Data science and advanced analytics in games – call for submissions!

I’m  coordinating the BRAND NEW data science in games track at the much-loved  game AI conference (now http:/nucl.ai),  in Vienna 20-22 July 2015.    Yipee!

We’ve already got some amazing talks and speakers already lined up from Mind Candy and Scientific Revenue.   Come and join us!   Do you have something you’d like to talk about?  Drop me a line today (or sooner)  with a few lines about what you’re interested in, and I’ll be happy to explain more about the themes we are developing for the track, and other talks that are in prep.    The programme is almost full but there are a few spaces left, so pick up your carrier pigeon and let it fly!

In terms of overall themes for the track,  I’m thinking along the following lines

• analytics for customising/tuning player experience –  what in-game variations/interventions are being powered by analytics?  (I think this focus fits best with the overall game AI theme in the conference)
  • do games have their own special tuning ranges (e.g. difficulty, pricing)?
  • problems and opportunities for using (realtime) data products, such as found on social platforms (e.g. recsys, graph inference)
  • empirical techniques for identifying natural categories in player types
  • [your idea here!]
• use of new or unusual analytical techniques – perhaps those that are standard in other problem domains but not so much used in games?
• projects addressing new or unusual problems – projects with unusual objectives (i.e. not optimising acquisition for LTV maximisation….;-)
• tools/processes for enterprise analytical workflows
• generalising models across games
• smarter kpis

I’d very much appreciate your thoughts about the themes you yourself would most like to hear about. 

If there are good practices, innovations, or thorny challenges you can share,  from your current perspective,  we’d love to know what they are.