A conversation with John Carmack
Join Michael Bowling for a casual conversation with John Carmack about innovation in games, open source, virtual reality, rockets, and his vision for the future of AI.
- Date: Monday, September 25, 2023
- Time: 5:00 PM - 5:45 PM
- Location: Amii HQ, 10065 - Jasper Avenue
- Live-streamed
- Cost: Free of charge
This event is now sold out. A live-stream is available.
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About John Carmack
John Carmack defined the now ubiquitous “first-person shooter” gaming genre at Id Software with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, while pioneering the adoption of many computer graphic techniques, including binary space partitioning, light mapping, tangent space bump-mapping, and megatexturing. His early involvement with the creation of GPUs to accelerate 3D gaming has now come full circle with their use to accelerate AI.
At Armadillo Aerospace, he built reusable rocket ships, both autonomous and piloted, with a wide variety of propulsion and control systems.
In 2012, he ushered in the modern era of virtual reality with the Oculus Rift prototype, using GPU distortion compensation and TimeWarp temporal reprojection technologies to enable low-cost systems to outperform exotic professional ones. He went on to champion the development of mobile, all-in-one VR systems at Meta, leading to the current Meta Quest line.
In 2022, he founded Keen Technologies to work on the fundamental challenges of AGI.
For his technical work, John has been awarded two Emmys, a BAFTA fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Game Developers Conference, and is in the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.
About Michael Bowling
Michael Bowling is fascinated by the problem of how computers can learn to play games through experience. He is best known for his work in poker, most notably on two milestone advances, both published in Science: Cepheus ‘essentially’ solved the game of heads-up limit Texas hold’em in 2015, and in late 2016, DeepStack became the first AI to beat human professionals at heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em. Both systems represent theoretical leaps forward in the world of imperfect (or hidden) information games. In leading the development of the Arcade Learning Environment, which launched in 2013, Michael played a pivotal role in the adoption of Atari as a key challenge problem and testbed for AI researchers across the world. The Arcade Learning Environment was instrumental in establishing the subfield of deep reinforcement learning.
Michael is a Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii, and a full professor at the University of Alberta. He is also leader of the Computer Poker Research Group and a principal investigator in the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence (RLAI) Lab at the University of Alberta. He has been an associate editor for top publications such as the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and has sat on the programming committees for more than 50 academic conferences, including AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML and IJCAI. With more than 100 papers published in scientific journals and refereed conferences and as the academic supervisor of over 30 early-stage researchers, Michael has been the recipient of numerous research and teaching awards. His work has been featured on the television programs Scientific American Frontiers, National Geographic Today, and Discovery Channel Canada, as well as appearing in the New York Times, Wired, on CBC and BBC radio, and twice in exhibits at the Smithsonian Museums in Washington, DC.
Watch the live stream on Amii's YouTube channel!
