Intelligent Narrative Generation: Creativity, Engagement, and Cognition

Storytelling is a pervasive part of the human experience–we as humans tell stories to communicate, inform, entertain, and educate. Indeed there is evidence to suggest that narrative is a fundamental means by which we organize, understand, and explain the world. In this talk, I present research on artificial intelligence approaches to the generation of narrative structures using planning and case-based reasoning. I discuss how computational story generation capabilities facilitate the creation of engaging, interactive user experiences in virtual worlds, computer games, and training simulations. I conclude with an ongoing research effort toward generalized computational narrative intelligence in which a system learns from experiences mediated through crowdsourcing platforms.
Mark Riedl is an Assistant Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. Dr. Riedl's research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, virtual worlds, and storytelling. 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 PhD degree in 2004 from North Carolina State University, where he developed intelligent systems for generating stories and managing interactive user experiences in 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, narrative-based training systems. Dr. Riedl joined the Georgia Tech College of Computing in 2007 and in 2011 he received a DARPA Young Faculty Award for his work on artificial intelligence, narrative, and virtual worlds. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, the U.S. Army, and Disney.