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Showing posts from November, 2015

Conference Report: AIIDE 2015

Earlier this month, I traveled to Santa Cruz, CA for two purposes: starting a new postdoc with the Expressive Intelligence Studio (which I'll be working on remotely for the time being) and attending AIIDE , a conference about AI in games, at which I was presenting a paper. I also attended two pre-conference events, the INT workshop on narrative tech, and the EXAG workshop on experimental AI in games. In this post, I want to mention a few highlights among the many exciting things I learned at the union of these activities, and draw out some common themes. 1. The state of the art in computational narrative is social & emotional believability. INT this year was joint with SBG, Social Believability in Games , and the themes of the talks blended so seamlessly that it was difficult to remember there were actually two workshops. Iolanda Leite gave the keynote on human-robot interaction; specifically, how to create conversational agents that would maintain children's inte

How to get a Ph.D. in computer science if you're me

Recently, I've been privy to a lot of advice that people give to beginning and prospective graduate students in computer science. The "grad school survival" talk given to CMU's CS department is one that's been passed down through a few generations; PLMW at SPLASH  is a workshop (affiliated with a few different PL conferences, now) with similar aims. At both of these events, I served on panels to answer questions. But by watching the main presenters' talks, I quietly accumulated critiques of the standard advice, and it occurred to me that my experiences might have value to some folks if expressed in longer form. As the title of this post suggests, all advice is subjective. The reason that I think people give "advice," even knowing this fact, is that otherwise we're telling very personal stories about experiences that might still be raw. Advice is an abstraction  over experience. But abstraction yields generalization, and generalizations require