Goldsmiths gets slice of £350m to teach next generation of game makers

The next generation of developers and innovators are to be trained at Goldsmiths, University of London after the university won part of a £350 million Government grant.

Professors at Goldsmiths’ Department of Computing will team up with colleagues at the universities of York and Essex to create a Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI).

The consortium, which includes Goldsmiths and its partner universities, is likely to receive £12.5m of the grant for the IGGI.

Working closely with industry leaders in gaming, the centre aims to train 55 PhD students to become the next generation of researchers, designers, developers, leaders and entrepreneurs in the digital games industry.

The first students will enrol from September 2014 and study for nine years. A total of 18 students will be based at Goldsmiths, in New Cross, London, and will work directly with over 60 industry partners through placements and collaborative research projects.

Goldsmiths’ involvement in the new venture will be led by Professor Atau Tanaka of the Embodied Audiovisual Interaction group, and supported by Professor William Latham, a specialist in computer generated art, Professor Simon Colton, specialist in Computational Creativity and Jeremy Gow, a specialist in Games Programming and big data analytics.

Tanaka, who is a fellow of the European Research Council and known for his work in interactive music systems for companies such as Sony, said: “This centre will transform the way the games industry works with the academic community, enabling them to access, engage with and influence leading-edge research in emerging areas such as big data analytics, software engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), computational creativity, human-computer interaction, graphics, sound, game design and robotics.

“Once they’ve completed their PhD, our students will not only be highly employable but will lead and define the state of the art in gaming and shape the industry into one which is both technologically advanced and research-aware.”

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