ICG JKU Linz Lab Talk: Elif Surer, Middle East Technical University

Title: A Brief Introduction to Game Research: Serious Games, Extended Reality Applications, and Reinforcement Learning

Jun 22nd, 16:00 pm CEST

About the Speaker:
Elif Surer received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering in 2011 from the University of Bologna. She received her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Computer Engineering from Boğaziçi University in 2007 and 2005. From 2013 to 2015, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Milan in the EU Project REWIRE, where she developed video games to rehabilitate stroke and Neglect patients. She joined METU Graduate School of Informatics’s Modeling and Simulation Department in 2015 and is currently working as an Associate Professor at the METU Graduate School of Informatics’ Multimedia Informatics program. She is the director of METU Entrepreneurship Research Center (GIMER). She is a mentor at METU Design Factory and bang. Art Innovation Prix. She collaborates as a researcher in several interdisciplinary national and EU-funded projects. Her research interests are serious games, virtual/mixed reality, and reinforcement learning.

Abstract:
In this talk, a quick overview of the game research domain and recent applications from the extended reality will be provided. Game research will briefly be introduced via recent research on serious games (games with ulterior motives rather than entertainment only), reinforcement learning agents, and virtual reality and mixed reality games. Example games and case studies from recent national and EU-funded projects, which use adaptive difficulty adjustment, procedural content generation, and reinforcement learning algorithms, will also be discussed. Finally, opportunities and limitations of using serious games will briefly be introduced.