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I am a full professor in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. Currently with Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR).

I was the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, and also co-founded the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, first held at the University of Essex in 2005. I am the Vice President for Education of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society; here is my vision statement.

Brief Bio

I was educated at Bedwas High School, University of Kent (BSc in Computer Systems Engineering) and University of Southampton (PhD in Electronics and Computer Science). Between BSc and PhD I worked for GEC Avionics, in a software test group for their world leading Head-Up Displays, then in the flight automation research lab research lab hacking LISP. My PhD (1991) was on Connectionist Architectures for Syntactic Pattern Recognition, one of the early PhDs on Deep Neural Networks, under the excellent supervision of Professor Bob Damper.

On completing my PhD I was post-doctoral research fellow at Southampton for one year and was then appointed as a Lecturer in Electronic Systems Engineering at Essex.

My early research was mostly focused on Pattern Recognition, and I have pioneered novel variations of N-Tuple classifiers (Scanning, Continuous and Convolutional), the best classifier that no-one has ever heard of! Over the last decade or two my research has gravitated toward Game AI: games provide an ideal arena for AI research, and also make an excellent application area. See publications for details.

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GAIG Publications

2024

2023

2022

2021

• 2021 Rinascimento: searching the behaviour space of Splendor
  Bravi, Ivan and Lucas, Simon, in arxiv:2106.08371, 2021.
  pubs-2021  arxiv  splendor  map-elites
  
  

2020

• IEEE TOG 2020 Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms for General Video Game Playing
  Raluca D. Gaina and Sam Devlin and Diego Perez-Liebana and Simon M. Lucas, in arxiv:2003.12331, 2020.
  pubs-2020  gvgai  general-video-game-playing  ieee-tog  rhea  optimisation  ntbea
  
  
• IEEE COG 2020 Evaluating Generalization in General Video Game Playing
  Balla, M and Lucas, Simon and Perez-Liebana, D, in IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2020.
  pubs-2020  ieee-cog  gvgai  general-vide-game-playing  evaluation
  
  
• IEEE COG 2020 Local Forward Model Learning for GVGAI Games
  Dockhorn, Alexander and Lucas, Simon, in IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), pp. 716-723, 2020.
  pubs-2020  ieee-cog  forward-model-learning  general-video-game-playing  gvgai
  
  
• IEEE COG 2020 Self-Adaptive Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms for General Video Game Playing
  Raluca D. Gaina and Chiara F. Sironi and Mark H.M. Winands and Diego Perez-Liebana and Simon M. Lucas, in IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2020.
  pubs-2020  ieee-cog  gvgai  general-vide-game-playing  rhea  optimisation
  
  
• IEEE COG 2020 Practical Game Design Tool: State Explorer
  Volkovas, Rokas and Fairbank, Michael and Woodward, John R and Lucas, Simon, in IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), pp. 439-446, 2020.
  pubs-2020  ieee-cog  tools  game-design  visualisation
  
  
• IEEE CEC 2020 Does it matter how well I know what you’re thinking? Opponent Modelling in an RTS game
  Goodman, James and Lucas, Simon, in IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), pp. 1-8, 2020.
  pubs-2020  ieee-cec  opponent-modelling  strategy-games
  
  
• GECCO 2020 Interactive evolution and exploration within latent level-design space of generative adversarial networks
  Schrum, Jacob and Gutierrez, Jake and Volz, Vanessa and Liu, Jialin and Lucas, Simon and Risi, Sebastian, in Proceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, pp. 148-156, 2020.
  pubs-2020  gecco  evolutionary-algorithms  procedural-content-generation  gan
  
  
• Evo* 2020 Efficient Heuristic Policy Optimisation for a Challenging Strategic Card Game
  Raul Montoliu and Raluca D. Gaina and Diego Perez-Liebana and Daniel Delgado and Simon M. Lucas, in International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoStar), 12104, pp. 403-418, 2020.
  pubs-2020  optimisation  evo-star  ntbea  card-games  oep  emcts
  
  
• 2020 AI and Wargaming
  Goodman, James and Risi, Sebastian and Lucas, Simon, in arxiv:2009.08922, 2020.
  pubs-2020  arxiv  war-games
  
  
• 2020 Weighting NTBEA for Game AI Optimisation
  Goodman, James and Lucas, Simon, in arXiv:2003.10378, 2020.
  pubs-2020  arxiv  optimisation  evolutionary-algorithms  ntbea
  
  

2019

• IEEE TOG 2019 General Video Game AI: a Multi-Track Framework for Evaluating Agents Games and Content Generation Algorithms
  Diego Perez-Liebana and Jialin Liu and Ahmed Khalifa and Raluca D. Gaina and Julian Togelius and Simon M. Lucas, in IEEE Transactions on Games, 11, pp. 195-214, Sep, 2019.
  pubs-2019  gvgai  general-video-game-playing  ieee-tog
  
  
• IEEE TEVC 2019 A survey of statistical machine learning elements in genetic programming
  Agapitos, Alexandros and Loughran, Roisin and Nicolau, Miguel and Lucas, Simon and O’Neill, Michael and Brabazon, Anthony, in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 23, pp. 1029-1048, 2019.
  pubs-2019  ieee-tevc  genetic-programming  machine-learning
  
  
• IEEE COG 2019 Project Thyia: A Forever Gameplayer
  Raluca D. Gaina and Simon M. Lucas and Diego Perez-Liebana, in IEEE Conference on Games (COG), pp. 1-8, 2019.
  pubs-2019  gvgai  general-video-game-playing  ieee-cog  rhea
  
  
• IEEE COG 2019 The Games Fusion Project: Competencies for Game Design
  Shoop, Karen and Lowthorpe, Chris and Anderson, Larra and Lucas, Simon, in IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), pp. 1-4, 2019.
  pubs-2019  ieee-cog  game-design
  
  
• IEEE COG 2019 Mek: Mechanics Prototyping Tool for 2D Tile-Based Turn-Based Deterministic Games
  Volkovas, Rokas and Fairbank, Michael and Woodward, John R and Lucas, Simon, in IEEE Conference on Games (COG), pp. 1-8, 2019.
  pubs-2019  ieee-cog  tools  visualisation
  
  
• GECCO 2019 Game AI Hyperparameter Tuning in Rinascimento
  Bravi, Ivan and Volz, Vanessa and Lucas, Simon, in Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, pp. 1742-1746, 2019.
  pubs-2019  gecco  splendor  optimisation  evolutionary-algorithms
  
  
• CEEC 2019 Extracting learning curves from puzzle games
  Volkovas, Rokas and Fairbank, Michael and Woodward, John R and Lucas, Simon, in 11th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CEEC), pp. 150-155, 2019.
  pubs-2019  ceec  learning-curves  puzzle-games
  
  
• BOOK 2019 General Video Game Artificial Intelligence
  Diego Perez-Liebana and Simon M. Lucas and Raluca D. Gaina and Julian Togelius and Ahmed Khalifa and Jialin Liu, 2019.
  pubs-2019  gvgai  general-video-game-playing  book
  
  
• AIIDE 2019 Analysis of Statistical Forward Planning Methods in Pommerman
  Diego Perez-Liebana and Raluca D. Gaina and Olve Drageset and Ercument Ilhan and Martin Balla and Simon M. Lucas, in Proceedings of the Artificial intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), 15, pp. 66-72, 2019.
  pubs-2019  aiide  pommerman  rhea  mcts
  
  
• AAAI 2019 Tackling Sparse Rewards in Real-Time Games with Statistical Forward Planning Methods
  Raluca D. Gaina and Simon M. Lucas and Diego Perez-Liebana, in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19), 33, pp. 1691-1698, 2019.
  pubs-2019  sparse-rewards  gvgai  general-video-game-playing  aaai  rhea  mcts
  
  

2018

• IEEE COG 2018 General Win Prediction from Agent Experience
  Raluca D. Gaina and Simon M. Lucas and Diego Perez-Liebana, in Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), pp. 1-8, Aug, 2018.
  pubs-2018  gvgai  general-video-game-playing  win-prediction  ieee-cog  rhea  mcts
  
  
• Evo* 2018 Self-adaptive MCTS for General Video Game Playing
  Chiara F. Sironi and Jialin Liu and Diego Perez-Liebana and Raluca D. Gaina and Ivan Bravi and Simon M. Lucas and Mark H. M. Winands, in Applications of Evolutionary Computation, pp. 358-375, 2018.
  pubs-2018  gvgai  general-video-game-playing  optimisation  evo-star  mcts
  
  
• AIIDE 2018 VERTIGO: Visualisation of Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms in GVGAI
  Raluca D. Gaina and Simon M. Lucas and Diego Perez-Liebana, in The 14th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 265-267, 2018.
  pubs-2018  gvgai  general-video-game-playing  aiide  visualisation
  
  
• 2018 Game Search Space Design and Representation
  Dan Ashlock and Cameron Browne and Simon Colton and Amy Hoover and Jialin Liu and Simon Lucas and Mark nelson and Diego Perez-Liebana and Senastian Risi and Jacob Schrum and Adam Smith and Julian Togelius and Vanessa Volz, in Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: AI-Driven Game Design (Dagstuhl Seminar 17471), 7, pp. 86-129, 2018.
  pubs-2018  dagstuhl  search-space  game-design  representation
  
  
• 2018 Gameplay Evaluation Measures
  Vanessa Volz and Dan Ashlock and Simon Colton and Steve Dahlskog and Jialin Liu and Simon M. Lucas and Diego Perez Liebana and Tommy Thompson, in Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: AI-Driven Game Design (Dagstuhl Seminar 17471), 7, pp. 86-129, 2018.
  pubs-2018  dagstuhl  evaluation  gvgai
  
  

2017