About UNLV’s IGI
The IGI has been operating at UNLV for over 30 years and serves as a global leader in gambling research. The institute’s goal is to help shape decision-making surrounding the gambling industry. It provides industry leaders, regulators, and policymakers with state-of-the-art research and thought leadership across an extensive range of topics, including gaming operations, regulatory policy, sports betting, responsible gambling, and more. The IGI advises over 50 global jurisdictions, with its research being presented at academic, industry, non-profit, and government audiences worldwide.
AI in Gaming Research
Major research the IGI is undertaking includes the use and regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) within the gambling sector. To do this, IGI launched its AI Research Hub (AiR Hub), which released the “State of AI in Gaming” report, aimed at outlining the use and adoption of AI practices within the industry and analysing maturity, innovation, and readiness.
The Executive Director of the IGI, Dr. Brett Abarbanel, will also be attending the Copenhagen conference. Dr. Abarbanel will represent the IGI at the event and support its team of researchers.
The European Conference on Gambling Studies
The EASG 2026 is an annual conference surrounding gambling policies and research. This year’s conference will shed light on trends within the regulatory landscape, including changes in gambling laws, new enforcement strategies as well as cross-border cooperation between countries.
It will also examine the role of AI in responsible gambling initiatives and how factors such as sustainability, diversity, and social responsibility reshape the sector.
More than 350 participants attend the conference each year, representing over 45 countries and averaging 110 presentations by researchers. Since its founding, the EASG has held 15 conferences.
Dr. Kasra Ghaharian
Dr. Kasra Ghaharian, Director of Research at IGI, will be presenting “The relationship between gambling involvement and financial health: A secondary analysis of UK Open Banking data.”
The research looks at the relationship between gambling and financial health, especially in terms of how gambling behaviour is associated with factors like financial vulnerability. Ghaharian and other researchers examined Open Banking data from more than one million UK residents between 2023 and 2024, measuring patterns such as how often people gambled and how much they spent, alongside financial indicators like income and overall spending.
Ghaharian and the other researchers found that gambling involvement can broadly affect financial behaviours, and that certain financial markers can then be used to identify people who are more vulnerable to gambling-related harm.
With these results, the researchers argue that the findings can be used to develop more detailed regulations as well as targeted financial interventions to help those at greater risk of gambling-related harm.
Ms. Andrea Dassopoulos
Andrea Dassopoulos, the Project Manager for the Nevada Problem Gambling Project at IGI, will be presenting, “Digital Self-Exclusion as Harm Reduction: Engagement, Compliance, and Everyday Use Among BetBlocker Users.”
The research examines how players engage with digital self-exclusion tools, their motivations for using them, how they use them, and whether users ultimately feel the tool helps reduce their gambling.
The purpose of the research is to address an area of the industry where researchers argue there is very little research on overall user engagement and harm-reduction strategies, such as self-exclusion tools. Dassopoulos and other UNLV researchers examined a selection of players using BetBlocker, measuring variables such as how long they had been using it, how often they checked the tool’s settings, the types of websites they requested to be blocked, and whether they had attempted to bypass the block.
Researchers found that self-exclusion tools don’t universally work as an intervention but rather serve to manage ongoing harms. With this in mind, the research can help shape the design of self-exclusion tools and highlight their limitations, ultimately making them more effective in the gambling industry.
Dr. Marla Royne Stafford
Dr. Marla Royne Stafford, professor at UNLV’s Department of Marketing and International Business, will be presenting, “Understanding the Recovered and Recovering Gambler: A Sentiment and Thematic Analysis.”
The research is a qualitative study looking at people who identify as recovered from a gambling disorder or are recovering. It explores the lived experiences of people in recovery, following interviews with 33 US participants who had all used the gambling blocking software Gamban.
Royne and other researchers analyzed the psychological, motivational, and social dimensions of participants in recovery, finding that they expressed strong negative emotions toward their gambling experiences, including feelings of harm, shame, and loss. Participants also showed positive feelings, including resiliency, self-regulation, and social reconnection.
Participants broadly rejected the responsible gambling paradigm and preferred social and emotional support. Other patterns also emerged: some viewed gambling-blocking software as effective exclusion tools, while men tended to lean towards accountability measures and women were more likely to approach recovery through emotional processing and coping strategies.
Overall findings indicated that recovery was not a linear process and that long-term recovery was influenced by the fulfilment of core psychological needs, including autonomy, competence, and relatedness. With that in mind, researchers argue that gambling-harm policies need to place greater emphasis on lived experiences and consumer protections instead of relying on industry-based responsible gambling programs or placing responsibilities onto individuals.
Ms. Melissa Swinehart
Melissa Swinehart, a Graduate Research Assistant at UNLV IGI who also presented her research during the AI in Gambling: Mapping the Research Landscape & Advancing Behavioral Risk Detection at the 19th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking, will be presenting “Detecting Unusual Gambling Transaction Patterns.”
Swinehart’s research focuses on how machine learning techniques can identify unusual or risky gambling behaviour by analysing players’ transaction patterns rather than relying on basic risk classifications. To detect these patterns, she examined anonymized online casino transaction datasets from players over a 52-week period, using a Transformer Autoencoder to learn weekly player behaviour.
Each player was assessed using eight behavioural features, including total wagered, active days, total declined funding, maximum daily declined funding, average hours between sessions, average wagering velocity, maximum daily wagering velocity, and total wallet funded.
Using this, the model was able to reconstruct players’ gambling habits; players with higher reconstruction error typically exhibited more unusual behavioural patterns, with the top 5% of scores indicating a high-anomaly group.
To visualise the data, Swinehart created a 3D simulation environment in Blender, representing observed behaviour as blue cards and the model’s expectations as red cards. As behaviour becomes harder to reconstruct, a risk meter is introduced.
The research demonstrates how the model’s anomaly-detection process provides an additional tool for detecting unusual gambling behaviour and highlights its accessibility to researchers and operators.
IGI’s Research Makes a Global Impact
The UNLV IGI not only attends conferences around the world but also hosts them. In May, it hosted the 19th International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. The conference occurs every three years, and its latest edition drew more than 500 attendees from more than 25 countries.
The conference is one of the oldest and most prestigious events in the gambling industry. Founded in 1974 by Dr. Bill Eadington, the conference aims to encourage continuous innovation in the sector by inviting students, scholars, researchers, and gaming industry authorities to discuss research and industry trends. The latest event covered economics, public policy, mathematics, social sciences, psychology, and treatment, and was a great success, not just in the number of attendees but also in the ongoing impact it has on the sector.
But IGI’s global reach doesn’t stop there. Throughout 2026, the department has attended conferences across the globe, starting with the annual National Council on Problem Gambling Conference, held July 22-24 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Next, IGI attended the AI4 Conference in Las Vegas, August 4–6. Following that, the upcoming EASG conference in Copenhagen is next, then the International Center for Responsible Gambling Conference and Global Gaming Expo, both in October in Las Vegas, and finally the National Association for Gambling Studies, held in Sydney, Australia, in November.
The growing number of IGI researchers across the globe shows the reach and influence IGI has in next-level research in the gambling industry.