Luke Dicken Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

San Francisco, California, Us

In addition to providing ongoing oversight and direction for our inhouse AI development projects, I have also become the architect of Zynga's overarching Generative AI strategy and led various initatives exploring and harnessing modern AI systems such as LLMs and Diffusion Models, as well as devising and implementing a framework by which we can safely, legally and ethically engage with these technologies. Although there is significant hype around the opportunities in this space, ensuring that all executive stakeholders across the business, including Take Two C-suite, are fully briefed on the actionable opportunities as well as the legitimate concerns has become a consistent part of my day to day responsibilities.A large part of my duties now revolve around identifying opportunities within the company and assessing prospective vendors to understand the potential impact that deploying their technology could bring. As a result, I have had to develop an ability to communicate clearly, concisely and transparently in the most cross-discipline manner I've ever experienced since AI is of relevance to every discipline from artists to audio engineers to executives.Due to the expanding nature of our role across the company, Zynga's AI group has grown to now include a variety of roles including Production, Product Management as well as a growing roster of engineers and AI specialists. As leader for this cross-functional group, I've had to become a stronger general manager, and put significant thought into organizational structure and inter-disciplinary collaboration to be effective.

San Francisco, California, Us

After finding significant technical success in my role overseeing the Central and Strategic Analytics group, I was tasked with forming and leading a small "Skunk Works" style development group with a mandate to explore the intersection of AI and mobile games, in order to better future-proof our business against the risk of technical stagnation.Our first project was focused on the idea of using Computational Creativity and Procedural Content techniques to create a rich, custom personalization of a game experience on a per player basis. In order to prove this concept, not only did we have to develop the underlying technology to support this approach, but we also had to develop a game, Spell Forest, which we successfully shipped on iOS and Android. Our detailed experimentation was able to validate a lot of our beliefs about the power of this approach.As the team developed further, our attention was drawn to a variety of needs in the Publishing organization, and we have been focused on harness AI technology to drive efficiency in our Creative production process. One of the biggest drivers of performance marketing is freshness of the campaign, so accelerating our ability to put marketing campaigns into effect has meaningful business impact.Patents arising from this role:US11420115B2 - Automated Dynamic Custom Game Content GenerationUS11673049B2 - Operator Interface for Automated Game Content GenerationUS11724193B2 - Automated Prediction of User Response States Based on Traversal BehaviorUS11465052B2 - Game Definition FileUS11565182B2 - Parametric Player Modeling for Computer-Implemented GamesUS11806624B2 - On Device Game Engine ArchitectureUS11738272B2 - Automated Generation of Custom Content for Computer-Implemented Games

San Francisco, California, Us

As head of Zynga's Central and Strategic Analytics group, my role was to provide a technical vision and stewardship across and oversee delivery of a complete refresh of Zynga's Analytics reporting stack, moving from a proprietary in-house system built on top of SQL to leveraging a more modern stack based around parameterized headless execution of Python notebooks.In parallel with this technology migration, my group also provided a range of other support across Zynga's central functions such as building dashboards for our Studio Ops team, creating pricing optimization algorithms for our Ad Monetization team, and breaking ground on a new approach to Dynamic Difficulty management for our Match3 titles to deliver more compelling experiences for our players and drive core business performance.Additionally, in this role I was responsible for undertaking Due Diligence from a Data and Analytics perspective for the following M&A transactions that succesfully closed, as well as several that did not complete.- Peak Games (Card Division) 2017 $100m- Gram Games 2018 $250m- Small Giant Games 2018 $560m

San Francisco, California, Us

As ranking Data Scientist:- Led design and development of AI-based optimization tools to support partner teams- Architected a new approach to Zynga's BI tooling systems- Provided mentorship across the Central Data Organization

San Francisco, California, Us

- Worked independently on a number of Data Science initiatives, primarily those that touched on the systems within the games- Acted as Product Manager for the Data Science team- Had ownership of development of strategic initiatives with the "New IP" division of Zynga- Served as a lead member of three game concept development projects

Ailm Dara is an interactive live streaming community for EU women focused on safety & diversity.

The IGDA Foundation is a charitable sister organisation to the International Game Developers Association. The Foundation focuses on supporting the mission of the IGDA through charitable work in areas including education and research related to game development.Over a seven year period I acted in a voluntary/unpaid capacity as Chair of the organization, navigating an unprecedented period of growth and driving a revenue increase of over 500x across my tenure.In that time we launched scholarship, bursary and grant programs that drove support for game developers around the world and at all stages of their career development, from students through to experienced and aspiring leaders, alongside building the organizational infrastructure to support these endeavors and attracting top talent to a growing paid staff and a variety of volunteer leadership positions.

The Edinburgh Game Symposium - in its 3rd year in 2015 - is a fantastic event put on by a group of community activists who were students when they started. It is a highlight of the Scottish development community, and I'm very proud to support them with strategic advice and insight, as well as helping them to connect with prospective speakers and sponsors.

"The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is the largest non-profit membership organization in the world serving all individuals who create video games. As an international organization, we are a global network of collaborative projects and communities comprised of individuals from all fields of game development - from programmers and producers to writers, artists, QA and localization. We bring together developers at key industry conferences, in over 90 Chapters and in Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to improve their lives and craft."The board of directors guide the IGDA and has governance over every aspect of the association, always acting in the best interest of the game developer community.

York, North Yorkshire, Gb

The IGGI CDT is an EPSRC funded initiative split between University of York, University of Essex and Goldsmiths, University of London. Over the next 8 years they aim to graduate over 55 PhD students researching topics in the area of AI and games. The proposed program emphasises the need for industrial engagement in this research to produce students who are trained and experienced in ways that will be of benefit to the industry in the future.As an Advisory Board Member I help steer the program and specifically provide guidance from an industry perspective, both in the context of my personal experience as an AI PhD student working with the industry, and my broader experiences working as a developer and with the IGDA.

The GameMentorOnline program, run by Women in Games International is an excellent opportunity for established professionals, or those with more specialist knowledge, to share their experience with those coming through. As a mentor, I dedicate a little time each week to developing core skills for my mentees, typically in areas like AI for games and networking, as well as, where relevant making sure that they are visible to my network. The "Online" component to GMO is crucial as it frees people to connect with mentors they may not ordinarily come into contact with - most of my mentees live thousands of miles away from me, but the GMO system still allows us to connect.

Responsibilities include community organisation, enhancing developer relations and coordinating events.

CalmDownTom is a Glasgow-based game reviews site. As a writer, I pick from among the reviews that are required for the site, play the game in question and then write a short article about the experience. I also occasionally assist the site with more BizDev-type issues - introductions to contacts and such.

Glasgow, Gb

Developed the Integrated Influence Architecture, an attempt to marry Reactive and Deliberative AI disciplines. The approach relies heavily on techniques drawn from Automated Planning to create a common frame of reference that reaction and deliberation can be conducted in.

Glasgow, Gb

I developed and presented the second half of the course "Artificial Intelligence", a final year honours class. The material covered a broad range of topics within the area of AI for games including :* Intro to Game Theory* Fundamental Probability Theory* Opponent Modelling* Decision Processes* Procedural Content Generation

Glasgow, Gb

I head up the committee in charge of running the prestigious IGDA Scholarships. This involves managing our activity throughout the year, coordinating the submission and selection processes and organising an on-the-ground presence at game development conferences around the world.

After the inaugural AltDevConf in February of 2012, myself and Heather Decker have now spun this out to a series of conferences, beginning in November 2012 with the AltDev Student Summit, with AltDevConf returning in 2013. We jointly take the lead in coordinating these events within the broader AltDev community, setting the direction, recruiting volunteers to provide the necessary support for the event and ensuring its success.

A project started by Insomniac Games' Mike Acton, AltDevBlogADay brings together a variety of people from all walks of game development. Authors are expected to write articles around twice a month on a subject related to game development. My articles have primarily focused on the development of Artificial Intelligence in the context of games.

I worked as Assistant Section Editor for two chapters the "Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals" book.This involved reviewing articles contributed by a range of authors for both technical and writing issues, and offering suggestions, corrections and in some cases, rewrites, as appropriate.

Glasgow, Strathclyde, Gb

I was invited to present a series of guest lectures to GCU's third year students in AI for Games. Topics included Monte Carlo Tree Search and UCT, ways that scientific AI techniques can be adapted to provide interesting experiences for players and how current mainstream games implement AI currently.

FeedTheGamer is a consumer-oriented gaming news site. Until early 2011 it served primarily as a content aggregation system for a variety of other sites. In 2011, the owner of the site decided that more original content was required, and I was brought in to spearhead this push. As the staff grew, I rose to lead the writing team as well as edit a significant portion of the content.

Responsible for sourcing speakers, promotion of conference etc.

London, Gb

Cerebrus-Net is an IT consultancy I founded in 2002 in response to requests from several small businesses that I investigate products they were thinking about deploying. In the past 8 years we have catered to a range of clients, and provided a range of services. Some of our more recent clients include the Scottish Solicitors' Property Centres (SSPC) and Lord Graham, Duke of Montrose.As my duties at U. o. Strathclyde increased, especially my teaching commitments, I elected to not seek any further contract work in this area.

Wien, At

Phd, Artificial Intelligence For Games

Mres(Dist), Automated Planning For Autonomous Systems

Msc, Bio-Informatics

Bsc(Hons), Artificial Intelligence And Computer Science