Tag Archives: leverage

Gaming as Life: How Therapists Leverage Video Games to Support Vulnerable Children

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oWhen Russia’s invasion of Ukraine commenced, Leksii Sukhorukov’s son was just 12 years old. For months, their family endured trauma and uncertainty. Sukhorukov had to leave his job in the entertainment sector, which included virtual reality and video games, leading to isolation from friends and family. Amid all this chaos, his son found solace in Minecraft. No matter the turmoil outside, he could enter Mojang’s block-building game to escape.

“After February 24, 2022, my perspective on the game shifted dramatically,” Skorkov reflects. He discovered a community of Ukrainian children playing together online. Some lived under Russian occupation, while others resided in government-controlled regions frequently targeted by missile strikes. Many had become refugees, yet they managed to connect, support each other, and construct their own worlds. Isn’t that fascinating? I felt compelled to explore how video games could be harnessed for this purpose.”

Sukhorukov, who holds a degree in psychology, chose to return to his roots, aiming to integrate his gaming experience with mental health practices. He is now the MC of the Ukrainian National Psychological Association’s Cyber Psychology Department. In 2023, he launched HealGame Ukraine, a project focused on utilizing video games for mental and emotional health support. “Currently, in collaboration with the Donetsk National Institute of Technology, we are developing a Minecraft server aimed at bringing together Ukrainian children who feel particularly isolated due to the conflict,” he explains. “The server will be facilitated by psychologists and social workers, and we also plan to create a Minecraft project for children with special educational needs.”




Lighthouse…Moment from Oleksii Sukhorukov’s Wonderworld project, where kids create towers to connect with each other on Minecraft servers. Photo: оacy

Play has been a foundation of child therapy for nearly a century, thanks to pioneers like Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Virginia Axlein. However, the integration of video games into therapy has been spearheaded by a new generation of practitioners who grew up gaming since the early 2010s. In 2011, Massachusetts-based therapist and gamer Minecra Grova published “Reset: Video Games and Psychotherapy,” a guide for clinicians seeking to understand gaming culture’s impact on adolescents. This piqued the interest of UK counselor Ellie Finch. Growing up with Mega Drive games, she began contemplating how to incorporate games into therapy after engaging with titles like Nie and Minecraft in 2012. However, the onset of the pandemic halted her plans.

“I transitioned from in-person youth counseling to online sessions overnight,” Finch recalls. “There are limitations to providing counseling via video calls, and I noticed many of the children were gamers. I began discussing video games with them.

Minecraft has shown to be particularly effective for several reasons: it’s one of the most popular games globally, with over 200 million players, making it familiar and accessible to many kids. Its open and creative structure allows players to express themselves freely, gathering materials to construct homes, explore, and fend off zombies.

Finch creates a private Minecraft environment exclusively for her and the children she works with. Clients can dictate parameters; some may prefer no hostile characters and opt for creative mode, while others desire a flat sky landscape. “I often begin the first session by asking my clients to design a safe space in their world,” Finch states. “This could be a house, castle, or underwater observatory. Their creations reveal much about their inner world right from the start.”




The ideal home… Ellie Finch guides clients in building a secure home within Minecraft. Photo: Microsoft/Ellie Finch

Therapists can navigate the game in various ways, allowing for a non-directed format where they follow the client to develop trust and employ therapeutic skills to decode the ongoing dynamics. “Minecraft provides a sense of adventure,” Finch notes. “Clients might wish to explore caves, swim underwater, battle hostile mobs, or construct intricate machines, opening a multitude of possibilities.

Therapists can also employ commands that engage clients in therapeutic or psychoeducational tasks. Recently, Sukhorukov and Ukrainian psychologist Anna Schulha, along with nonprofit Martesezer Werke, orchestrated a quest called Wonderworld for Ukrainian refugees aged 11-13 in Germany. These children, often feeling isolated and burdened by forced migration, participated in sessions where they had to find envelopes containing Minecraft-related resources hidden around their living spaces and nearby parks. They then utilized these resources in the game to create cakes and other items.

“At the conclusion of each session, we encouraged kids to reflect on the positive emotions and experiences they encountered during the game,” Skorkov shares. “It’s fascinating to observe the kids’ constructions and the choices they make. Are they vibrant and open, or concealed underground? How do they navigate this gaming realm?

Finch resonates with the notion that creativity within video games serves as a medium of communication, akin to drawing or building with LEGO. “The kids have shown me their fears and feelings of entrapment by guiding me into dark caves. They constructed slime block trampolines to relieve tension. Teenagers have utilized the game to venture outside their ‘safe spaces’ and explore unfamiliar territories beyond the guidance of therapists and trusted adults. In 2024, she plans to collaborate with the Cambridge University Faculty of Education on a project named ‘Chasm: Creating Accessible Services Using Minecraft’ to showcase these therapeutic uses.

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Today, an increasing number of therapists are exploring the potential of video games in diverse ways. Drawing influence from Sukhorukov, they’re doing essential work that elucidates the digital landscape, cyber trauma, and the realities children face in gaming.

It’s not just about Minecraft. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Animal Crossing are also becoming therapeutic tools. Regardless of the game, therapy is essential in reflecting the increasingly digital lives of our youth. “For individuals raised in a tech-rich world, digital play isn’t merely a pastime,” Stone asserts. “They utilize platforms, programs, and devices as their primary forms of creativity and connection, amplifying the foundations of psychotherapy rather than replacing them.

Finch is currently contemplating extending video game therapy to adults, recognizing that this approach can be beneficial across all ages, given her lifelong devotion to gaming.

For Sukhorukov, a profound dynamic exists between Ukrainian children and Minecraft. The therapeutic impact is expanding throughout the nation. “If you search for the term ‘майнкрафт’ on Ukrainian YouTube, you will find numerous videos created by Ukrainian children and teenagers within Minecraft. They reflect lives intersected by war, with military parents, loved ones, or displaced companions. The war has fragmented their connections, affecting every Ukrainian child.

“Moreover, there’s something else that may be challenging to convey. The homelands of many Ukrainians—Volnovakha, Sievierodonetsk, Soledar, Mar’inka, Bakhmut—only exist in Minecraft. Children lack the capacity to articulate their experiences in extensive articles about these realities.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Microsoft aims to leverage AI tools to assist in the creation of video games

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Muse AI was trained in video games Bleeding Edge

Microsoft

Microsoft’s artificial intelligence models can replicate realistic video game footage the company says will help designers create games, but experts are not convinced that the tool will help most game developers. yeah.

Neural networks that can generate consistent, accurate footage from video games are nothing new. A recent Google-created AI produced a fully playable version of a classic computer game destiny No access to the underlying game engine. original destiny, However, it was released in 1993. More modern games are more complex with sophisticated physics and computationally intensive graphics, and have proven difficult for AIS to faithfully replicate.

now, Katja Hofmann Microsoft Research and her colleagues developed an AI model called Muse. This allows you to recreate the complete sequence of multiplayer online battle games Bleeding edge. These sequences follow the physics that underlie the game, and appear to keep players and in-game objects consistent over time. This means that the model has a deeper understanding of the game, says Hofmann.

The Muse is trained with seven years of human gameplay data, including both controllers and video footage. Bleeding EdgeNinja Studios is a Microsoft-owned developer. It works similarly to large language models such as ChatGpt. If given input, it imposes predicting the next gameplay in the form of video game frames and their associated controller actions. “To this day, for me, it’s a very moving thing to me, purely from training models to predict what will come next. I learn a sophisticated and deep understanding of this complex 3D environment,” Hoffman said. I say it.

To understand how people use AI tools like Muse, the team researched game developers and learned which features would be useful. As a result, researchers added the ability to repeatedly adjust changes made on the spot, such as changes to player characters or new objects entering the scene. This could help you come up with new ideas and try out what-if scenarios for developers, says Hofmann.

However, the muse is still limited to generating sequences within the original boundaries Bleeding Edge Games – Can’t come up with new concepts or designs. And I say it’s unclear whether this is a model-specific limitation or something that can be overcome with more training data from other games. Mike Cook King’s College London. “This is a long way from the idea that AI systems can design their own games.”

The ability to generate consistent gameplay sequences is impressive, but developers may prefer greater control, says Cook. “If you create a tool that is actually testing the game code itself, you don’t have to worry about persistence or consistency because you’re running the actual game. So these are introduced by generative AI itself. It’s solving the problem.”

It is promised that the model is designed with developers in mind, he says Georgios Yannakakis The Digital Games Institute at the University of Malta may not be feasible for most developers who don’t have that much training data. “Does that come down to the question of it being worth it?” says Yannakakis. “Microsoft has been collecting data for seven years and training these models to demonstrate what they can actually do. But real game studios can afford it. [to do] this? “

Even Microsoft itself is vague about whether AI-designed games could be on the horizon. When asked if there was a possibility that developers in the Xbox gaming division would use the tool, the company declined to comment.

Hofmann and her team hope that future versions of Muse can generalize beyond training data, but they can create new scenarios and levels for the games they are trained to work in a variety of games. I hope that I can do it. Challenge is because modern games are very complicated.

“One way games distinguish themselves is by changing the system and introducing new concept-level ideas. So machine learning systems go outside of their training data and go beyond what they see. It’s extremely difficult to innovate and invent,” he says.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

How scientists leverage your surname to apprehend serial offenders

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In the realm of crime-solving, Forensic Detective Genetic Genealogy (FIGG) has emerged as a powerful tool, ushered in by the guilty plea of Joseph James DeAngelo, also known as the Golden State Killer, nearly four years ago. DNA testing has long been used to match crimes to perpetrators, but when a suspect is lacking, FIGG steps in to fill the gap.

According to Dr. Tuli King, who spoke at the Cheltenham Science Festival, “With DNA databases, we can find people who are genetic relatives of DNA found at a crime scene.”

By creating family trees through DNA matches, police and experts are able to track down potential suspects, as was the case with DeAngelo, whose crimes in California during the 1970s and 1980s were solved with the help of DNA uploaded to consumer ancestry websites like GED Match.

Since then, over 500 cases have been solved using FIGG, showcasing the potential for DNA data to be a valuable tool in criminal investigations. However, concerns about ethical implications remain, with the importance of informed consent and privacy being emphasized by experts like Dr. King.

Where is this all leading?

Looking ahead, Dr. King believes FIGG will continue to play a crucial role in solving serious crimes, with the potential for DNA technology to be utilized in more innovative ways in the future. One intriguing possibility she discusses is the use of surnames and Y chromosome types in crime-solving scenarios.

While the link between surnames and genetic markers may provide valuable leads, Dr. King acknowledges the complexities and challenges of such an approach, highlighting the need for extensive databases and further research.

About our experts

Tuli King is a respected scientist in the field of genetic genealogy, known for her work in solving forensic DNA cases and exploring the relationship between Y chromosomes and British surnames. Her groundbreaking research has paved the way for new insights into the intersection of genetics and criminal investigations.

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Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Factory plans to leverage AI for streamlining the software development lifecycle

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Developer velocity (the speed at which an organization ships code) is often influenced by necessary but time-consuming processes such as code reviews, documentation, and testing. Inefficiencies can make these processes even longer. according to According to one source, developers waste 17.3 hours a week on technical debt and bad code, or code that doesn’t work.

Machine learning Ph.D. Matan Greenberg and Eno Reyes, previously a data scientist at Hugging Face and Microsoft, thought there had to be a better way.

During a hackathon in San Francisco, Greenberg and Reyes built a platform that could autonomously solve simple coding problems. This is a platform they later came to believe had commercial potential. After the hackathon, the two expanded the platform to handle more software development tasks and founded a company. factoryto monetize what they built.

“Factory’s mission is to bring autonomy to software engineering,” Grinberg told TechCrunch in an email interview. “More specifically, Factory helps large engineering organizations automate parts of their software development lifecycle through AI-powered autonomous systems.”

Factory systems – Greenberg calls them “droids” in Lucasfilm terminology there may be a problem — Built to juggle a variety of repetitive, mundane, but typically time-consuming software engineering tasks. For example, Factory has “Droids” for reviewing code, refactoring or rebuilding code, and even generating new code from a prompt like GitHub Copilot.

Grinberg explains: “Reviews Droid leaves insightful code reviews, providing human reviewers with context for every change to the codebase. Documentation Droid generates documentation as needed and continuously updates it. Test Droid creates tests and maintains test coverage percentages as new code is merged. Droid knowledge resides in communication platforms (such as Slack) to answer deeper questions about engineering systems. Project Droid also helps you plan and design requirements based on customer support tickets and feature requests.”

Factory’s droids all have what Greenberg calls a “droid core,” an engine that ingests and processes a company’s engineering system data to build a knowledge base, and an engine that extracts insights from the knowledge base to perform various engineering tasks. It is built on algorithms that solve problems. . His third Droid core component, his Reflection Engine, acts as a filter for third-party AI models that Factory utilizes, allowing Factory to implement its own safety measures, security best practices, etc. based on these models. I will make it possible.

“The enterprise perspective here is that this will enable engineering organizations to output better products faster, while also boosting engineering morale by offloading tedious tasks such as code reviews, documentation, and testing. It’s a suite of software that makes it better,” Greenberg said. “Additionally, the autonomous nature of the droid requires little user education or onboarding.”

Now, if Factory can consistently and reliably automate all these development tasks, the platform will certainly pay for itself. According to 2019 investigation According to Tidelift and The New Stack, developers spend 35% of their time managing code, including testing and addressing security issues, and less than a third of their time actually coding.

But the question is, can it be done?

Even today’s best AI models can make fatal mistakes. Generative coding tools can also introduce insecure code, and a Stanford study found that software engineers who use code generation AI are more likely to introduce security vulnerabilities in the apps they develop. It is suggested.

Greenberg was candid about the fact that Factory doesn’t have the capital to train all its models in-house, so it’s at the mercy of third-party limitations. But while relying on third-party vendors for some of its AI capabilities, he argues that the Factory platform still provides value.

“Our approach is to build these AI systems and inference architectures, leverage cutting-edge models, establish relationships with customers, and deliver value now,” Greenberg said. Masu. “For early startups, training is a losing battle. [large] model. There is no financial advantage, no chip access advantage, no data advantage, and (almost certainly) no technological advantage compared to incumbents. ”

Factory long play teeth Greenberg said the company will further train its AI models to build an “end-to-end” engineering AI system and differentiate those models by collecting engineering training data from early customers.

“Over time, you have more capital. Chip shortage The problem is solved and we have direct access (with permission) to a treasure trove of data (i.e., the historical timeline of the entire engineering organization). ” he continued. “We build robust and fully autonomous droids with minimal human intervention, customizing them to our customers’ needs from day one.”

Is that too optimistic? perhaps. Competition in the AI ​​startup market is increasing day by day.

But to Greenberg’s credit, Factory already works with a core group of about 15 companies. Mr. Greenberg declined to name names, but the size of his clients, which have used Factor’s platform to date to perform thousands of code reviews and create hundreds of thousands of lines of code, is from “seed stage.” It covers a wide range of topics, including “public”.

And Factory recently closed a $5 million seed round co-led by Sequoia and Lux ​​with participation from SV Angel, BoxGroup, DataBricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue. Greenberg said the new funding will be used to expand Factory’s six-person team and platform capabilities.

“The main challenges in this AI code generation industry are trust and differentiation,” he said. “Every VP of Engineering wants to use AI to improve their organization’s outcomes. This is hindered by the unreliability of many AI tools and the lack of confidence that this new futuristic sound A large labyrinthine organization that refuses to trust its technology…Factory is building a world where software engineering itself is an accessible, scalable commodity.”

Source: techcrunch.com