People

Julian Togelius
Director / Associate Professor

I work on artificial intelligence and games. I research and develop methods for making games more fun, easier to design and develop, more adaptive, or just to enable games and interactive experiences that we cannot yet create. I'm interested in all kinds of games that people actually play: video games, board games, card games or mind games. When it comes to AI techniques I'm flexible and willing to engage with all kinds of methods, but my methodological roots are in evolutionary computation and neural networks. Some keywords that describe what I do are game AI, player modelling, procedural content generation, automatic game design, believable bot behaviour, coevolution, neuroevolution, genetic programming and monte carlo tree search.

Christopher DiMauro
Sys-Admin / Project Advisor

An alum of NYU Tandon Polytechnic's Digital Media Masters program, Chris is a Wearer of many hats: Web design, electronics, VR, game design and programming, 3d modeling, prop fabrication and robotics. He's also the current advisor for the NYU's RoboMaster VIP Project, Team Ultraviolet

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Yuchen Li
PhD student
Yuchen Li is a PhD student in Computer Science at NYU since 2024. She completed both her Master's and Bachelor's degrees at NYU. Her research interests include diversity measurement in games and procedural content generation (PCG), reinforcement learning in PCG for 3D games like Minecraft and Monument Valley, large language models for playing and designing games, and human-in-the-loop PCG. Outside of research, she is a big fan of playing League of Legends and watching animation.
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Graham Todd
PhD Student

I'm a second-year PhD student with an interest in intersections between games, cognitive science, and natural language processing. I graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in Symbolic Systems. My current projects at the lab are using a formal grammar to model how people come up with games and exploring how Hebbian learning (and other biologically-inspired algorithms) can be used for multi-task learning and emergent communication. Outside of the lab, I'm an avid fencer and frequent game master for my table-top role-playing game group!

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M Charity
PhD student

M is a PhD student in Computer Science at NYU studying Game Design and Artificial Intelligence. They graduated with their bachelor's degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. In addition to their work in the Game Innovation lab, M has a background in natural language processing and virtual reality game design.
They've been making games since the 7th grade, most of which can be found here: https://mastermilkx.itch.io/

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Zehua Jiang
PhD student

Zehua Jiang is a 3rd-year PhD student in Computer Science at NYU. He completed his master's studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering at NYU and holds a bachelor's degree in Physics (Optics) from Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests include reinforcement learning, open-endedness, and generative models. Outside the lab, he's learning to play the electric guitar.

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Sam Earle
PhD student

PhD student at NYU's Game Innovation Lab, using AI to play open-ended sandbox simulation games.

Tim Merino
PhD Student

I am a first year PhD with a special interest in Generative AI for Procedural Content Generation and creativity. I graduated with a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Towson University, then got my Masters in Computer Science from NYU Tandon. My research so far has involved generating Minecraft houses, generating game maps and sprites from text descriptions, and solving Connections puzzles using LLMs. I'm currently researching other applications of LLMs for word games, and applications of diffusion models for discrete game spaces.

Matthew Siper
PhD candidate
ML PhD candidate at NYU
Catalina Jaramilo
PhD student

I was born in Spain. After obtaining a degree as Mining engineering, I moved to Paris to study a second degree and masters degree in applied Mathematics in UPMC Paris VI. After that, I decided to pursue my career in the field of Artificial Intelligence. These last few years, I was working in several projects in the Technology Research Center of Repsol (Madrid) and Repsol-IBM (New York), applying deep learning and reinforcement learning for logistic and real time decision making. A Games are a great environment to test artificial intelligence research. I am interested in developing new agents to play Start Craft II.

Yuhe Nie
Grad Student

Yuhe (She likes people call her "Dolphin") is a Graduate student studying CS and IDM at New York University. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in CS from the Southern University of Science and Technology. Yuhe is an avid entertainment technology enthusiast. She is interested in game development, PCG, computer graphics, mixed reality, and HCI. Her games and interesting stuff can be found at https://nyh-dolphin.itch.io/.

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Maria Edwards

Search-Based Exploration and Diagnosis of TOAD-GAN
Learning Controllable Content Generators

Maxwell Sirotin
Grad Student

Maxwell Sirotin is an M.S. student in Computer Science studying at NYU. He graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from Adelphi University specializing in Game Design. Currently, his research focus is on how evolutionary algorithms perform on games that "deceive" other reinforcement learning algorithms. He finds speaking in the 3rd person increasingly unusual the longer he thinks about it.

Michael Middleton

PhD student with interests in driving procedural content generation through active cognitive load monitoring with non-invasive brain-computer interfaces.

Shouren Wang
M.S. Intern

Shouren is an intern in Game Innovation Lab. He earned his M.S. degree in Computer Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and B.E. degree in Digital Media Technology at Hunan University. His research interests include machine learning, reinforcement learning, and gameplay AI. His current work is the project Street Fighter 2 AI, designing an AI model to master Street Fighter 2 gameplay. He is a fan of video games. In addition to playing the games, he plays the piano and focuses on piano cover video game music. He also loves cosplay and has cosplayed Leon of Resident Evil 4

Debosmita Bhaumik
Research Assistant

Debosmita is a research assistant in Prof. Julian Togelius research
group, NYU. She did master’s in computer application from Vidyasagar
University, India and previously worked as research assistant in the
Chair for Management Science and Energy Economics, University
Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Presently she is working in Artificial
Intelligence for games.

Lisa Soros
Former Post Doc

Lisa's research explores the intersection of artificial life and games. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida, focusing on neuro-evolution, generative systems, and open-ended evolutionary dynamics.

Michael C. Green
Ph.D. Alumni / Visiting Scholar

Michael completed his Ph.D. at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering in June of 2022. In his thesis, he primarily focuses on the intersection between AI and game mechanics, and how AI can automatically build video game tutorials. His research spans many AI methods including tree search and evolutionary algorithms, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. Michael is currently a senior data scientist at Hitachi Solutions America, where he heads a research/engineering team to build AI-powered products. Outside of work, Michael is an avid fan of video games. His favorites include the Civilization series, The Witcher, and Path of Exile. He also enjoys all things involving water such as swimming and especially sailing.

https://mikecgreen.com/

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Chang Ye
Alumni MS Computer Science

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Aaron Dharna
Visiting Scholar

He is currently an MS student in CS at Fordham University, applying to PhDs, and having his MS thesis co-advised by Prof. Julian Togelius and Prof. Damian Lyons at NYU and Fordham respectively. His interests currently are in generative models, reinforcement learning, neural networks, evolution, and the intersection of games and machine learning.

Ruben Torrado

I was born in Spain. After obtaining a degree as Mining engineering, I moved to Paris to study a second degree and masters degree in applied Mathematics in UPMC Paris VI. After that, I decided to pursue my career in the field of Artificial Intelligence. These last few years, I was working in several projects in the Technology Research Center of Repsol (Madrid) and Repsol-IBM (New York), applying deep learning and reinforcement learning for logistic and real time decision making. A Games are a great environment to test artificial intelligence research. I am interested in developing new agents to play Start Craft II.

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