Location

MIT Media Lab, E14-633

Description

Storytelling is a pervasive part of the human experience—we as humans tell stories to communicate, inform, entertain, and to educate. Indeed there is evidence to suggest that narrative is a fundamental means by which we organize, understand, and explain the world. Regardless, computers are not known for their ability to create novel, fictional stories. What could a computational system do with narrative generation capabilities? It could write a fictional book, generate a movie or comic, share its own personal experiences, direct interactive dramatic experiences, direct personalized scenario-based training experiences, or generate a personalized computer game. In this talk, Riedl presents research on artificial intelligence approaches to automatic generation of narrative structures. Specifically, Riedl presents AI planning algorithms specialized toward solving narrative generation problems. Riedl shows the application of these algorithms in a variety of practical applications and will discuss future research directions.

Biographies

Mark Riedl is an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing. As director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab, Riedl's research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, virtual worlds, and storytelling. The principle research question Riedl addresses through his research is how can intelligent computational systems reason about and autonomously create engaging experiences for users of virtual worlds and computer games? Riedl earned a PhD in 2004 from North Carolina State University, where he innovated novel intelligent technologies for automatically generating stories and managing interactive user experiences in virtual worlds and computer games. From 2004 to 2007, Riedl was a research scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, where he researched and developed interactive, adaptive training systems. Riedl joined the Georgia Tech College of Computing in 2007. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, the US Army, and Disney.

Host/Chair: Deb Roy