Support Team

The AI Interface Standards Committee (AIISC) support team consists of ten people (mostly 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, Bjoern Knafla hold the position of the group coodinator but due to time constraints had to step asside from the group coordination. Börje Karlsson is the current 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 has some postings but most of the work is organized by e-mailing 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.

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 work. But collaborating with the AIISC working group coordinators and experiencing their passion is really great!

Tasks

Support tasks involve:

• summarizing the discussions of the different AIISC working groups,
• creating activity reports of all AIISC members,
• working into software, APIs or other standards (e.g., XML schemas or OpenGL) seemingly useful for the experts and providing short reviews of them,
• testing and proposing new tools that can be used to enhance the committee's productivity,
• assisting in the creation of presentation slides and reports,
• working on the creation of a glossary to try to uniform terminology usage among the groups,
• collecting questions of experts and answers given in the AIISC forums into so called "Expertly Asked Questions" (EAQ) documents,
• 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.

Every member monitors at least one committee discussion forum to try 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 discussions, but we do so sometimes (when we think that we could provide some expertise as well).

The current approach to writing the summaries is to try to have more than one member monitoring each forum. One will produce the summary and one of the others will be something like a reviewer, changing this position the next time. With the steadily growing number of postings, more and more group work will surely have to take place, mainly between the supporters assigned to the same AIISC working group.

At the current stage, the support team has also started to work on issues of the support activity itself. We are trying to develop guidelines for making summaries, approaching group coordinators and quickly integrate and evaluate our work.  This way we expect to raise our productivity and especially that of new members.

Group Members

Current members of the support team:

• Stephen D. Byrne - Hiram College
• Alex J. Champandard - University of Edinburgh
• Cengiz Gunay - Emory University
• Börje Karlsson - Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (current group coordinator)
• Bjoern Knafla - University of Kassel
• José Lopes - University of Exeter
• Eric Martel - Microids
• Hugo da Silva Sardinha Pinto - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
• Samir Pipalia - City University, London
• Jayaraman Ranjith - International Institute of Information Technology