Talk Title

Automated Story Generation as a Lens for Fundamental Artificial Intelligence

Talk Abstract

Storytelling is a pervasive part of the human experience–we as humans tell stories to communicate, inform, entertain, and educate. In this talk, I will lay out the case for the study of storytelling through the lens of artificial intelligence. I will explore the grand challenge of building an intelligent systems that learn to tell stories, which touches on many fundamental research challenges across artificial intelligence such as commonsense reasoning, contextual reasoning, theory of mind, and maintaining long-term coherence.

Speaker’s Bio

Mark Riedl is a professor in the College of Computing, School of Interactive Computing. As director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab, Dr. Riedl’s research focuses on the study of artificial intelligence and storytelling for entertainment (e.g., computer games). Narrative is a cognitive tool used by humans for communication, sense-making, entertainment, education, and training. Consequently, there is value in discovering new computational techniques that make computers better communicators, entertainers, and educators. The principle research question Dr. 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?

Dr. Riedl earned a Ph.D. degree 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, Dr. Riedl was a research scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies where he researched and developed interactive, adaptive training systems. Dr. Riedl joined the Georgia Tech College of Computing in 2007.

Interests

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Game AI
• Storytelling Technologies
• Interactive education and entertainment
• Intelligent Media
• Computational Creativity
• Machinima

Talk Slides

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