Artificial Intelligence · Game AI · Statistical Forward Planning · Monte Carlo Tree Search · Reinforcement Learning · Tabletop Games

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Profile

I am a Distinguished Researcher at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). My research focuses on Artificial Intelligence for games, with particular interests in Statistical Forward Planning, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms, Reinforcement Learning, General Game Playing, and Artificial Intelligence for modern tabletop games.

My work investigates decision making in complex environments and how forward models, search, abstraction and learning can be used to build more capable and general agents. More recently, this research has expanded towards automated playtesting, quantitative game analysis, AI-assisted game design and Large Language Models.

I have published more than 150 research papers across Game AI, computational intelligence and related areas. I have also developed and organised international Game AI competitions, created open-source research frameworks, supervised doctoral researchers, and worked extensively with industry.

Academic Positions

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Distinguished Researcher
July 2026–present
Madrid, Spain

Queen Mary University of London

Senior Lecturer in Computer Science
September 2020 – June 2026

Lecturer in Computer Games and Artificial Intelligence
January 2018 – August 2020

School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, London, United Kingdom.

During my time at QMUL I conducted research in Game AI, supervised PhD and MSc research, taught Artificial Intelligence and games, and served as Programme Director of the MSc Artificial Intelligence.

University of Essex

Lecturer in Computer Games and Artificial Intelligence
September 2015 – December 2017

Senior Research Officer
January 2015 – August 2015

Colchester, United Kingdom.

Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg

Research Associate
2014–2015
Magdeburg, Germany.

Education

PhD in Computer Science
University of Essex, United Kingdom, 2015

Research on Monte Carlo Tree Search, Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms and decision making in real-time games.

MSc in Computer Science
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, 2008

Ingeniería Informática (Computer Science Engineering)
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, 2007

Research

My research has centred on Artificial Intelligence methods that make decisions by reasoning about possible futures. Major themes include:

• Monte Carlo Tree Search: long-term planning, heuristic bias, tree reuse, multi-objective search, state and action abstraction, portfolio methods and Elastic MCTS.
• Evolutionary Planning: Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms and their application to real-time and general game playing.
• General Game Playing: agents capable of operating across previously unseen games rather than specialising in a single environment.
• Strategy Games: abstraction, planning and general decision-making methods for complex turn-based games.
• Tabletop Games: planning, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, game characterisation, automated playtesting and AI-assisted game design.
• AI and Game Design: quantitative analysis, balancing, digital twins, quality-diversity methods and Large Language Models.

See a selection of research projects.

Selected Research Leadership and Service

I have held a range of organisational and editorial roles within the Game AI research community.

• General Chair, IEEE Conference on Games, London, 2019.
• Program Chair, IEEE Conference on Games, 2022.
• Program Chair, IEEE Conference on Games, 2026.
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Games.
• Associate Editor, ACM Games: Research and Practice.
• Recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Associate Editor Award from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
• Co-organiser of Dagstuhl Seminar 22251: Computational Creativity for Game Development, 2022.
• Co-organiser of Dagstuhl Seminar 24261: Computational Creativity for Game Development, 2024.
• Organiser and co-organiser of Game AI competitions including GVGAI and the Microsoft Research MARLO competition.
• Organiser of tutorials, workshops and invited sessions at major Game AI conferences and events.

I regularly review for conferences and journals in Artificial Intelligence, computational intelligence, games and evolutionary computation.

Selected Talks

• D. Perez, R. Gaina. Empowering Game Designers with Automatic Playtesting, in AI in Games Conference, London, UK, 2024.
• D. Perez. AI for Tabletop Games, in Workshop on Computational Intelligence and Games, Shenzhen, China, 2024.
• D. Perez. Bringing AI to the table: helping designers make better board games, in Pint of Science, London, UK, 2023.

Research Funding and Collaboration

I have secured and contributed to research funding from UK research councils, industry and innovation programmes.

Selected activities include:

• EPSRC New Investigator Award — Abstract Forward Models for Modern Games, Principal Investigator (~ £305,000).
• Innovate UK — Empowering Tabletop Game Designers with AI (~ £50,000).
• Research and PhD funding from Microsoft Research, Creative Assembly, Queen Mary Innovation and other industrial partners (totalling ~ £137,000)
• Co-Investigator on the EPSRC Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence (IGGI) Centre for Doctoral Training (~ £3,000,000).
• Co-Investigator on the EPSRC ARCIDUCA, applying conversational agents and games to reference and coreference research (~ £985,000).

My research collaborations have included academic and industrial partners working across Game AI, machine learning, game development and computational creativity.

Supervision and Teaching

I have supervised doctoral researchers working across planning, Reinforcement Learning, Game AI, tabletop games, Large Language Models and automated game analysis. By the end of my time at QMUL I had acted as primary supervisor for 9 PhD researchers, including 7 completed PhDs, and co-supervisor for a further 4 researchers. This research resulted in a substantial body of first-authored publications by the doctoral researchers.

• Marko Tot, Search, Learning and World Models: Strengths, Limitations and Ways Forward. Viva Date: 26 March 2025. [Pending deposit]
• Linjie Xu, Efficient Data Usage for Planning and Reinforcement Learning. Viva Date: 30 May 2025. [Deposit / pdf]
• Martin Balla, Multi task Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Agents. Viva Date: 4 July 2024. [Deposit / pdf]
• Cristiana Pacheco, Believability Assessment and Modelling in Video Games. Viva Date: 15 June 2023. [Deposit / pdf]
• Ercument Ilhan, Accelerating Deep Reinforcement Learning via Action Advising. Viva Date: 28 March 2022. [Deposit / pdf]
• Cristina Guerrero-Romero, Beyond Playing to Win: Elicit General Gameplaying Agents with Distinct Behaviours to Assist Game Development and Testing. Viva Date: 22 March 2022. [Deposit / pdf]
• Raluca D. Gaina, Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms in General Video Game Playing. Viva Date: 25 March 2021. [Deposit / pdf]

I have also supervised more than sixty undergraduate and postgraduate research projects on Artificial Intelligence for Games and Game Development.

Research Software and Open Science

Much of my research is supported by publicly available software and benchmark environments.

👉 Research repositories

Major frameworks include TAG, PyTAG, Stratega, GVGAI, Tribes and PTSP. These systems provide reproducible environments for evaluating planning, learning and optimisation algorithms and have been used by researchers and students internationally.

Knowledge Transfer and Tabletop R&D

I am a co-founder of Tabletop R&D, a Queen Mary University of London spin-out created to transfer research on Artificial Intelligence for tabletop games into practical tools for professional designers and publishers.

The company builds digital twins of tabletop games and uses automated AI playtesting to generate large-scale quantitative evidence about balance, strategies, scoring systems and gameplay dynamics.

This work grew directly from research conducted with the TAG framework and provides a pathway from academic Game AI research to applications in the creative industries.

Selected Recognition

• Outstanding Associate Editor Award, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, 2023.
• Best Artifact Award for Analysis of Statistical Forward Planning Methods in Pommerman, in AIIDE, 2019.
• Best Paper Award, IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, 2012.
• Best Paper Award, EvoStar, 2011.
• BCS SGAI Intelligence Prize, 2012.

Publications

My complete publication record, including direct links to papers, can be found on the Publications page.

Research outputs span IEEE Transactions on Games, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, AAAI, IEEE Conference on Games, FDG, GECCO, CEC and other international venues.

I am also a co-author of the book:

General Video Game Artificial Intelligence, Morgan & Claypool, 2019.

Links

👉 Publications
👉 Research Projects
👉 Open-source Repositories
👉 Google Scholar
👉 ORCID