John Funge

Recent Activities

My YouTube debut featured the first in-depth look at the Wii MotionPlus working with AiLive's LiveMove 2 software.  AiLive helped design the MotionPlus accessory. The video was watched over a quarter of a million times in the first week it appeared, was the YouTube featured gaming video and generated widespread media coverage.  You can even watch a Japanese version!

LiveMove 2 is the latest in the LiveMove series of products.  LiveMove 2 fully supports the Nintendo Wii MotionPlus accessory to do motion tracking and recognition. AiLive, the company I co-founded, collaborated with Nintendo to design the MotionPlus hardware and is offering LiveMove 2 to help game developers take full advantage of its capabilities. LiveMove 2 incorporates all the great features of previous LiveMove products.  It is now even easier to create motion recognizers within minutes simply by showing examples of motions; no coding or scripting required.

LiveCombat is a commercial product I helped develop with my colleagues at AiLive. LiveCombat gives you the power to build AI characters that learn in seconds how to behave by observing the actions of human players.

John Funge. Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games: An Introduction. A K Peters, July 2004. Buy it from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

CMPS 146 - Game AI is a course I proposed, designed, developed and taught in my spare time at the University of California Santa Cruz in Spring 2006, Spring 2007 and Fall 2008.

Contact Information

Biography

John Funge is a co-founder and one of the lead scientists at AiLive Inc. (formerly iKuni), a Silicon Valley based company focusing on developing real-time machine learning technology for computer entertainment.  John is also an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the University of California Santa Cruz. At AiLive John is part of the team that developed LiveMove and LiveCombat,  two commercial products that bring ground breaking real-time machine learning technology to the computer entertainment industry.  John previously worked at Sony Computer Entertainment America's (SCEA) research lab.  Before that John was a member of Intel's Microcomputer Research Lab (MRL).  He received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science at King's College London in 1990, an M.Sc. in Computation from Oxford University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1998.  For his Ph.D. John successfully developed a new approach to high-level control of characters in games and animation.  John is the author of numerous technical papers and two books on Game AI, including his new book Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games: An Introduction. John is the Associate Editor for AI and Goal-Directed Action Planning for the International Journal of Intelligent Games and Simulation (IJIGS) and a member of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Artificial Intelligence Interface Standards Committee (AIISC).  His current research interests include computer games, machine learning, knowledge representation and new democratic methods.

Past Activities

John Funge. AI for Games and Animation: A Cognitive Modeling Approach.  A K Peters, 1999 (buy it!).

John Funge. Chinese translation of AI for Games and Animation: A Cognitive Modeling Approach. Tsinghua University Press, May 2004.

John Funge. Making Them Behave: Cognitive Models for Computer Animation. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto, 1998 (screen optimized PDF, print optimized PDF).

John Funge. Representing Knowledge within the Situation Calculus using Interval-valued Epitemic Fluents. Journal of Reliable Computing, Kluwer, issue 1, volume 5, 1999 (PDF).

John Funge, Xiaoyuan Tu, and Demetri Terzopoulos. Cognitive Modeling: Knowledge, Reasoning and Planning for Intelligent Characters. SIGGRAPH 99, Los Angeles, CA, August 11-13, 1999 (PDF).