Jose Font

• PhD in Artificial Intelligence
• Professor (Assistant) at Malmö University

In this paper, we highlight how including technology, movement or play can boost a design process but with unbalanced amounts can also hamper the process. We provide a set of examples where we miscalculated the amount of technology, movement, or play that was needed in a design activity in such a way that it became counterproductive and for each ex...

Warm-ups, as preliminary activities to physical training, are an inherent part of any physical exercise and sports practice. Rooted in the concept of embodied cognition, embodied design is a paradigm that shifts the focus of interaction design from external artefacts and devices to the human body (Svanæs & Barkhuus, 2020). A body-centred design emp...

We propose modeling designer style in mixed-initiative game content creation tools as archetypical design traces. These design traces are formulated as transitions between design styles; these design styles are in turn found through clustering all intermediate designs along the way to making a complete design. This method is implemented in the Evol...

Narratives are a predominant part of games, and their design poses challenges when identifying, encoding, interpreting, evaluating, and generating them. One way to address this would be to approach narrative design in a more abstract layer, such as narrative structures. This paper presents Story Designer, a mixed-initiative co-creative narrative st...

In Mixed-Initiative Co-Creative tools, the human is mostly in control of what will and can be created, delegating the AI to a more suggestive role instead of a colleague in the co-creative process. Allowing more control and agency for the AI might be an interesting path in co-creative scenarios where AI could direct and take more initiative within...

Augmented reality (AR) games are a rich environment for researching and testing computational systems that provide subtle user guidance and training. In particular computer systems that aim to augment a user's situation awareness benefit from the range of sensors and computing power available in AR headsets. In this work-in-progress paper, we prese...

Games are complex, multi-faceted systems that share common elements and underlying narratives, such as the conflict between a hero and a big bad enemy or pursuing some goal that requires overcoming challenges. However, identifying and describing these elements together is non-trivial as they might differ in certain properties and how players might...

MAP-Elites has been successfully applied to the generation of game content and robot behaviors. However, its behavior and performance when interacted with in co-creative systems is underexplored. This paper analyzes the implications of synthetic interaction for the stability and adaptability of MAP-Elites in such scenarios. We use pre-recorded huma...

Multiplayer Online Battle Area (MOBA) games are a recent huge success both in the video game industry and the international eSports scene. These games encourage team coordination and cooperation, short and long-term planning, within a real-time combined action and strategy gameplay. Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence in Games re...

We propose the Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites, a quality-diversity solution for game content generation, implemented as a new feature of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD): a mixed-initiative co-creativity tool for designing dungeons. The feature uses the MAP-Elites algorithm, an illumination algorithm that segregates the population among...

We propose modeling designer style in mixed-initiative game content creation tools as archetypical design traces. These design traces are formulated as transitions between design styles; these design styles are in turn found through clustering all intermediate designs along the way to making a complete design. This method is implemented in the Evol...

This paper presents the Designer Preference Model, a data-driven solution that pursues to learn from user generated data in a Quality-Diversity Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity (QD MI-CC) tool, with the aims of modelling the user’s design style to better assess the tool’s procedurally generated content with respect to that user’s preferences. Through...

This paper presents the Designer Preference Model, a data-driven solution that pursues to learn from user generated data in a Quality-Diversity Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity (QD MI-CC) tool, with the aims of modelling the user's design style to better assess the tool's procedurally generated content with respect to that user's preferences. Through...

We propose the Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites, a quality-diversity solution for game content generation, implemented as a new feature of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer: a mixed-initiative co-creativity tool for designing dungeons. The feature uses the MAP-Elites algorithm, an illumination algorithm that segregates the population among severa...

We propose the use of quality-diversity algorithms for mixed-initiative game content generation. This idea is implemented as a new feature of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer, a system for mixed-initiative design of the type of levels you typically find in computer role playing games. The feature uses the MAP-Elites algorithm, an illumination algo...

Mobile Virtual Reality (MVR) makes Virtual Reality games more accessible to a broader audience. Interaction design guidelines and best practices for MVR experiences are available for developers. In this paper, we specifically explore interactions in MVR games, a particular subset of MVR experiences that is becoming popular. A set of MVR games is an...

Mixed-initiative systems highlight the collaboration between humans and computers in fostering the generation of more interesting content in game design. In light of the ever-increasing cost of game development, providing mixed-initiative tools can not only significantly reduce the cost but also encourage more creativity amongst game designers. The...

The Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) [1] is as a mixed-initiative tool for creating dungeons for adventure games. Results from a user study with game developers positively evaluated EDD as a suitable framework for collaboration between human designers and PCG suggestions, highlighting these as time-saving and inspiring for creating dungeons [2]....

Multiplayer Online Battle Area (MOBA) games are a recent huge success both in the video game industry and the international eSports scene. These games encourage team coordination and cooperation, short and long-term planning, within a real-time combined action and strategy gameplay. Artificial Intelligence and Computational Intelligence in Games re...

Ethiopia has one of the highest maternal and child mortality rates in the world, partly due to the low accessibility of educational content regarding nutrition and healthcare in the rural regions. This paper presents the first step for tackling this problem by means of a serious game, Easycare, designed for teaching illiterate users, with almost no...

In this paper we explore the hybrid application of evolutionary computation and artificial neural networks in the development of intelligent systems able to solve the problem of approximating the optimal strategy in a tile-matching puzzle game. Three intelligent systems are proposed: an evolutionary heuristic technique, artificial neural networks,...

Mixed-initiative Procedural Content Generation uses algorithms to assist human designers in the collaborative creation of game content. Different mixed-initiative approaches use different methods to engage with the design material while supporting the designer's intentions. However, the designer runs the risk of misunderstanding the system's abilit...

This paper introduces an evolutionary method for generating levels for adventure games, combining speed, guaranteed solvability of levels and authorial control. For this purpose, a new graph-based two-phase level encoding scheme is developed. This method encodes the structure of the level as well as its contents into two abstraction layers: the hig...

Encoding feasible solutions is one of the most important aspects to be taken into account in the field of evolutionary computation in order to solve search or optimization problems. This paper proposes a new encoding scheme for real-coded evolutionary algorithms. It is called partition based encoding scheme, and satisfies two restrictions. Firstly,...

This paper explores the capabilities of open-ended bio-inspired evolutionary construction of intelligent systems under changing environments. We present and analyze extensive results of the bacterial evolutionary system. This system creates 3D environments that simulate real constantly changing environments. Populations of artificial bacteria const...

This paper presents a bacterially inspired evolving system as an evolutionary computation technique that is naturally inspired by the behavior of bacterial populations. This system implements a population of bacteria that evolves by means of chemotaxis, cellular growth and division, natural death of less fit individuals and a novel conjugation oper...

This paper presents empirical results that show how an instructional and learning model might influence the underlying social network of discussion and generation of new ideas and, therefore, knowledge building. This study has been conducted on higher education students taking the third-year program development models course unit, as part of an acc...

We present initial research regarding a system capable of generating novel card games. We furthermore propose a method for computationally analysing existing games of the same genre. Ultimately, we present a formalisation of card game rules, and a context-free grammar G cardgame capable of expressing the rules of a large variety of card games. Exam...

This paper explores the synergies between evolutionary computation and synthetic biology, developing an in silico evolutionary system that is inspired by the behavior of bacterial populations living in continuously changing environments. This system creates a 3D environment seeded with a simulated population of bacteria that eat, reproduce, interac...

A grammar-guided genetic program is presented to automatically build and evolve populations of AI controlled enemies in a 2D third-person shooter called Genes of War. This evolutionary system constantly adapts enemy behaviour, encoded by a multi-layered fuzzy control system, while the game is being played. Thus the enemy behaviour fits a target cha...

This paper proposes the EvoBANE system. EvoBANE automatically generates Bayesian networks for solving special-purpose problems. EvoBANE evolves a population of individuals that codify Bayesian networks until it finds near optimal individual that solves a given classification problem. EvoBANE has the flexibility to modify the constraints that condit...

This paper introduces evolutionary techniques for automatically constructing intelligent self-adapting systems, capable of modifying their inner structure in order to learn from experience and self-adapt to a changing environment. These evolutionary techniques comprise an evolutionary system that is engineered by grammar-guided genetic programming,...

This paper presents a grammar-guided evolutionary automatic system (GGEAS) that is capable of autonomously building special-purpose problem-solving programs. GGEAS uses a grammar-guided genetic programming (GGGP) core that generates solutions to a given problem from scratch, evolving them via selection, crossover and replacement to obtain the near-...

En este trabajo se presentan los resultados obtenidos tras la realización de diversas pruebas en un dominio ferroviario real. Estos resultados muestran cómo el sistema evolutivo desarrollado obtiene de forma automática el conocimiento basado en reglas difusas y cómo éste permite la detección de estados anómalos del tren.

This paper presents the results regarding the satisfaction of learners attending a course under the following instructional conditions: traditional face-to-face classroom, distance learning without an instructional model, having only virtualized the teaching contents used in face-to-face classrooms; and distance learning with an instructional model...

Conference code: 98435, Export Date: 25 April 2017, Correspondence Address: Fundacion Fatronik-Tecnalia, Parque Tecnologico, Paseo Mikeletegi 7, 20009 Donostia, Spain, References: Langley, P., Elements of machine learning (1995) Morgan Kaufmann.;

This paper proposes a system for applying data mining to a set of time series with medical information. The series represent an isokinetic curve that is obtained from a group of patients performing a knee exercise on an isokinetic machine. This system has two steps: the first one is to analyze the input time series in order to generate a simplified...

Classical approaches when building diagnosis and monitoring systems are rule-based systems, which allow the representation of existing knowledge by using rules. There are several techniques that facilitate this task, such as fuzzy logic, which allows knowledge to be modeled in an intuitive way. Nevertheless, sometimes it is not easy to define the f...

Both complexity and lack of knowledge associated to physical processes makes physical models design an arduous task. Frequently, the only available information about the physical processes are the heuristic data obtained from experiments or at best a rough idea on what are the physical principles and laws that underlie considered physical processes...

In this paper we propose an evolutionary fuzzy neural networks system for extracting knowledge from a set of time series containing medical information. The series represent isokinetic curves obtained from a group of patients exercising the knee joint on an isokinetic dynamometer. The system has two parts: i) it analyses the time series input in or...

El objetivo fundamental de esta tesis de fin de máster es la construcción de un algoritmo de generación automática de sistemas basados en reglas mediante técnicas evolutivas, y su aplicación a la resolución del problema de detección de lesiones de rodilla a partir de curvas isocinéticas. Se presentan dos técnicas diferentes de generación de sistema...