Jeff Orkin, MSc.

The IEEE Spectrum article Bots Get Smart said

Can video games breathe new life into AI research?
 
Researchers in our group have analyzed computer logs of more than 50 hours of tournament-level play between seasoned Counter-Strike teams. Soon, we expect, computer bots programmed to learn tactics from such logs will play reasonably well — doing things a person might do. It’ll be a long time before these bots will be able to beat expert human players, though. But that’s not the objective, after all — they just need to make for entertaining adversaries.
 
Jeff Orkin and Deb Roy of MIT are undertaking a similar effort with something they call The Restaurant Game, for which they are applying machine learning to the task of making bots speak and act believably in social settings. In this case, the bots’ behaviors are based on observations gleaned from more than 10,000 sessions of human play.

Jeff Orkin, MSc. is Research Assistant, MIT Media Lab, Cognitive Machines Group.
 
Prior to enrolling at the Media Lab, Jeff spent 9 years developing A.I. systems in the game industry for Sierra and Monolith Productions. He pioneered Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP) for games while working on F.E.A.R.
 
He coauthored The Restaurant Game: Learning Social Behavior and Language from Thousands of Players Online and The 2004 Report of the IGDA’s Artificial Intelligence Interface Standards Committee, and authored Three States and a Plan: The A.I. of F.E.A.R., Agent Architecture Considerations for Real-Time Planning in Games, and Symbolic Representation of Game World State: Toward Real-Time Planning in Games.
 
Jeff earned his Bachelors of Science in Computer Science at Tufts University in 1995, his Masters of Science in Computer Science at the University of Washington in 2003, his second Masters of Science in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 with the thesis Learning Plan Networks in Conversational Video Games, and is studying for his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 
Read Turning dumb dialogue into intelligent conversation and Toward more human video game characters.