This year's symposium could not have taken place without the help of a great number of people and organisations.
We would like to thank the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) for sponsoring the symposium and providing invaluable organisational support in helping administering it. We also thank the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society (CES) for providing technical co-sponsorship.
In particular, we would like to thank CIS President David Fogel, CIS Vice President for Conferences Garrison Greenwood, and the Chair of the CIS Games Technical Committee, Simon Lucas for their encouragement, support, and belief in both the event and our organisation of it.
A number of other organisations provided significant financial support to the symposium. We would like to thank Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University, Rio Tinto, and The University of Western Australia for their very generous contributions that helped make the symposium such a productive and enjoyable one.
The organising committee (Simon Lucas, Cara MacNish, Martin Masek, Risto Miikkulainen, Lyndon While, and Kevin Wong) worked tirelessly in preparing this year's symposium. We thank them for their fantastic efforts that have led to such a successful event. We also thank the various regional publicity coordinators (Narendra Chaudhari, Sung-Bae Cho, Andries Engelbrecht, Sushil Louis, Tomoharu Nakashima, Mike Preuss, and Abdennour El Rhalibi) for their efforts in publicising the symposium; their hard work being realised in the record number of submissions to the symposium.
The programme committee did an excellent job in their timely reviewing of the papers submitted to the symposium. Realising the legacy of a symposium is largely judged by the quality of the accepted papers and the people represented on the programme committee, we have been extremely fortunate to have such a high-class, internationally recognised, panel of experts serve in this role. We thank them for their time and effort with this task.
We thank the three plenary speakers (Jason Hutchens, Jonathan Schaeffer, and Penny Sweetser) for agreeing to participate in this year's symposium. Their involvement has greatly helped to raise the profile of the event, and we thank them for their commitment and their enthralling and inspiring presentations.
We also thank the four tutorial presenters (Bobby Bryant, Simon Lucas, Julian Togelius, and Georgios Yannakakis) who gave up their time and energy to allow others to learn from their vast knowledge and experience. We also appreciate the efforts of the special session organisers (Alan Blair, Bobby Bryant, Chris Miles, Mike Preuss, Julian Togelius, and Georgios Yannakakis) in arranging the presentations that make up the four themed emerging areas being showcased at this year's symposium.
The online paper management and review system used by this event was developed by Tomasz Cholewo. We thank him for configuring and supporting the system for use in this year's symposium; a system that undoubtedly made the administration of the technical side of the symposium so much easier than it might otherwise had been.
We are also deeply grateful to Mark Wittkamp for his graphical design work in preparing the artwork used in the proceedings, website, call for papers and other promotional material, Lucas Bradstreet and Keith Johnson for reviewing the papers for formatting consistency and quality assurance, and Evan Wong for designing the symposium logo.
The combined efforts of a number of people were needed to ensure the success of the BotPrize competition. Firstly we thank 2K Australia for taking up the challenge of sponsoring this inaugural event, especially Ali Hinton for convincing the company of its value and securing the cash prize and additional much-needed support. We also thank the many people who offered their suggestions and insights in the design of the competition, particularly Jessica Bayliss of Rochester IT, the Pogamut team from Charles University in Prague and the competitors. The roles of the judges (Penny Sweetser, Robert Spencer, David Fogel, Cam Anderson and John Weise), and the confederates (Byron Pogson, Andrew Smith, Keith Johnson, Sebastain Davidson, Scott Kerr and Ashley Wiren) were crucial. We'd also like to especially thank Peter Reynolds, our trophy maker, who went way beyond the call of duty in the execution of his commission to create a really superb and distinctive trophy.
Finally, we would like to thank the local staff from The University of Western Australia who helped ensure the smooth running of the symposium. In particular, thanks to Nicola Hallsworth, Paula Langley, Marilyn Monaghan, and Ilse Du Toit for their administrative assistance, Ryan McConigley and Laurie McKeaig for their technical support with the registration system and local computer arrangements, and Joe Sandon for his logistical support.
Thank you to all for making this event such a huge success.
Luigi Barone and Philip Hingston (co-chairs)
The University of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University
