I’m a final year PhD candidate working on biosignal modelling of player experience and behavioural analytics at the York HCI labs. At least, that’s what I was doing before the plague ruined my lab and research. Since then I’ve been doing online survey research and studying psychometrics. I’m currently writing up my PhD thesis on the measurement of video game Immersion.
Background
If you want to reach out to me or you’d like my full resume, email me at [myat]at[aung]dot[uk] or you can reach out to me on my linkedin. A brief overview of my background below:
PhD, Computer Science & Human Computer Interactions
University of York, Dept. of Computer Science
My PhD on the measurement of Immersion is supervised by the wonderful professors Paul Cairns and Alex Wade. As part of my training, I’ve also studied courses on Numerical Analysis and Econometrics & Statistics to round out my technical skills.
MSci, Psychology: Neuroscience & Neuroimaging
University of York, Dept. of Psychology
I studied for my first degree under the supervision of Dr. Rob Jenkins, at the department of Psychology. I was also guided significantly by Dr. Philip Quinlan, who supervised my reading into the effects of playing video games on sleep quality and duration. My master’s thesis involved trying to systematically produce parrahippocampal gyrus responses to images that were parametrically manipulated based on their low level properties. It was a small piece of a larger body of ongoing work by Dr. Tom Hartley and Dr. David Watson.
Teaching
I love teaching, and throughout my doctorates I’ve taught at the departments of Computer Science, and Psychology here in York. My favourite have been:
- Advanced Research Methods: Intro to R with topics like fourier analysis, monte carlo methods, and machine learning for Psychology final year undergrads and masters students.
- Statistics: I’ve helped Paul Cairns with delivering statistics labs for masters HCI students.
- Cognitive Neuroscience of Economic Games: UG Seminars on neuroimaging research using game theory experiments as their central paradigm.
Other stuff
- I like trying to use Discord to make weird chat based social games, like bossfight club and stonks.
- I have been collaborating with Sagarika Patra at WEAVR on machine learning projects for esports in DOTA 2.
- I was a research intern with the Digital Creativity labs, working on a project in collaboration with Riot Games on skill prediction in player populations. The paper is open and can be found on whiterose.
- Much of my good fortune is because of Athanasios Kokkinakis who introduced me to the concept of doing research on games at all, and I’ve been credited with collecting data on some of his publications.
- My earliest experience in research was thanks to Jet Sanders, who I helped with labelling and processing of traffic data for her work on weekday effects on risk taking behaviours.
Publications
I haven’t published much so far, but below is a list of my peer reviewed work. I have a few others in the works, and my google scholar may be more up to date (link on the header).
Predicting Skill Learning in a Large, Longitudinal MOBA Dataset
M Aung, V Bonometti, A Drachen, P Cowling, AV Kokkinakis, C Yoder, A Wade
Proceedings 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)
PDF Here
The trails of Just Cause 2: spatio-temporal player profiling in open-world games
Myat Aung, Simon Demediuk, Yuan Sun, Ye Tu, Yu Ang, Siva Nekkanti, Shantanu Raghav, Diego Klabjan, Rafet Sifa, Anders Drachen
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
PDF Here