Support Team

The AI Interface Standards Committee (AIISC) support team consists of people from all around the world that are enthused about game AI and whose main role is, as the name of the group implies, to provide some level of support for the expert groups. Börje Karlsson is the current group coordinator and is the main communication link between the committee chairperson Alexander Nareyek and the support team. Additionally, it is the coordinator's 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-mails sent back and forth between 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.

Sometimes, the group can get quite quiet for a while and so we must take a more pro-active instance and spur new discussions and efforts. Which can always get everything moving again.

As we always say, we are proud to support the world's best game AI experts and to learn from them at the same time. The AIISC is a team, and we are trying to help make a difference with our support - and to have fun beside, too. Overall collaborating with the AIISC working group coordinators and experiencing their passion is really great!

If you're thinking on joining, please contact Alex (the committee chairperson) and let him know, we always need new energetic people. :)

Tasks

Support group tasks involve:

• summarizing the discussions of the different AIISC working groups,
• creating activity reports of all AIISC members,
• developing support software,
• testing and proposing new tools that can be used to enhance the committee's productivity,
• 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,
• working on the creation of a glossary to try to uniform terminology usage among the groups,
• and having an open ear to all needs and problems that might occur in the daily committee work.

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, we do not engage actively in the discussions, only sometimes when we think that we could provide some expertise as well or some of point of view regarding the issue at hand.

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 roles the next time. With the steadily growing number of postings (and concentration of activity in specific groups at a time), more and more group work will surely have to take place, mainly between the supporters assigned to the same AIISC working group.

The support team has also started working on issues of the support activity itself. We are on an ongoing effort to try 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 (and also in a more organized way :) ). Along with that effort, we are also trying to find new ways in which we can help the experts.

Group Members

Current members of the support team:

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