Dr Chiara Sironi (C.F.)

I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences at Maastricht University, where I also received my PhD degree in 2019. My research focuses on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In particular, I am working on improving algorithms that address one of the key competences of AGI: search. I am using General Game Playing (GGP) for board games and video games as main application domain to test my approaches. I addressed problems such as finding a computationally efficient way to reason on game rules, designing mechanisms for online learning of search control in Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), and devising mechanisms that automatically adapt search algorithms online to the game at hand. Evolutionary Algorithms and Reinforcement Learning are among the methods that I have applied in conjunction with MCTS to create game playing agents.

Since the start of my academic career, I have also been part of the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS). In 2016, I volunteered to assist in the organization of the 5th World Congress of the Game theory Society (GAMES 2016). I also served as local arrangements chair for the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2018). Moreover, I co-organized the Special Session on Games at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2021. To remain involved with the research community that is working on game-related topics, since 2020, I became a member of the Games Technical Committee (GTC) of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and in 2021, I joined the Competitions Subcommittee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.