AI, Search, & Games Researcher. AAAI Fellow, Amii Fellow, CIFAR chair. Univ. Alberta. Consultant. ✞

Edmonton, Alberta
Joined January 2010
We are looking for people to help evaluate tools that assist users in designing puzzles for The Witness! Check out the official link below.
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University of Alberta invites English-speaking adults (18+) to join The Witness Editor User Study (Pro00156658). Design 2 levels online (~40 min; no compensation). Details: webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~junw…
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Nathan Sturtevant retweeted
We are very happy to announce the list of newly elected AAAI Fellows for 2026. AAAI will celebrate the newly elected Fellows at the awards ceremony during AAAI-26. Congratulations to all the 2026 Fellows for this well-deserved honor! Bo An Elias Bareinboim Roman Barták Tanya Berger-Wolf Sanmay Das Alan Fern Irwin King Yan Liu Nathan Sturtevant Qi Tian Francesca Toni Ingmar Weber Learn more: aaai.org/about-aaai/aaai-awa…
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Nathan Sturtevant retweeted
Learn more about U of A professor Nathan Sturtevant's research. @nathansttt @ualbertaScience
In this new episode of "Meet the Researcher," Amii Fellow and Canada @CIFAR_News AI Chair Nathan Sturtevant talks about his research and shares his thoughts on combining classic AI techniques, heuristic search, and game theory with LLMs. Watch: hubs.la/Q03Fn6qG0
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Listening to Bengio at #IJCAI25. While I agree with the risks of AI, he seems to be worried about future AI as an actor with malicious goals and intentions. I'm far more worried about what people do with AI than what AI does on its own.
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He proposes an AI oracle that can answer queries of the form P(statement is true | context). This is a way of avoiding the risks of a system deceiving us - if it can get these probabilities correct. Interesting to think about what you could build with such a tool.
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Finishes by talking about governance, which makes sense. First audience question is "what about AI being too dumb, not too smart." A good question - he defers to the potential future AI that will be super-intelligent.
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A message regarding today's unfortunate studio news.
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Jasper wildfire damage visualized through satellite imagery from a month ago and now. Dark green denotes dense vegetation, white denotes almost none. (details in the thread)
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The Seventeenth International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2024) from June 6-8, 2024 in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada. Proceedings are now available here: bit.ly/3wRQBnR
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Kick-start of the ICAPS 2024 Summer School: with talks by Sarah Keren and Nathan Sturtevant. Hard work by the summer school organisers (Sarah Keren, Jane Jean Kiam, Pascal Bercher) and teaching assistants (Guy Azran, Yuval Goshen) is paying off!
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Nathan Sturtevant retweeted
The ICAPS 2024 Program Overview is now live - icaps24.icaps-conference.org… The late registration deadline is fast approaching. If you have not already, please register soon as rooms are in short supply.
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Nathan Sturtevant retweeted
x-posting from Linkedin -- Tommy Thompson makes the best videos about AI in videogames. Tommy approached me about a FEAR retrospective episode to help celebrate the @AIandGames youtube channel turning 10 years old. One of his questions was why FEAR is relevant almost 20 years later. I think a big part of that is due to Tommy making such great videos about it, keeping the interest alive! I'm grateful that AI & Games has spotlighted the work, in several videos over the years, and it was a lot of fun to reminisce on this video with Tommy. Tommy has a unique insider perspective, having established himself as the go-to guy for Game AI consulting. I am excited to see how he connects the dots from FEAR to @bitpartai, in a follow up video he and I are working on. I recommend subscribing to @AIandGames to get informed perspectives on game AI, complemented with Tommy's delightful Scottish brogue.
🧟‍♀️ NEW VIDEO🧟‍♀️ To celebrate 10 years of AI and Games, I wanted to go back to where it all began. The F.E.A.R. Retrospective: ~1 hour deep-dive into the making of the game as I interview Jeff Orkin @jorkin - F.E.A.R.'s AI programmer. Live on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=3Of2NtTY…
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<Unpopular opinion> Inter-reviewer anonymity is a big cause for low review quality at mega #AI conferences (e.g. #AAAI #NeurIPS #IJCAI #ICLR #ICML..). When reviewers don't have to worry about the censure of the other peer reviewers looking at the same paper, there is little downside to bad reviewing. [Note that we are of course not talking about reviewer names being visible to authors; just among the reviewers of the same paper] When I started reviewing for AI conferences, the reviewers looking at the same paper will all know each other's names. When you have to stand behind your opinions in front of your peers, there is a natural moderating force at work Over the time, however, there was a movement to anonymize the reviewers among themselves (as well as, in some conferences, at the senior PC member level). The justification given for this (at least in the AAAI/IJCAI family of conferences) was that junior reviewers will be intimidated into writing , and discussing what they really think about the paper . This justification may have had some support at one time, but I contend that it barely makes sense in the current AI Zeitgeist. To begin with, everyone knows that very few senior folks actually review for conferences anymore. Much of the reviewing is really done by junior researchers--often graduate students who themselves haven't had much experience in publishing (because, face it, we have exponentially growing number of papers). Secondly, in most conferences, inter-reviewer discussion has really become negligible (see xitter.cf/rao2z/status/170508056…). So why do we still have inter-reviewer anonymity? I contend that the knowledge that your reviews will be seen along with your name by other 3-4 reviewers of that paper may well help reign in the short/contentless/spiteful "why didn't cite my paper?"/chatGPT generated reviews. Currently, the downside for putting up such reviews is quite low--as unless the review is truly and horrendously egregious, it is not likely to get flagged to a level where it will be associated with the reviewer name. Even then, there is little practical/legal censure options available to conference organizers. (I heard countless discussions about keeping track of longitudinal reviewer behavior--but face it, AI conferences are not reddit with easy to accumulate/track karma!) We all complain eternally about reviewing quality. But we can't change the number of papers being submitted, or the fact that we can't do reviewing with just people who have a significant reputational loss to fear (there just aren't enough of them). This inter-reviewer anonymity is something we can actually change.. If you agree, consider retweeting.
Two pareto-optima in #AI conf. reviewing styles A. Inter-reviewer discussion shepherded by SPC/AC. [ICAPS/AAAI/IJCAI] B. 1-on-1 reviewer-author discussion [@openreviewnet] A doesn't engage the authors & B misses inter-reviewer/AC breadth. Hard to get all! #NeurIPS2023
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Doing some regression tests on snakebird/anhinga code today - found this level in the process: movingai.com/snakebird/play.…
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Sokobond Express, @josehzz1's beautifully minimalist puzzle game of chemical bonds and puzzling pathfinding, is OUT NOW on Steam/itch for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Steam Deck!
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Nathan Sturtevant retweeted
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s elected Fellows are individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions — usually over at least a ten-year period — to the field of artificial intelligence. Congratulations to our 2024 Fellows who will be recognized at the AAAI-24 awards ceremony on Saturday February 24: ⭐️Anima Anandkumar, Caltech and NVIDIA ⭐️Claire Cardie, Cornell University ⭐️Nitesh Chawla, University of Notre Dame ⭐️Cristina Conati, University of British Columbia ⭐️Jennifer Dy, Northeastern University ⭐️Ariel Felner Ben-Gurion, University of the Negev ⭐️Kristian Kersting, TU Darmstadt ⭐️Mausam,  Indian Institute of Technology ⭐️Ariel Procaccia, Harvard University ⭐️Brian Scassellati, Yale University ⭐️Kilian Weinberger, Cornell University ⭐️Jun Zhu, Tsinghua University
 Learn more: aaai.org/about-aaai/aaai-awa…
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Our 2024 Conference Call is *OPEN* Abstracts due December 7th. Plan to share your research with the community in Banff next year. icaps24.icaps-conference.org…
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