Keynote Speakers

Kate Compton

Independent Researcher

Bio: Dr. Kate Compton (galaxykate) is a generative artist, inventor, programmer and teacher. She generated planets for Spore, made Tracery which ran 200,00 community-made bots on Twitter and invented the first phone-based AR. Her longtime personal mission is to bring small playful forms of AI to poets, artists, kids and weirdos.

Mix Tapes, Collages, and Other Folk Infrastructure for AI

Ten years ago, people made twitterbot mashups as gifts for each other. Thirty years ago, people composed pirated songs into mix tapes for their crushes, and a hundred years earlier, the Victorian aristocracy cut apart postcards and sent funny collages to their friends. Why is so much of human culture about making silly gifts for our friends, by cutting up and rearranging things? And what does that have to do with AI?

Most people now engage with AI through immense, closed systems they can't own or control. But in our field, we remember a time when "AI" meant small programs you could make, run, and share yourself. And it still can be! This talk explores how casually-creative people have always cut up and rearranged culture to express themselves - and what composable properties of both "old-fashioned" and "new" AI will let us send each other mix-tapes once again.

Take Two Keynote Speakers

Dr. Luke Dicken, Sr. Director of AI, Take-Two Interactive

Nadine Perez, Sr. Engineering Manager, Take-Two Interactive

Bios:

Dr. Luke Dicken currently leads the AI Group at Take-Two Interactive. He holds degrees in computer science, artificial intelligence and bioinformatics as well as a PhD in AI specifically for games. Luke has written a range of articles and given sessions at conferences around the world, as well collaborating on many game projects including Spell Forest where he acted as Game Director from inception to sunset. Luke has been passionate about AI since playing “Creatures” as a teenager, and is stunned that he's made a career out of that.

Nadine Perez is Senior Engineering Manager for Take-Two Interactive's AI Group where she focuses on creating products and applications to support teams across T2 to leverage the capabilities of traditional and Generative AI in a safe, secure and responsible manner. She joined Zynga's AI team in 2020, and moved with the team to drive AI for the entire T2 corporate family in 2025. Nadine holds a BSc in Data Science from the University of Maryland, and currently can't put Balatro down unless her dogs Bandit and Baxter demand it!

An Algorithm Is Just the Start

You’ve got a great new AI-based technique to solving a problem! And people want that problem solved! Easy right? Wrong.

In this session the Take-Two AI team will discuss what it takes to go from a theoretical solution to a tool that can be deployed in an enterprise setting to address a business need. What starts on a whiteboard needs to live in production, and often the majority of the work isn’t anything to do with tuning and tweaking your technique, it’s putting in the work to make that technique usable as part of workflows or applications. The key takeaways from this session will be a discussion of strategies and approaches to take your smart new research out of the ivory tower, and turn it into something relevant that people can use – safely, securely and at scale.

Jonathan Schaeffer

Distinguished University Professor of Computing Science, University of Alberta

Bio: Jonathan Schaeffer is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His research is in the area of artificial intelligence, and much of his research has been demonstrated using games and puzzles. His checkers-playing program Chinook was the first computer to win a human world championship (1994) in any game, a feat recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records, and he is a co-author of Polaris, the first program to achieve superhuman play in poker (also a Guinness record). He has worked with Bioware and Electronic Arts. He is co-founder of Onlea (onlea.org), a company specializing in the creation of engaging online learning experiences.

Game-AI Past, Present, and Prospects

I wrote my first game-related code in 1974, so that makes me an "antique" in the computer games world. Over a 50 year career, I have worked on creating AI ideas and applying them primarily to checkers, chess, poker, and (today) bridge, as well as single-agent search (pathfinding), scripting, and distributed computing. Along the way there were wise decisions, missed opportunities, incautious choices, academic indulgences, entrepreneurial adventures, and lessons learned. This talk will concentrate on four related themes: the many unrecognized contributions to AI from game applications, the role of the University of Alberta in game-AI research, lessons from my career (good and bad), and perspectives on the next decade of AI research applied to games.

Chris Entwistle

Head of Game Product, Artificial Agency

Bio: Veteran game producer and product leader with over 20 years of experience at BioWare, Improbable, and Bizarre Creations. From Dragon Age to metaverse platforms, Chris has led cross-disciplinary teams across AAA, live service, and emerging tech, and now drives product vision at Artificial Agency.

Agents in the Wild: Building and Discovering Artificial Agency Inside Games

What happens when AI agents stop following scripts and start living inside your game? This talk shares the journey behind Artificial Agency’s Behavior Engine - how we tackled the hard technical problems of putting generative agents directly into game worlds, what surprised us when they started acting on their own, and what it means for developers and designers alike. We’ll tell real stories from the trenches: systems that broke in funny ways, agents that outsmarted their creators, and the tools we built to keep them grounded. We'll conclude by sharing some open research questions that we'd love to see the AIIDE audience tackling before the 2026 conference ;)

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