91

Christian Guckelsberger

Christian Guckelsberger

I'm a Computer Scientist, Art Historian and Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies at Aalto University, where I lead the Autotelic Interaction Research (AIR) group. My goal is to engineer artificial systems that are creative in their own right and in interaction with people. Moreover, I am interested in how creative AI is perceived by its users and the general public, and how we can support its sustainable adoption in the workplace and in society. I conduct interdisciplinary, theoretical work as well as applied qualitative and quantitative research in various creative domains such as videogames, fine art and design, bridging between AI, HCI, Psychology, Philosophy & Creative Practice.

Inspired by its central role in human and animal creativity, I advocate intrinsic motivation as a key to unleashing creativity in artificial systems. I contribute to the comparison of existing and the development of new, psychologically plausible models of computational intrinsic motivation with a focus on multi-agent interaction, and I apply my findings to shape the next generation of transformative videogame AI. I promote games as a domain for computational creativity research because they allow us to study and foster both, human and AI creativity, in play and in game design, across different types of content, with societal, cultural and economic impact.

I am also a visiting scholar at the School of Electronical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, a PI in the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI), and a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).

The list below is a selection of recent publications. You can find the complete list on and my academic CV . Also, a recorded talk with an overview of six recent research projects on creative AI.

You can best contact me via email. I occasionally post news on , or as @CreativeEndvs on and .

I'm always interested in meeting curious, smart and ambitious people to work with. If you would like to do a Research Visit/Postdoc/PhD or your MSc thesis with me, please check out the application instructions on our group's website. Unfortunately, I do not have time to respond to requests that do not follow these instructions. 

Full researcher profile
Postiosoite
Konemiehentie 2 02150 Espoo Finland

Osaamisalueet

Computational Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Intrinsic Motivation, Videogames, Design

Palkinnot

Honorable Mention (CHI PLAY 2023)

Awarded for V. Vimpari, A. Kultima, P. Hämäläinen and C. Guckelsberger: "An Adapt-or-Die Type of Situation": Perception, Adoption, and Use of Text-To-Image-Generation AI by Game Industry Professionals. In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 7, CHI PLAY, p. 131–164, 379.
Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Jan 2023

Finalist in “AI Game Dev” Competition

Europe’s first research-driven competition to enhance game technology. Entered with our work published in S. Roohi, C. Guckelsberger, A. Relas, H. Heiskanen, J. Takatalo, and P. Hämäläinen. Predicting Game Engagement and Difficulty Using AI Players. Proc. of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CHI Play):1–18, 2021.
Invitation or ranking in competition Department of Computer Science Dec 2021

Best Paper Award (International Conference on Computational Creativity)

Awarded for S. Colton, A. Pease, C. Guckelsberger, J. McCormack, and M. T. Llano. On the Machine Condition and its Creative Expression. In Proc. Int. Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), pages 342–349, 2020.
Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Sep 2020

Best Paper Award (IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games)

Awarded for C. Guckelsberger, C. Salge, and J. Togelius. New And Surprising Ways to be Mean: Adversarial NPCs with Coupled Empowerment Minimisation. In Proc. Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), pages 1–8. IEEE, 2018.
Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Aug 2018

Finalist in “Creative Computing for the Digital Economy” Competition

A category in the UK-wide “Connected Nations Pioneers” competition, hosted by the EPSRC to recognise exceptional postgraduate research contributions. Awarded for my work on intrinsically motivated NPCs for next-generation game AI.
Invitation or ranking in competition Department of Computer Science Oct 2018

Best Paper Honourable Mention (CHI Play)

Awarded for C. Guckelsberger, C. Salge, J. Gow, and P. A. Cairns. Predicting Player Experience Without the Player. An Exploratory Study. In Proc. SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI Play), pages 305–315. ACM, 2017. Honourable mentions are given to the top 5 papers in the competition.
Award or honor granted for a specific work Department of Computer Science Oct 2017

Julkaisut

Erik M. Lintunen, Nadia M. Ady, Sebastian Deterding, Christian Guckelsberger 2025

Niki Pennanen, Simo Linkola, Anna Kantosalo, Nicolas Hiillos, Tomi Männistö, Christian Guckelsberger 2025 ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

Sebastian Berns, Vanessa Volz, Laurissa Tokarchuk, Sam Snodgrass, Christian Guckelsberger 2024 CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Sebastian Deterding, Erik Matias Lintunen, Christian Guckelsberger, Nadia M. Ady 2024

Joonas Lahikainen, Nadia M. Ady, Christian Guckelsberger 2024 Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2024)

Erik Lintunen, Nadia Ady, Christian Guckelsberger 2024

Lisa B Soros, Alyssa M Adams, Stefano Kalonaris, Olaf Witkowski, Christian Guckelsberger 2024 ALIFE 2024: Proceedings of the 2024 Artificial Life Conference

Ville Tanskanen, Chang Rajani, Perttu Hämäläinen, Christian Guckelsberger, Arto Klami 2024 Transactions on Machine Learning Research

Severi Uusitalo, Anna Kantosalo, Antti Salovaara, Tapio Takala, Christian Guckelsberger 2024 Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

Susanna Värtinen, Perttu Hämäläinen, Christian Guckelsberger 2024 IEEE Transactions on Games