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Ignacio Amaya leads AI initiatives at Rovio, working on machine learning and generative AI for games, advertising, and user acquisition. He has a background in data science and data engineering and focuses on building AI solutions that deliver real business impact.

Kyle Boerstler is a Senior Manager of Machine Learning Security at Activision. His background is in academia, with a PhD in Philosophy from Florida State University. After his PhD, he transitioned to Data Science and Machine Learning and started his career at Activision in 2021 as an Associate Data Scientist. He officially joined Ricochet's Machine Learning team in 2023.

Hisham is a lead architect for AI and machine learning software within the AMD Radeon GPU organization. He leads the architecture and development of key ML enablement layers—including ONNX, WindowsML, DirectML, and related components—optimized for AMD Radeon GPUs. He also drives the end to end ML strategy for AMD’s client GPU portfolio, working closely with architects, internal stakeholders, and customers to deliver a cohesive and forward looking ML software roadmap.

Guy Elsmore-Paddock is a Staff Engineer and software architect with over two decades of experience building scalable, performance-critical systems for real-time and live-service environments. His work focuses on the intersection of distributed systems, machine learning, and player experience, with an emphasis on low latency, reliability, and systems that hold up under real-world load. At Modulate, Guy leads development of the APIs behind the Modulate Platform and ToxMod, partnering directly with studios that include Rockstar Games and Activision to support online player safety at scale. He specializes in architecting backend services and developer-facing platforms that integrate cleanly into modern game stacks without getting in the way of shipping. Prior to joining Modulate, Guy held multiple CTO and Principal Architect roles across the entertainment and retail sectors, building cloud-native asset management systems for large-scale interactive fan engagement experiences used by millions. His work has supported global artists including Bon Jovi, Metallica, and Def Leppard. Guy holds a B.S. in Software Engineering from RIT and brings a systems-level perspective to every project, blending creative domain fluency with rigorous technical execution.

Principal Engineer with 27 years of experience specialising in 3D graphics, GPU programming, and high-performance engine architecture across multiple console generations. Tom has led technical development on platforms ranging from Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 to legacy systems like PS2 and Dreamcast. His work spans real-time ray tracing and image upscaling technologies such as DLSS, with a growing interest in graphics-focused machine learning.

Bill Kleyman is an award-winning data center, cloud, and digital infrastructure leader with a 20-year career at the forefront of technology. Ranked globally by Onalytica as one of the leading executives in cloud computing and data security, Bill is focused on advising organizations, training young talent, and educating global audiences around AI, machine learning, sustainable data center design, colocation architecture, cybersecurity, DevOps, and more. Today, Bill is CEO of Apolo, an AI platform and infrastructure company, and Chair of the Education Committee at Infrastructure Masons, Board Advisory Member of Nomad Futurists, and the AFCOM Data Center World Program Chair. Bill is also a regular guest lecturer at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering for graduate and undergraduate courses.

Dr. Elvis Liu is a Principal Engineer at Tencent Games, where he leads multiple R&D teams focused on distributed virtual environments and AI technologies. He has spearheaded several groundbreaking projects that are reshaping the future of game AI. Most notably, he led the development of sparring AI agents for Naruto Mobile—the first commercial fighting game to integrate deep reinforcement learning—which has powered over two billion human-AI matches. The design of this machine learning system was presented by Dr. Liu at the GDC 2024 Machine Learning Summit. More recently, he introduced F.A.C.U.L.—the world's first FPS AI companion capable of seamless interaction with human players through natural language—unveiled at GDC 2025 Core Concepts.

Adrien Logut is a Senior Tools Programmer who has been at Epic Games for almost 4 years now. After 5 years of doing Machine Learning at Ubisoft, he joined Epic Games to work on the PCG plugin.

Rachel Manzelli is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Modulate. Her work focuses on leading the technical direction & development of audio-native, cost-effective machine learning models that support Modulate's Platform, ToxMod, and other product lines. Rachel holds almost a decade of machine learning research experience, alongside several peer-reviewed publications at the intersection of machine learning and audio. Her work has previously been featured at top venues such as NeurIPS, ICML and ISMIR. Rachel is passionate about creating spaces for researchers to share ideas; she loves to help organize audio-related events at major machine learning conferences, including workshops at NeurIPS ("Machine Learning for Audio" in 2023) and ICML ("AI Heard That!" in 2025, "Machine Learning for Audio Synthesis" in 2022). She regularly brings Modulate's researchers to machine learning conferences & events to share and discover cutting edge research. Before Modulate, Rachel worked at Macro (acq.) as a machine learning engineer, where she developed audio source separation models used in remote coworking spaces. She earned her B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University in 2019.

Hilary Mason is the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door. Prior to Hidden Door she was General Manager of the Machine Learning business unit at Cloudera. She previously founded Fast Forward Labs, an applied machine learning research and consulting startup which Cloudera acquired in 2017. Additionally, she was Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners, co-founded HackNY, and was Chief Scientist at bitly. Hilary delights at living in the magical space around an emergent AI capability and the opportunity to build new product and game experiences around it.

Dr. Jeff Orkin is an AI researcher, serial entrepreneur, and game industry veteran.  Jeff is currently Cofounder / CEO of Bitpart AI, a startup developing advanced NPC technology that combines Machine Learning with Automated Planners. Previously Jeff founded Giant Otter Technologies, a conversational AI venture that grew out of his Ph.D research at the MIT Media Lab.  Giant Otter was acquired by Drift conversational marketing, where Jeff led the AI team for 4 years building products that learned from billions of chat messages. Jeff began his career as an AI specialist in the game industry for 10 years, at Sierra and Monolith Productions. His work on No One Lives Forever 2 (NOLF2) and F.E.A.R. won awards for the best AI in the industry.  F.E.A.R. was the first commercial video game to ship with a goal-oriented action planner (GOAP), inspired by STRIPS planning from robotics research. Jeff has served as a co-Author of the AI Game Programming Wisdom book series, Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, and has presented at GDC, AIIDE, IEEE CIG, MIGS, AAAI, AAMAS, ICAPS, and SARA. Prior to MIT, Jeff earned a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington and Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Tufts University with a minor in Studio Art.

Samuel Pizelo is an Assistant Professor of Game Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga whose research focuses on the relationship between games of all kinds and knowledge production practices. His research has appeared in Representations, Game Studies, ROMchip, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. He is also a media practitioner, who uses data science, media art, and digital and analog game design practice to complement his research and teaching. He co-created Project Quintessence, a corpus exploration framework integrating machine learning and statistical models with dynamic visualizations to facilitate archival research. He is also a founding member of the Degrowth Game Design Project (DeGDP), a multi-campus design and research cluster exploring the possibilities of different games for helping us to imagine a post-growth future.  

Thomas is a Technical Architect at Ubisoft, specializing in large-scale data engineering, analytics, and AI-driven developer tools. Over the past several years, Thomas has architected the implementation of core data and DevOps infrastructure that powers insights and decision-making across Ubisoft's worldwide studios. Most recently, Thomas was the technical lead on DocGPT—Ubisoft's secure, in-house AI knowledge assistant—bringing generative AI to the heart of the studio's development workflows. From integrating scattered sources like Jira, Confluence, Perforce, and playtest reviews, to deploying highly secure, domain-aware retrieval pipelines, Thomas helped make knowledge more accessible for thousands of game developers every day. Prior to this, Thomas worked on Ubisoft's global analytics and machine learning platform, delivering scalable event-driven architectures and deploying AI-powered features directly inside game engines. A strong advocate of combining DevOps discipline with machine learning and data engineering best practices, Thomas leverages tools like Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Spark, and Databricks to make scalable, production-grade solutions a reality. Thomas holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from IRRCyN (Nantes) and an engineering degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Mines de Nantes.

Xin Qiao is a Senior Software Engineer on the research and development team at LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS, focusing on the intersection of Character Animation and Machine Learning. Prior to this role, he engineered real-time, machine learning-driven animation systems for NetEase. He earned his M.S. in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University.

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.

Alexis Rolland is a seasoned technology leader with over 15 years of experience at the intersection of artificial intelligence, game development, and data analytics. As the Director of Ubisoft La Forge in China, he spearheads innovative R&D initiatives that bridge academic research and game development, driving technical prototyping and the adoption of cutting-edge AI solutions. Alexis began his career as a consultant at IBM before transitioning to the gaming industry, where he has played a pivotal role in shaping Ubisoft's AI and data strategy. Over his 13-year tenure at Ubisoft, he has held multiple leadership roles, including Director of Ubisoft China AI & Data Lab, where he managed a diverse team of data scientists, engineers, and product managers to enhance analytics, machine learning, and AI-driven innovation across Ubisoft's projects. A self-taught programmer with a passion for development, Alexis has contributed to numerous groundbreaking AI initiatives, such as Ubisoft's internal generative AI platform, Ghostwriter for narrative dialogue generation, and ZooBuilder, a tool for creating 3D animations from videos. His expertise spans reinforcement learning, computer vision, and generative AI, with his work showcased at major industry events like SIGGRAPH Asia.

Allan Schaffer is a senior manager in Worldwide Developer Relations, leading the team focused on graphics and games, machine learning and AI, augmented reality, and spatial computing.

Alessandro Sestini is a research scientist at SEED, the research and development lab within Electronic Arts. His work focuses on the application of deep reinforcement learning (RL), inverse reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and large language models (LLM) to game AI and playtesting. Alessandro contributed to the game AI landscape, helping develop LLM-based agents for the new Battlefield game and, more recently, developing the new RL-based movement system of the goalkeeper in EA Sports FC 26. Alessandro has published several academic papers and given several talks about the intersection between machine learning and video game development, helping researchers and practitioners in adopting such technology. Prior to joining SEED, Alessandro obtained his PhD with honorable mention in Smart Computing and Computer Engineering from Università degli Studi di Firenze

Martin Singh-Blom is the Machine Learning Research Lead at Embark Studios, where he heads a team exploring how learning systems can bring digital worlds to life. He holds an MSc in Engineering Physics from KTH and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin, where his research focused on machine learning for genetics. Before joining Embark, Martin worked at EA's SEED division on next-generation facial animation. Since 2019, he has helped shape Embark's approach to integrating machine learning into every layer of game development. When he's not teaching machines to move or speak, he's usually chasing after his two kids.

Ryan Valenza leads Data & AI for PlayStation Studios, partnering with first-party game teams to apply AI where it meaningfully improves game development. He previously drove machine learning strategy at Bungie and has worked across the data stack in research, government, and industry. With training in physics and mathematics, Ryan brings an eclectic, practical approach to AI—and a gamer’s perspective on the craft and future direction of the industry.

Rob VanReenen is a Principal Engineer and embedded graphics software lead at Qualcomm, known for advancing mobile graphics, gaming, XR, and heterogeneous compute. With over 25 years of experience in optimized 3D graphics and compute drivers, he has led global teams delivering high‑performance Adreno GPU drivers across Snapdragon platforms. Rob has driven innovations such as updatable graphics drivers for Android and major performance optimizations, and his recent work focuses on enabling heterogeneous compute for machine learning and super‑resolution. He has co‑authored multiple Khronos extensions, including those for foveated rendering, variable rate shading, and heterogeneous compute