Request unreal support contact

Have you tried your local Unreal Engine Evangelist? Most of us can be @'d on twitter. I don’t know if we can answer most of your questions though.

We can answer general Unreal Engine questions (like any other forum user really), but we don’t have true AI in Unreal Engine. We enable users to create their own Behavior Trees so they can create their own AI, and tools surrounding that: Artificial Intelligence | Unreal Engine Documentation, but there’s no support for general AI in the engine out of the box.

You might want to check out some of the community plugins that allow you to use AI libraries with Unreal Engine, like this one that allows you to use Tensorflow: GitHub - getnamo/tensorflow-ue4: TensorFlow plugin for Unreal Engine 4, we even gave them a megagrant.

In your case the Unreal community will likely have more experience with AI than anyone at Epic that you could get in contact with. For your dissertation you would be casting a wider net by not limiting the people you want to talk to to Epic employees only.