ISyE Seminar "Using Deep Networks and Transfer Learning for Player Experience Management in Online Games”

Please join us for our next seminar of spring semester in person! This seminar will feature Nishith Pathak from Wargaming who will discuss player experience management in online games.

About the Seminar

Online games are a rich ecosystem of many users interacting and participating in goal-oriented activities. Developing and maintaining such systems is a non-trivial process. User satisfaction in online games is an important and complex concept which has many factors feeding into it, such as attaining goals in the game, the social experience of interacting with other players as well as the UI and UX aspects of the game world. Traditionally the gaming industry has relied on game designers’ experience and user surveys along with AB testing for informing various decisions related to these topics. However, with recent advances in machine learning, particularly the ability of deep networks to deal with unstructured data, there are now various possibilities for designing automated systems for more agile, scalable and effective user experience management. This talk will focus on how how deep networks and transfer learning can be used for some of the challenges faced in maintaining a positive user experience. Pathak and his colleagues specifically look at models for analyzing text data and focus on two problems. The first one is related to identifying toxic behavior among users. The second problem is extracting sentiment and relevant topics from user feedback.

About the speaker

Nishith Pathak is a senior data scientist with Wargaming.net, and a developer of some of the most popular online games such as World of Tanks and World of Warships. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and his Bachelor's in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.