main communication link between the committee chairperson Alexander Nareyek and the support team now. Additionally, it is the coordinators task to try to distribute the workload onto all team members.

Our forum discussions counts 150 postings but most of the work is organized by emailing team members or the AIISC working group coordinators. Being far outnumbered by the other committee members - the experts - and all of us studying actively, it is sometimes hard to deliver immediate support when asked for. Nonetheless, we are striving to offer the best help possible.

Tasks

Support tasks involve:

• summarizing the discussions of the different AIISC working groups,
• collecting questions of experts and answers given in the AIISC forums into so called "Expertly Asked Questions" (EAQ) documents,
• working into software, APIs or other standards (e.g., XML schemas or OpenGL) seemingly useful for the experts and providing short reviews of them,
• creating activity reports of all AIISC members,
• assisting in the creation of presentation slides and reports,
• helping with technical problems mostly concerning the usage of SourceForge.net and accessing its CVS repositories,
• and having an open ear to all needs and problems that might occur in the daily committee work, e.g., developing slide templates for conferences like GDC.

Everyone of us monitors at least one committee discussion forum to react quickly on support demands and to protocol the posted arguments in summaries. In general, our role is not to participate actively in the experts' discussions (not to disturb them with greenhorn talk) but sometimes it is very hard to hold our horses, i.e., when we think that we could provide some expertise as well.

Until now, most discussion summaries were written by single members, but the steadily growing number of postings won't be overcome this way. In the future, more and more group work will have to take place, mainly between the supporters assigned to the same AIISC working group. All of us will need to dedicate more time for the AIISC or more support team members are needed.

Motivation

We are proud to support the worlds best game AI experts and to learn from them at the same time. The AIISC is a team, and we are helping to make a difference with our support - and have fun beside, too. However, we aren't sure if all of the experts (apart from some exceptions - mainly working group coordinators) really noticed and utilized our hard work. Directly collaborating together with the AIISC working group coordinators and experiencing their passion and patience helping us to improve our work is a blast though.

Group Members

Current members of the support team:

• Stephen D. Byrne - Hiram College
• Alex J. Champandard - University of Edinburgh
• Ting Feng - Northeastern University
• Cengiz Gunay - University of Louisiana at Lafayette
• Daniel Hartrell - University of Toronto
• Alexander Hornung - RWTH Aachen
• Börje Karlsson - Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
• Bjoern Knafla - University of Bielefeld (currently elected group coordinator)
• Jayaraman Ranjith - International Institute of Information Technology
• Hugo da Silva Sardinha Pinto - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul