I presented a breakout session in the Artificial Intelligence track at Databricks Data + AI Summit 2025 in San Francisco on Thursday, June 12, 2025 — a 40-minute talk on how we use machine learning to detect aimbots in Call of Duty.

As online gaming grows, maintaining fair play is an ongoing challenge. Call of Duty, a highly competitive first-person action game, faces aimbot usage — cheats that enable near-perfect accuracy, undermining fair play. Traditional detection methods are increasingly less effective against advanced cheats that mimic human behaviour.

The talk walked through the data pipeline we built to address this: collecting features such as angle velocity and acceleration, training a deep neural network on them, and deploying it at scale. The system processes 30 million rows of data per hour on the Databricks platform, using Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and Databricks SQL.

I closed on methodologies, challenges, and future directions — how machine learning is transforming anti-cheat strategy, and preserving competitive integrity in online gaming.

Databricks has since retired the 2025 session catalogue, so the session page is now only available through the Internet Archive. View the archived listing here.