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Duygu Cakmak is the R&D Director at Creative Assembly, where she leads the studio's research and AI strategy. She actively contributes to the wider game AI community, such as co-organising Europe's largest AI and Games developer conference in London, advising the GDC AI Summit, and chairing the IGGI industry board. She also collaborates closely with academia and research organisations to advance innovation in AI and games.

Shafik Quoraishee is a Senior Games Machine Learning Engineer at The New York Times, where he works on flagship games including Wordle, Connections, Crosswords, and Strands. With a background in computer vision and applied AI, he builds tools and production systems that translate research ideas into real, shipped features. He has over 11 years of experience as an Android developer and led MakerWeek 2023 at The New York Times, where he spearheaded the development of an experimental handwriting recognition system for the NYT Crossword Android app. That work spanned the full pipeline, including custom handwriting input (SketchBox), preprocessing varied writing styles, training a convolutional neural network, and deploying it with TensorFlow Lite. Shafik is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as GDC's AI Summit, Eng X engineering summits, and Droidcon NYC, where he presents on topics including handwriting recognition, generative AI in games, GANs, and the relationship between AI and game theory. He also writes about machine learning and experimental game AI, with published work on platforms such as Medium and Nieman Lab.

Steve Rabin is a Principal Software Engineer at Electronic Arts in the Performance Technology Group and a 30-year game industry veteran, specializing in game AI, CPU optimization, and game development tools. He has worked on games for Microsoft, Activision, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts. He has 16 issued patents on the Wii Remote (5 patents), Data Visualization and Analysis of Code (9 patents), In-Store Nintendo Kiosk, and Augmented Reality. Steve was the chief editor of the Game AI Pro series, the AI Game Programming Wisdom series, Introduction to Game Development, and an author in the Game Programming Gems series. Steve founded and organized the GDC AI Summit from 2009 to the present. He also teaches Game AI and Data Visualization within the Computer Science department at the DigiPen Institute of Technology since 2006. Steve holds a master's degree in Computer Science and an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering, both from the University of Washington.