Welcoming Zhiyu Lin to the Division of Games
The Division of Games at the University of Utah is excited to announce the appointment of Zhiyu Lin as Assistant Professor. Zhiyu arrives from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Game User Interaction and Intelligence Laboratory. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he worked in the Entertainment Intelligence Laboratory — one of the leading centers for research at the intersection of AI and games.
Zhiyu’s scholarship sits at a frontier that is reshaping both the games industry and the broader field of artificial intelligence: how humans and AI systems can genuinely collaborate in the act of creation. Rather than treating AI as a tool that generates output for a passive user to accept or reject, his research asks a more ambitious question — what does it look like when a human designer and an AI system share creative initiative, learn from each other, and improve together over time?
That question drives three interlocking areas of inquiry. The first is mixed-initiative co-creativity: designing systems in which creative context and control is shared fluidly between human and machine, making generative AI accessible, steerable and collaborative rather than opaque and passive. The second is human-AI co-improving — studying how AI systems can detect and adapt to unexpected situations, respond to human feedback, and grow progressively better at supporting the specific creative goals of the people they work with, while also educating users to collaborate more efficiently with AI. The third is creator-aware content generation, which puts the creator’s intentions and high-level ideas at the center of the generative process, rather than treating content generation as a black box that operates independently of human vision and meta-cognitive goals.
Zhiyu has applied these ideas across storytelling, game content generation, and education, combining rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods to study how real creators interact with AI tools. He also brings hands-on experience as a game maker, with game stages he designed having received millions of plays and ongoing contributions to open-source game communities.
“I am both honored and excited to join the Division of Games, a pioneer in research in games as a discipline,” says Zhiyu. “Games provide a unique multidisciplinary lens for probing computational creativity and for exploring how game designers and creators collaborate with interactive machines to create societal impacts both within and beyond entertainment. I look forward to sharing this vision with the community at the Division of Games and the University of Utah to fully realize the potential of games.”
Fernando Rodriguez, Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Division of Games and chair of the search committee that brought Zhiyu to Utah, described why Zhiyu’s work is so timely for the field: “The question of how human creativity and artificial intelligence can work together — not just alongside each other, but genuinely in partnership — is one of the defining challenges of this moment in games. Zhiyu is among the most creative and rigorous thinkers working on that question, and having him in the Division is going to open up new directions for our students and our research community alike.”
Zhiyu’s appointment is part of Press Play, the Division of Games’ major initiative to grow its research enterprise, now entering its third year. He joins four other tenure-line faculty brought to the Division through Press Play, and the Division anticipates sustaining that growth — with plans to add more than ten new faculty members over the next three years