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As Riot Wesley Kerr’s head of technology and Yves Jacquier, executive director of Ubisoft La Forge, told The Loadout, the Zero Harm in Comms project implements complex semantics to understand and infer the intent of text. It aims to test the reliability of scalable AI solutions that can be trained to base communication.
This initiative, like most major academic projects, grew out of beer. More specifically, missed beer opportunities. The two directors were originally scheduled to meet at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2020, but the arrival of COVID has ruined their meeting. Despite this, the two kept in touch, and two years later, phone conversations began to materialize.
“From a technical and R&D perspective, we faced the same problem: [training AI] is a complex problem,” he said. “For technical reasons, training an AI to target malicious content requires a large amount of data.
“So we talked about it and then came up with the crazy idea of starting a joint R&D project with two legs. The first is to find a way to share data securely […], 2 The first is the data blueprint: do we create algorithms that are trustworthy enough to detect all kinds of toxic content?”
This is certainly an amazing collaboration, especially when it comes to valuable data. Nonetheless, Jacquier said the alignment between his two games and his monolith, both part of the Fair Play Alliance, was so strong that it was “very hard to reach out and get the ball rolling.” “It was easy to do.”
Kerr said that Riot aims to increase its investment in technology research and that Jacquier’s cooperation with Ubisoft is “a great opportunity to work together given his Ubisoft and Riot desire to improve the gaming experience and players. It was,” he adds.