Professor Peter Cowling (www.cowling.org.uk) joined the University of York in September 2012, to take up a 50th Anniversary chair joint between The York Management School and the Department of Computer Science, based in the interdisciplinary York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis (YCCSA). He is well known internationally for his work on decision making in games and in operations management using Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically tree search [COW12] and heuristic search [REM11]. He is well connected with the digital games industry, and co-led the EPSRC-funded “Industry/Academia AI and Games Network” with nearly 300 members including 18 games companies (www.aigamesnetwork.org). In 2012 he gave invited tutorial talks to the largest meeting for AI in games aimed at academic researchers (IEEE CIG http://geneura.ugr.es/cig2012/) and at games industry workers (Vienna AI summit www.gameaiconf.com). He is currently co-holder of a £1.5m EPSRC grant to study a breakthrough approach to AI in Games [COW12] (www.mcst.ai). This consortium includes York University, Essex University, Imperial College, 3 games companies and international collaborators. He has over 90 publications in leading scientific journals and conferences including 3 edited books, 3 “best-paper” awards, and 3 “best paper” nominations. He has received funding totalling nearly £7 million (30 grants), with £1.4 million as principal investigator from sources including EPSRC, EU, JISC, Yorkshire Forward, ESRC, BBSRC, TSB and Industry.
