Mentor Program

Hello! I'm Joe Osborn, an assistant professor of computer science at Pomona College (joseph.osborn@pomona.edu). I'm also the Outreach Chair for a AAAI conference called AI for Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE). I'm writing to invite you to publish your work at AIIDE (deadline: end of May), which is a fantastic venue for work at the intersection of AI (broadly construed) and interactive systems (especially but not only games). AIIDE has been home to me since the first semester of my PhD at UC Santa Cruz, and I have found it to be by far the single most productive conference for me --- not only in terms of publishing work, but more importantly for cultivating new research partnerships, exposure to new and relevant ideas, and stimulating conversation. This year, we are starting a mentoring program for new AIIDE authors (regardless of their background or stage in their research career) to bring new voices, new approaches, and new problems to our community.

Topics in AIIDE's remit are covered in the call for papers, but AIIDE welcomes both qualitative and quantitative work, as well as research that focuses on e.g. visualization, HCI, programming languages, and other approaches (in our program last year, papers explored deep reinforcement learning, narrative planning, player modeling and analytics, social simulation, and visualization of dynamical systems, among other topics).

Publishing at AIIDE has been a boon for me personally in my work on game design recovery and verification, and I believe that AIIDE's relatively small size (one or two hundred attendees) and excellent (double-blinded) reviewer pool are key reasons for its importance in my career. At the same time, we do not want AIIDE to become a "club" known only to those whose advisors published there. So this year, we are focusing on reaching out to those who have never published at AIIDE before, whether because they haven't heard of it or because they or their advisors aren't familiar with positioning and strategy for submitting work to AIIDE.

To this end, we are establishing a new mentoring program, where prospective authors will be paired with mentors in the AIIDE community at varying levels of engagement: from a handful of meetings about paper positioning and brainstorming on the low end, up through copy-editing and even research collaboration on the high end. All participants will be recognized in the AIIDE program (if desired), and events during the conference between mentors and mentees will also be held. Mentor programs have been a big success in the programming languages community among others, and we hope to replicate that here.

If you think you might like to join the mentoring program as a mentee, please email me (joseph.osborn@pomona.edu) with subject "Mentor Program" with your research interests, whether you'd be generally interested in light, moderate, or heavy mentoring involvement, and any questions you may have --- and please do share this with your colleagues and others who may want to participate in AIIDE!