I am an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University.

Email: clump@cs.mcgill.ca (or clark.verbrugge@mcgill.ca)
Office hours: Mondays 10:30—12:00 (virtual), and Thursdays 14:00-15:30 (in-person, MC230)
Voice: (514) 398-2411 But please use email; I don't think the phone works anymore.
Fax: (514) 398-3883
Pigeon: please attach your note to the grey one with white spots ("Carl")

Mailing Address:

Fall 2024: COMP 521 Modern Computer Games.
Winter 2025: COMP 409 Concurrent Programming.

I am interested in several research areas. If you are student with some interest in one or other of these topics, check out the "Prospective" tab and contact me.

Modern computer games

I am interested in various topics related to formalizing and understanding different aspects of games. Much of the recent work has focused on level analysis and design concerns, especially in the context of practical and effective game AI, but also on approaches to procedural content generation, and game narrative as well. You can find publications on the publication tab, student theses on the students tab, and more general information on the sometimes-working GR@M website.

Compilers and Languages

Much of my research work has focused on compiler analysis and optimization, especially in the context of concurrent computing. I have a current interest in optimization of web-based computation (such as via WebAssembly), exploiting concurrency in general, as well as a more theoretical interest in memory consistency, especially as a pertains to compiler optimization.
You can find publications on the publication tab, student theses on the students tab, and more general information on the aging Sable Research Group website.

I mainly target conferences, rather than journals. I do not have convenient links to all publications, particularly the older ones. If you are interested in an article, feel free to email me. Also note that other than a few older ones I have not included technical reports in this list.

1. Julien Deantoni, Paula Muñoz, Cláudio Gomes, Clark Verbrugge, Rakshit Mittal, Robert Heinrich, Stijn Bellis, Antonio Vallecillo. "Quantifying and combining uncertainty for improving the behavior of Digital Twin Systems." Accepted to Automatisierungstechnik.
2. Jonathan Campbell, Clark Verbrugge. "Procedural generation of rollercoasters." (expanded journal version). Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Games. (early access)

1. Quentin Massonnat, Clark Verbrugge. "Efficient Octree-based 3D Pathfinding." IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2024). Milan, Italy. August 2024. official site paper
2. Cheng Li, Clark Verbrugge. "Regular Expressions on Modern GPGPUs." GPGPU '24: Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on General Purpose Processing Using GPU. Edinburgh, UK. March 2024. official site

1. Wael Al Enezi, Clark Verbrugge. "Evaluating Player Experience in Stealth Games: Dynamic Guard Patrol Behavior Study." 19th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-23). Salt Lake City, USA. October 2023. official site
2. Wael Al Enezi, Clark Verbrugge. "Investigating the Influence of Behaviors and Dialogs on Player Enjoyment in Stealth Games." 19th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-23). Salt Lake City, USA. October 2023. official site
3. Jonathan Campbell, Clark Verbrugge. "Procedural generation of rollercoasters." 5th IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2023). Boston, USA. August 2023. official site
4. Alexander Krolik, Clark Verbrugge, Laurie Hendren. "rNdN: Fast Query Compilation for NVIDIA GPUs." ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. 20(3). Article 41. official site
5. Akshay Gopalakrishnan, Clark Verbrugge, Mark Batty. "Memory Consistency Models for Program Transformations: An Intellectual Abstract." ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management. Orlando, Florida. pp.30–42. June 2023. official site

1. Wael Al Enezi, Clark Verbrugge. "Stealthy path planning against dynamic observers." Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games. Guanajuato, Mexico. Article 11. pp.1–9. November 2022. official site

1. Prabhjot Sandhu, Clark Verbrugge, Laurie Hendren. "A Hybrid Synchronization Mechanism for Parallel Sparse Triangular Solve." Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC 2021). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol.13181. pp.118–133. 2022. official site
2. Quinn Kybartas, Clark Verbrugge, Jonathan Lessard. "A Force Dynamic Model of Narrative Agents." 17th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-21). Virtual conference due to COVID-19. October 2021. pp.50–57. (Best student paper winner). official site
3. Nima Davari, Clark Verbrugge. "Efficient 2D Sound Propagation in Video Games." 17th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-21). Virtual conference due to COVID-19. October 2021. pp.132–139. (Best artifact winner). official site
4. Wael Al Enezi, Clark Verbrugge. "Skeleton-based multi-agent opponent search." 3rd IEEE Conference on Games (CoG-21). Virtual conference due to COVID-19. pp. 1--8. August 2021. official site
5. Ben Kybartas, Clark Verbrugge, Jonathan Lessard. "Tension Space Analysis for Emergent Narrative." IEEE Transactions on Games. 13(2):146–159. June 2021. official site arXiv version
6. Alexander Krolik, Clark Verbrugge, Laurie Hendren. "r3d3: Optimized Query Compilation on GPUs." CGO 2021: Proceedings of the 19th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization. Virtual conference due to COVID-19. February/March 2021. official site

1. Akshay Gopalakrishnan, Clark Verbrugge. "Reordering Under the ECMAScript Memory Consistency Model." Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC 2020). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13149. pp.198–214. 2022. official site
2. Wael Al Enezi, Clark Verbrugge. "Dynamic Guard Patrol in Stealth Games." 16th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-20). Virtual conference due to COVID-19. October 2020. pp.160–166 official site
3. Ben Kybartas, Clark Verbrugge, Jonathan Lessard. "A Sketch-Based Tool for Authoring and Analyzing Emergent Narratives." 16th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-20). Virtual conference due to COVID-19. pp.319–321 (demo-paper). official site
4. Adrian Koretski, Clark Verbrugge. "Geometry of Hiding: Generating Visibility Manifolds." 16th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-20). Virtual conference due to COVID-19. October 2020. pp.316–318 (demo-paper). official site
5. Prabhjot Sandhu, Clark Verbrugge, Laurie Hendren. "A Fully Structure-driven Performance Analysis of Sparse Matrix-vector Multiplication." ICPE '20: Proceedings of the ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering. Virtual conference due to COVID-19. April 2020. official site presentation video presentation slides
6. Hanfeng Chen, Alexander Krolik, Bettina Kemme, Clark Verbrugge, Laurie Hendren. "Improving Database Query Performance with Automatic Fusion." Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Compiler Construction. San Diego, California. February 2020. pp.63–73. official site

1. Jonathan Campbell, Clark Verbrugge. "Exploration in NetHack with Secret Discovery." IEEE Transactions on Games. 11(4):363–373, 2019. official site arxiv preprint
2. Jorge Morales Díaz, Clark Verbrugge. "Solving the take-down and body-hiding problems." Experimental AI in Games: An AIIDE 2019 Workshop. Atlanta, Georgia. October 2019. paper
3. Simon Van Mierlo, Julien Deantoni, Loli Burgueño, Clark Verbrugge, Hans Vangheluwe. "Towards sketching interfaces for multi-paradigm modeling." MPM4CPS — First International Workshop on Multi-Paradigm Modelling for Cyber-Physical Systems in the 2019 ACM/IEEE 22nd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C). September 2019. pp.437–442. HAL archive site

1. Ben Kybartas, Clark Verbrugge, Jonathan Lessard. "Expressive Range Analysis of a Possible Worlds Driven Emergent Narrative System." International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2018). Dublin, Ireland. December 2018. pp.473–477. official site paper bibtex
2. Mengxi Xoey Zhang, Clark Verbrugge. "Modelling Player Understanding of Non-Player Character Paths." 14th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-17). Edmonton, Alberta. November 2018. pp.257–263. official site paper bibtex
3. Hugo Scurti, Clark Verbrugge. "Generating Paths with WFC." 14th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-17). Edmonton, Alberta. November 2018. pp.271–273. official site paper bibtex
4. Bentley James Oakes, Levi Lucio, Clark Verbrugge, Hans Vangheluwe. "Debugging of Model Transformations and Contracts in SyVOLT." Second International Workshop on Debugging in Model-Driven Engineering. Copenhagen, Denmark. October 2018. official site paper slides
5. Māris Jukšs, Clark Verbrugge, Maged Elaasar, Hans Vangheluwe. "Scope in Model Transformations." in Software & Systems Modeling. Volume 17, Number 4. October 2018. pp. 1227–1252. official link
6. Hugo Scurti, Clark Verbrugge. "Generating Paths with WFC." non-refereed ArXiv preprint, arXiv:1808.04317 [cs.AI]. August 2018 arxiv link

1. Ben Kybartas, Clark Verbrugge, Jonathan Lessard. "Subject and Subjectivity: A Conversational Game using Possible Worlds." International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2017). Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. November 2017. pp.332–335. official site paper bibtex
2. Simon Van Mierlo and Erwan Bousse and Hans Vangheluwe and Manuel Wimmer and Clark Verbrugge and Martin Gogolla and Matthias Tichy and Arnaud Blouin. "Report on the 1^st International Workshop on Debugging in Model-Driven Engineering (MDEbug'17)." MDEbug - 1st International Workshop on Debugging in Model-Driven Engineering. Austin, Texas, USA. November 2017. pp.441–446. official site paper
3. Jonathan Campbell, Clark Verbrugge. "Learning Combat in NetHack." 13th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-17). Snowbird City, Utah. October 2017. pp.16–22. official site paper bibtex
4. Māris Jukšs, Clark Verbrugge, Hans Vangheluwe. "Transformations Debugging Transformations." First International Workshop on Debugging in Model-Driven Engineering. Austin, Texas. September 2017. to appear official site paper slides
5. Jonathan Campbell, Clark Verbrugge. "Exploration in NetHack Using Occupancy Maps." FDG'17 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Hyannis, Massachusetts. August 2017. pp.42:1–42:4. official site paper bibtex

1. Clark Verbrugge, Christopher J.F. Pickett, Alexander Krolik, Allan Kielstra. "Exhaustive Analysis of Thread-level Speculation." 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering for Parallel Systems. Amsterdam, Netherlands. November 2016. pp.23–34. official site paper bibtex
2. Navjot Singh, Clark Verbrugge. "Staying Hidden: An Analysis of Hiding Strategies in a 2D Level with Occlusions." 12th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-16). Burlingame, California. October 2016. official site paper bibtex
3. Alexander Borodovski, Clark Verbrugge. "Analyzing Stealth Games with Distractions." 12th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-16). Burlingame, California. October 2016. official site paper bibtex
4. István Dávid, Eugene Syriani, Clark Verbrugge, Didier Buchs, Dominique Blouin, Antonio Cicchetti, Ken Vanherpen. "Towards Inconsistency Tolerance by Quantification of Semantic Inconsistencies." in First International Workshop on Collaborative Modelling in MDE. Saint Malo, France. October 2016. official site paper bibtex
5. Shuo Xu, Clark Verbrugge. "Heuristics for Sleep and Heal in Combat." in IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2016). Santorini Island, Greece. September 2016. official site paper bibtex
6. Muntasir Chowdhury, Clark Verbrugge. "Exhaustive Exploration Strategies for NPCs." in 7th Workshop on Procedural Content Generation (PCG 2016). Dundee, Scotland. August 2016. official site paper bibtex
7. Zhen Cao, Clark Verbrugge. "Reducing Memory Buffering Overhead in Software Thread-Level Speculation." 25th International Conference on Compiler Construction. Barcelona, Spain. March 2016. pp.12–22. official site paper slides bibtex

1. Jonathan Tremblay, Clark Verbrugge. "An Algorithmic Approach to Decorative Content Placement." Experimental AI In Games workshop. Santa Cruz, California. November 2015. official site paper bibtex
2. Māris Jukšs, Bruno Barroca, Clark Verbrugge, Hans Vangheluwe. "Towards a Unifying Model Transformation Bus." 9th International Workshop on Multi-Paradigm Modeling. Ottawa, Ontario. September 2015. pp.62-71. official site paper bibtex
3. Jonathan Campbell, Jonathan Tremblay, Clark Verbrugge. "Clustering Player Paths." FDG'15: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. Monterey, California. June 2015. official site paper bibtex
4. Jonathan Tremblay, Clark Verbrugge. "A Game Genre Agnostic Framework For Game-Design." Fourth International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering (GAS 2015). Florence, Italy. May 2015. pp.3-7. official site paper bibtex

1. Ben Kybartas, Clark Verbrugge. "Analysis of ReGEN as a Graph Rewriting System for Quest Generation." in Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games. 6(2):228-242. June 2014. official site paper bibtex
2. Jonathan Tremblay, Alexander Borodovski, Clark Verbrugge. "I Can Jump! Exploring Search Algorithms for Simulating Platformer Players." Experimental AI In Games workshop. Raleigh, North Carolina. October 2014. official site paper bibtex
3. Qihan Xu, Jonathan Tremblay, Clark Verbrugge. "Generative Methods for Guard and Camera Placement in Stealth Games." 10th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-14). Raleigh, North Carolina. October 2014. official site paper bibtex
4. Māris Jukšs, Clark Verbrugge, Dániel Varró, Hans Vangheluwe. "Dynamic Scope Discovery for Model Transformations." 7th International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2014). Västerǿas, Sweden. September 2014. official site
5. Joachim Denil, Māris Jukšs, Clark Verbrugge, Hans Vangheluwe. "Search-Based Model Optimization using Model Transformations." 8th System Analysis and Modelling Conference (SAM 2014). September 2014. official site
6. Jonathan Tremblay, Pedro Andrade Torres, Clark Verbrugge. "An Algorithmic Approach to Analyzing Combat and Stealth Games." IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games CIG'14:. Dortmund, Germany. August 2014. official site paper bibtex
7. Qihan Xu, Jonathan Tremblay, Clark Verbrugge. "Procedural Guard Placement for Stealth Games." Fifth Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games (PCG 2014). Miami, Florida. April 2014. official site paper bibtex
8. Jonathan Tremblay, Christopher Dragert, Clark Verbrugge. "Target Selection for AI Companions in FPS Games." FDG'14: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. Miami, Florida. April 2014. official site paper bibtex
9. Jonathan Tremblay, Pedro Andrade Torres, Clark Verbrugge. "Measuring Risk in Stealth Games." FDG'14: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. Miami, Florida. April 2014. official site paper bibtex

1. Zhen Cao, Clark Verbrugge. "Mixed Model Universal Software Thread-Level Speculation." International Conference on Parallel Processing: The 42nd Annual Conference. Lyon, France. October 2013. official site paper bibtex
2. Ben Kybartas, Clark Verbrugge. "Integrating formal qualitative analysis techniques within a procedural narrative generation system." Intelligent Narrative Technologies 6. Boston, Massachusetts. October 2013. official site paper slides bibtex
3. Jonathan Tremblay, Pedro Andrade Torres, Nir Rikovitch, Clark Verbrugge. "An Exploration Tool for Predicting Stealthy Behaviour." The Second Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in the Game Design Process (IDPv2). Boston, Massachusetts. October 2013. official site paper bibtex
4. Christopher Dragert, Jörg Kienzle, Clark Verbrugge. "Scythe AI: A Tool for Modular AI Reuse." Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. Boston, Massachusetts. October 2013. official site
5. Amir Yahyavi, Jonathan Tremblay, Clark Verbrugge, Bettina Kemme. "Towards the Design of a Human-Like FPS NPC using Pheromone Maps." IEEE Games Innovation Conference (IGIC). Vancouver, British Columbia. September 2013. official site paper bibtex
6. Zhen Cao, Clark Verbrugge. "Adaptive Fork-Heuristics for Software Thread-Level Speculation." 10th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics. Warsaw, Poland. September 2013. official site paper bibtex
7. Timothy Michael Drews, Paul G. Kry, James Richard Forbes, Clark Verbrugge. "Sequential Pose Estimation Using Linearized Rotation Matrices." Tenth Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV 2013). Regina, Saskatchewan. May 2013. official site paper bibtex
8. Jonathan Tremblay, Clark Verbrugge. "Adaptive companions in FPS games." FDG'13: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. pp. 229-236. Chania, Greece. May 2013. official site paper slides bibtex

1. Christopher Dragert, Jörg Kienzle, Clark Verbrugge. "Statechart-based AI in Practice." Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE). pp. 1-6. Palo Alto, California. October 2012. official site paper bibtex
2. Zhen Cao, Clark Verbrugge. "Language and Architecture Independent Software Thread-Level Speculation." (Poster) in Proceedings of the 25th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC'12). pp. 270-272. Tokyo, Japan. September 2012. official site
3. Christopher Dragert, Jörg Kienzle, Clark Verbrugge. "Reusable Components for Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games." in 2nd International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering (GAS 2012), held within the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering. pp. 35-41. Zürich, Switzerland. June 2012. official site paper bibtex

1. Laurie Hendren, Jesse Doherty, Anton Dubrau, Rahul Garg, Nurudeen Lameed, Soroush Radpour, Amina Aslam, Toheed Aslam, Andrew Casey, Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Jun Li, Clark Verbrugge, Olivier Savary Belanger. "McLAB: Enabling Programming Language, Compiler and Software Engineering Research for MATLAB." (Poster) in SPLASH 2011 Poster Session. Portland, Oregon. October 2011. official site
2. Martin Ashton, Clark Verbrugge. "Measuring Cooperative Gameplay Pacing in World of Warcraft." in Proceedings of the 2011 Foundations of Digital Games Conference. Bordeaux, France. June/July 2011. official site paper bibtex
3. Clark Verbrugge, Allan Kielstra, Yi Zhang. "There is Nothing Wrong with Out-of-Thin-Air: Compiler Optimization and Memory Models." in Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Memory Systems Performance and Correctness. pp. 1-6. San Jose, California. June 2011. official site paper slides bibtex
4. Christopher Dragert, Jörg Kienzle, Clark Verbrugge. "Toward High-Level Reuse of Statechart-based AI in Computer Games." in 1st International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering (GAS 2011), held within the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering. Honolulu, Hawaii. May 2011. official site paper bibtex

1. Tom Ching Ling Chen, Clark Verbrugge. "A Protocol for Distributed Collision Detection." in NetGames 2010: The 9th Annual Workshop on Network & Systems Support for Games. pp. 1-6. Taipai, Taiwan. November 2010. official site paper bibtex
2. Patrice Pominville, Feng Qian, Raja Vallée-Rai, Laurie Hendren, Clark Verbrugge. "A framework for optimizing Java using attributes." in Special Edition of the Proceedings of CASCON for High-Impact papers for the 20th Anniversary of CASCON. IBM, November 2010. official site
3. Clark Verbrugge, Peng Zhang. "Analyzing Computer Game Narratives." in Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2010, 9th International Conference. LNCS 6243. pp. 224-231. Seoul, Korea. September 2010. official site paper bibtex
4. Andrew M Casey, Jun Li, Jesse Doherty, Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Toheed Aslam, Anton Dubrau, Nurudeen A Lameed, Amina Aslam, Rahul Garg, Soroush Radpour, Olivier Savary Belanger, Laurie Jane Hendren, Clark Verbrugge. "McLab: An extensible compiler toolkit for MATLAB and related languages." (Poster) in C3S2E '10: Proceedings of the Third C* Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering. pp. 114-117. Montréal, Canada. May 2010. poster
5. Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Laurie Hendren, Clark Verbrugge. "Optimizing MATLAB through Just-In-Time Specialization." in Compiler Construction: 19th International Conference. pp.46-65. Paphos, Cyprus. March 2010. official site paper bibtex

1. Jörg Kienzle, Clark Verbrugge, Bettina Kemme, Alexandre Denault, Michael Hawker. "Mammoth: A Massively Multiplayer Game Research Framework." in The Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG'09). pp.1-8. Florida, USA. April 2009. official site paper

1. Josh Goodman, Clark Verbrugge. "A Peer Auditing Scheme for Cheat Detection in MMOGs." in NetGames 2008: 7th Workshop on Network & System Support for Games. pp.1-6. Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. October 2008. official site paper bibtex
2. Gregory B. Prokopski, Clark Verbrugge. "Analyzing the Performance of Code-copying Virtual Machines." in Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2008 Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA '08). Nashville, Tennesse. October 2008. SIGPLAN Notices, 43(10). pp.403-422. official site
3. Nicholas Rudzicz, Clark Verbrugge. "An iterated subdivision algorithm for procedural road plan generation." in 4th Annual North American Conference on intelligent games and simulation (GameOn'NA 2008). August 2008. pp.40-47. official site paper slides bibtex
4. Dayong Gu, Clark Verbrugge. "Phase-Based Adaptive Recompilation in a JVM." in CGO '08: Proceedings of the sixth annual IEEE/ACM international symposium on Code generation and optimization. Boston, Massachusetts. April 2008. pp.24-34. official site paper slides bibtex
5. Gregory B. Prokopski, Clark Verbrugge. "Compiler-guaranteed Safety in Code-copying Virtual Machines" in Compiler Construction: 17th International Conference (CC 2008). Budapest, Hungary. April 2008. pp.163-177. official site paper slides bibtex
6. Richard Halpert, Christopher J.F. Pickett, Clark Verbrugge. "Component-Based Lock Allocation." in PACT'07: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques. pp. 353-364. Braslov, Romania. September 2007. official site paper bibtex
7. Haiying Xu, Christopher J.F. Pickett, Clark Verbrugge. "Dynamic Purity Analysis for Java Programs." in PASTE'07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering. pp. 75-82. San Diego, California. June 2007. official site paper bibtex

1. Jean-Sebastien Boulangér, Jörg Kienzle, Clark Verbrugge. "Comparing interest management algorithms for massively multiplayer games." in NetGames 2006: 5th Workshop on Network & System Support for Games. pp.1-12. Singapore. October 2006. official site paper bibtex
2. Marc Lanctot, Nicolas Ng Man Sun, Clark Verbrugge. "Path Finding for Large Scale Multiplayer Computer Games." in Game-On 'NA 2006: 2nd International North American Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulation. pp. 26-33. Monterey, California. September 2006. official site paper bibtex
3. Sokhom Pheng, Clark Verbrugge. "Dynamic Data Structure Analysis for Java Programs." in 14th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC '06). pp. 191-201. Athens, Greece. June 2006. official site paper bibtex
4. Dayong Gu, Clark Verbrugge, and Etienne Gagnon. "Relative Factors in Performance Analysis of JVMs." in Second International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE '06). pp.111-121. Ottawa, Canada. June 2006. official site paper slides bibtex

1. Christopher J.F. Pickett, Clark Verbrugge. "Software Thread Level Speculation for the Java Language and Virtual Machine Environment." in Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC'05). pp. 304-318. Hawthorne, NY. October 2005. official site paper slides bibtex
2. Christopher J.F. Pickett, Clark Verbrugge. "SableSpMT: A Software Framework for Analysing Speculative Multithreading in Java." in Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE'05). pp. 59-66. Lisbon, Portugal. September 2005. official site paper slides bibtex
3. Christopher J.F. Pickett, Clark Verbrugge, Félix Martineau. "(P)NFG: A Language and Runtime System for Structured Computer Narratives." in Game-On 'NA 2005: 1st International North American Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulation. pp. 23-32. Montréal, Canada. August 2005. official site paper bibtex
4. Paul Brebner, Emmanuel Cecchet, Julie Marguerite, Petr Tuma, Octavian Ciuhandu, Bruno Dufour, Lieven Eeckhout, Stéphane Frénot, Arvind S. Krishna, John Murphy, Clark Verbrugge. "Middleware Benchmarking: Approaches, Results, Experiences." in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 17(15): 1799-1805. December, 2005.
5. Dayong Gu, Clark Verbrugge, and Etienne Gagnon. "Code Layout as a Source of Noise in JVM Performance."in Studia Informatica Universalis. 4(1): 83-99. March, 2005.

1. Marc Lanctot, Clark Verbrugge. "Locally-Adaptive Virtual Environments in Persistent State Multiplayer Games." in Game-On 2004: 5th International Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulations. pp. 89-96. Ghent, Belgium. November 2004. official site paper bibtex
2. Bruno Dufour, Christopher Goard, Laurie Hendren, Oege de Moor, Ganesh Sittampalam, and Clark Verbrugge. "Measuring the Dynamic Behaviour of AspectJ Programs." in OOPSLA'04: Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications. pp 150-169. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. October 2004. official site paper
3. Christopher J.F. Pickett, Clark Verbrugge. "Return Value Prediction in a Java Virtual Machine." in VPW2: Second Value-Prediction and Value-Based Optimization Workshop. pp 40-47. Boston, USA. October 2004. paper slides bibtex
4. Lin Li, Clark Verbrugge. "A Practical MHP Information Analysis for Concurrent Java Programs." in LCPC'04: The 17th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing. LNCS 3602. pp.194-208. West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. September 2004. official site paper bibtex

1. Bruno Dufour, Karel Driesen, Laurie Hendren, Clark Verbrugge. "Dynamic Metrics for Java." in OOPSLA'03: Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications. pp. 149-168. Anaheim, California, USA. October 2003. official site paper slides bibtex
2. Bruno Dufour, Laurie Hendren, Clark Verbrugge. "*J: a tool for dynamic analysis of Java programs." (Poster) in OOPSLA'03: Companion of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications. pp. 306-307. Anaheim, California, USA. October 2003. poster abstract bibtex
3. Qin Wang, Wei Wang, Rhodes Brown, Karel Driesen, Bruno Dufour, Laurie Hendren, Clark Verbrugge. "EVolve: An Open Extensible Software Visualization Framework." in SoftVis'03: Proceedings of the ACM 2003 Symposium on Software Visualization. pp. 37-46. San Diego, California, USA. June 2003. official site paper

1. Clark Verbrugge. "A Structure for Modern Computer Narratives." in CG'2002: Computers and Games: Third International Conference. LNCS 2883. pp.308-325. Edmonton, Canada, July 25-27, 2002. official site paper bibtex
2. Rhodes Brown, Karel Driesen, David Eng, Laurie Hendren, John Jorgensen, Clark Verbrugge, Qin Wang. "STEP: A Framework for the Efficient Encoding of General Trace Data." in PASTE'02: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering. pp. 27-34. Charleston, South Carolina, USA. November 2002. official site paper slides bibtex
3. Feng Qian, Laurie Hendren, Clark Verbrugge. "A Comprehensive Approach to Array Bounds Check Elimination for Java." in CC'02: International Conference on Compiler Construction. LNCS 2304. pp. 325-341. April 2002. official site paper slides

1. Rhodes Brown, John Jorgensen, Qin Wang, Laurie Hendren, Karel Driesen, Clark Verbrugge. "STOOP: The Sable Toolkit for Object-Oriented Profiling." (Poster). in Addendum to OOPSLA'01. October 2001. poster
2. Patrice Pominville, Feng Qian, Raja Vallée-Rai, Laurie Hendren, Clark Verbrugge. "A Framework for Optimizing Java Using Attributes." in CC'01: International Conference on Compiler Construction. LNCS 2027. pp. 334-354. April 2001. official site paper slides bibtex

1. Prakash Panangaden, Clark Verbrugge. "Generating Irregular Partitionable Data Structures." in Theoretical Computer Science. 238(1-2): 31-80. May 2000. official site paper

1. Clark Verbrugge, Laurie Hendren, Phong Co. "Generalized Constant Propagation: A Study in C." in CC'96: International Conference on Compiler Construction. LNCS 1060. pp 74-90. Linköping, Sweden. April 1996. official site paper
2. Clark Verbrugge. A Parallel Solution Strategy for Irregular, Dynamic Problems. PhD. Thesis. McGill University. August 1996. thesis

1. Clark Verbrugge, Prakash Panangaden, Riccardo Pucella. "Locally-Adaptive Grid Generation Using Quadtrees." Technical Report. SOCS TR-95.3. McGill University. 1995. report

1. Godfried Toussaint, Clark Verbrugge, Caoan Wang, Binhai Zhu. "Tetrahedralization of Simple and Non-Simple Polyhedra." in Proceedings of the Fifth Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry. Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo, August 1993. paper

Jay Xu: Game level generation.
Jonathan Campbell: Machine learning in games.
Akshay Gopalakrishnan: Memory consistency and optimization.
Brian Yang: Player analysis
Yiwei Zhang: Stealth level generation
Rebecca Wang (co-supervised): ML in compiler optimization
Nathan Sandum: GC in WebAssembly

Wael Al Enezi: Dynamic behaviors for stealth game characters. 2024
Quinn Kybartas (co-supervised): A Force Dynamic Model of Narrative Agents. 2023
Prabhjot Sandhu (co-supervised): Efficient and Parallel Sparse Matrix Computations on the Web. 2022
Alexander Krolik (co-supervised): rNdN: Optimized query compilation for GPUs. 2022
Bentley James Oakes (co-supervised): A symbolic execution-based approach to model transformation verification using structural contracts. 2018
Māris Jukšs (co-supervised): Efficient and Usable Model Transformations. 2018
Jonathan Tremblay: Computing Techniques for Game Design. 2016
Zhen Cao: Efficient Design and Implementation of Software Thread-Level Speculation. 2015
Chris Dragert (co-supervised): Model-Driven Development of AI for Digital Games. 2015
Christopher J.F. Picket: Software Method Level Speculation for Java. 2012
Gregory B. Prokopski: Optimizing Software--hardware Interplay in Efficient Virtual Machines. 2009
Dayong Gu (co-supervised): Hardware-based GC and phase analysis in JVMs. 2007 Cheng Li: Regex solving using GPGPU with CUDA. 2024
Quentin Massonnat: Efficient Octree-based 3 Dimensional Pathfinding. 2024
Nima Davari: Efficient 2D sound propagation in video games. 2022
Hongji Chen: SableWasm: a static compiler and runtime for WebAssembly. 2021
Akshay Gopalakrishnan: Analysis of the ECMAscript memory model: a program transformation perspective. 2021
Ivan Miloslavov: Improvements to Solving Stealth Video Game Scenarios. 2021
Dipanjan Dutta: Optimization of neural networks by reducing floating-point precision of weights during training. 2020
David Herrera (co-supervised): MatWat: A compiler project to execute Matlab code on the web 2020
Jorge Morales Díaz: Solving the Take Down and Body Hiding Problem 2019
Amir El Bawab: Machine Learning in WebAssembly. 2019
Xoey Zhang: Modelling Player Understanding of Non-Player Character Paths 2019
Jonathan Campbell: Exploration and Combat in NetHack. 2018
Alexander Borodovski: Pathfinding in Dynamically Changing Stealth Games with Distractions. 2016
Navjot Singh: Analyzing Simple Heuristic Hiding Strategies for Non-Player Characters in Games. 2016
Muntasir Chowdhury: Exhaustive Exploration Strategies for NPCs in Game Maps. 2016
Shuo Xu: Improving Companion AI in Small-Scale Attrition Games. 2015
Zhenzhou Wu: Speech Synthesis with Deep Denoising Autoencoder. 2015
Dhirendra Singh: Using Medial Skeleton for Path Finding in Dynamic Stealth Games. 2015
Qihan Xu: Procedural Guard Placement and Behaviour Generation. 2015
Bentley James Oakes: Practical and Theoretical Issues of Evolving Behaviour Trees for a Turn-Based Game. 2013
Ben Kybartas: Design and analysis of ReGEN a narrative generation tool. 2013
Timothy Drews (co-supervised): Shared augmented reality: A framework for networked augmented reality applications. 2013
Martin Ashton: Measuring Cooperative Behavior in Contemporary Multiplayer Games. 2012
Yi Zhang: Implementation and Optimization of Thread-Local Variables for a Race-Free Java Dialect. 2012
Tom Chen: Distributed Collision Detection and Resolution. 2010
Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert (co-supervised): McVM: An Optimizing Virtual Machine for the MATLAB Programming Language. 2009
Yanwar Asrigo (co-supervised): Communication Middleware for a Web-based Game Lobby. 2009
Nicholas Rudzicz: Arda: A Framework for Procedural Video Game Content Generation. 2009
Peng Zhang: Dataflow on game narratives. 2009
Josh Goodman: A hybrid design for cheat detection in massively multiplayer online games. 2008
Richard Halpert: Static Lock Allocation. 2008
Michael Hawker (co-supervised): Subgames in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. 2008
Xun Zhu (co-supervised): Static verification of concurrent system design. 2008
Haiying Xu: Dynamic purity analysis for Java. 2007
Jean-Sebastien Boulanger (co-supervised): Interest management in multiplayer computer games. 2007
Ahmer Ahmedani (co-supervised): Java information flow for security. 2006
Jorge Ressia: XThread: A Flexible Concurrency Analysis Framework. 2006
Félix Martineau: PNFG: A Framework for Computer Game Narrative Analysis. 2006.
Sokhom Pheng: Dynamic Data Structure Analysis and Visualization of Java Programs. 2006.
Marc Lanctot: Adaptive virtual environments in modern multi-player computer games. 2005.
Bruno Dufour (co-supervised): Objective quantification of program behaviour using dynamic metrics. 2004.
Lin Li: A practical MHP information computation for concurrent Java programs. 2004.
Sam B. Sanjabi: Dataflow analysis of the Π-calculus. 2004.
Jason Pizzuco: Tomiko: An Extensible OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect Authorization Server. 2023
Adrian Koretski: Geometry of Hiding: Generating Visibility Manifolds. 2020
Hugo Scurti: Generating paths with WFC. 2018
Jaryd Novotni: Magic: The Gathering AI with GPU. 2013.
Nicolas Ng: Evaluation of Path Planning Techniques for the Mammoth Game Architecture. 2006.
Xuebo Liang: Incorporating inconsistency into network computer games. 2005.
Irwin Chiu Hau: A generic computer game engine generator. 2005.
Lin Wang: Java application extraction. 2005.

I am always interested in hearing from students interested in working with me. I do read everything, but I have observed in myself a response time that is positively related to the effort required to formulate a response, and inversely related to the effort I see invested in the original request. The constant in that function can also be large, so do not be shy about sending reminder emails if it's been a while.

For MSc students, I would be happy to be notified of your interest in a given topic, and especially so if you have background related to one of my research interests. In most cases I would like to see your completed application though; to ensure I look at your application please indicate me as one of your potential supervisors in the application.

For PhD students, please include details on your research background and at least an informal research plan. Your intended research work should have an obvious connection mesh with my areas of interest.

Here is a link to general admission information for students interested in studying Computer Science or Software Engineering at McGill University, and here is a link to information on graduate studies in CS.

These Greasemonkey scripts improve the interface for a few aspects of McGill's internal systems that I commonly end up using:

• Minerva Monkey!
• Banner Monkey!

• MDEbug 2017
• MDEbug 2018

• CDP 2010
• CDP 2011