Two talks: an introduction to the POEM lab; a survey paper on story generation

Principles of Expressive Machines

Last week I gave a presentation to the first-year computer science grad student seminar on my research, AKA an introduction to the "Principles of Expressive Machines" (POEM) lab, because I am looking for students. This talk was my first attempt to organize my future research plans into something vaguely coherent and forward-looking (in more depth than my job talk described), so I thought I'd share the results of my efforts. Here are the slides:


In the talk, I outline three research agendas:

  1. Narrative knowledge representation and generation
  2. Tools for game and interactive fiction design
  3. Social multi-agent system modeling
The slides are not particularly verbose, but there should be enough in them to grant a sense of what I'm interested in.

Story Generation Survey

This semester, I'm teaching a course on Generative Methods, i.e. algorithms for producing creative artifacts -- such as stories. For the most part, students have been presenting the papers each week, but there's one fewer student than there are papers to present, so I presented this week's: A survey on story generation techniques for authoring computational narratives by Ben Kybartas and Rafael Bidarra.


The paper is a nice resource for folks looking to understand the state of the art in computational storytelling, and I hope my slides will save similar folks the effort of reading a 20-page academic article. :) 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading academic papers while having ADHD

Disclaimer : Any discussion of experience with disability walks a tricky line between individual and more "general" experiences. I'll try to make it clear when I'm speaking for just myself vs. reporting "common knowledge" about ADHD, but in either case, remember that ADHD manifests very differently for different people. Please don't make assumptions that my experiences or preferences are the same as yours or someone else you know with ADHD. If you do research, you have to read a lot of papers. Reading papers is challenging for most people, especially when you're new to it, but what if on top of that, you're fighting against a brain that would rather be doing literally anything else? Read on to learn how real live ADHD academics manage this challenge in practice.
Read more

Using Twine for Games Research (Part II)

Image
This  preliminary discussion  introduced my thoughts on using Twine as a tool for creating prototypes for games research. I'll start with documenting my first case study: a hack-and-slash RPG-like setting where the player character has a record of attributes ("stats") that evolve through actions that turn certain resources (money, health, items) into others. I've selected this hack-and-slash example because it falls outside the canonical "branching story" domain thought to be Twine's primary use case, but it is not too much trickier to implement. It relies crucially on the management of state in ways that simple branching stories would not, but it does so in a fairly straightforward way. If all goes well, this post may also serve as a tutorial on the "basics" of Twine (links + variables + expressions). In particular, I'll be using  Twine 2/Harlowe , and I haven't seen many tutorials for this new version published yet. To me, the mai
Read more

Using Twine for Games Research (Part III)

Image
Where we last left off , I described Twine's basic capabilities and illustrated how to use them in Twine 2 by way of a tiny hack-and-slash RPG mechanic. You can play the result , and you should also be able to download that HTML file and use Twine 2's "import file" mechanism to load the editable source code/passage layout. Notice that, in terms of game design, it's not much more sophisticated than a slot machine: the only interesting decision we've incorporated is for the player to determine when to stop pushing her luck with repeated adventures and go home with the current spoils. What makes this type of RPG strategy more interesting to me is the sorts of decisions that can have longer-term effects, the ones where you spend an accumulation of resources on one of several things that might have a substantial payoff down the road. In a more character-based setting, this could be something like increasing skill levels or adding personality traits. Often, th
Read more