Monday, May 25, 2009

Moving to ITU

I've just tendered my resignation at IDSIA.

The reason is that I've gotten a grant from the Danish Research Council for Technology and Production, allowing me to start working in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. I'll move on August 1st.

Writing this feels almost surreal, as I've been longing to move home for quite some time now. But this is not only about moving home. At least as important is that I'm moving from a world-class machine learning institute to a world-class games research group.

This closely mirrors the ongoing shift in the emphasis of my research efforts. I simply think that I have more good ideas within applications of computational intelligence methods to games and game design, than within the development of new computational intelligence methods themselves. Naturally, this has much to do with the former field being much younger and thus less exploited. More white spots on the map to fill in with bright colours.

So yes, I'm very happy right now.

3 comments:

M said...

Good luck!!!

Unknown said...

Nice! Congratulations. Look forward to work with you at ITU when I'll be visiting :))))

Marcelo said...

I think you are 200% right!

Designing new methods is a quite difficult task, mainly when it comes to spreading the new method and creating a user base for it.

See, for example, the case of genetic algorithms. I have (and you have too) heard of new wonders coming from genetic algorithms' community, there are all those kinds of EDAs, the promised land it will bring to us and so on and on. BUT, looking into the crude reality shows us an interesting fact: After 30 something years of genetic algorithm research and despite all the new genetic based methods, the most applied evolutionary algorithm still is the good old elitist simple genetic algorithm, that was established by Kenneth De Jong along the early 1970s.

I think your choice is much more interesting than designing methods that no one will use and writing papers no one will read at all.

Good luck, Julian. :)

Marcelo