Two M.Sc. students of the Institute of Digital Games, Konstantinos Sfikas and Panagiotis Migkotzidis, have had papers accepted the upcoming IEEE Transactions on Games, a journal that publishes articles covering scientific, technical, and engineering aspects of games. It has an impact factor of 1.98 and is ranked among the top 1000 journals by Guide2Research (505).

Konstantinos Sfikas and Antonios Liapis published "Playing Against the Board: Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms Against Pandemic," It builds on the M.Sc. dissertation research done by Konstantinos Sfikas on making an AI that can collaborate with human players and with each other using the boardgame Pandemic as a test-bed. He will be streaming a demo at IndieCade Horizons on 13 June as well.

The other journal article by Panagiotis Migkotzidis and Antonios Liapis "SuSketch: Surrogate Models of Gameplay as a Design Assistant," develops the M.Sc. dissertation of Panagiotis where he has developed an AI game design assistant. It leverages machine learning to provide the designer with predictions of the gameplay for two competing players of specific classes.

The interface allows the designer to work side-by-side with an artificially intelligent creator and to receive varied types of feedback such as path information, predicted balance between players in a complete playthrough, or a predicted heatmap of the locations of player deaths.