UNCC Computer Science Department

Invited Talk

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
2:00-3:30 in Woodward 441

Believable Agents and Intelligent Story Adaptation for Interactive Storytelling

Mark Riedl
Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)
University of Southern California

Abstract: Narrative is a pervasive part of the human experience. Stories are told for entertainment through novels, movies, and computer games. Stories are also told for training and education as a way of illustrating and motivating. Interactive Narrative is an approach to interactive entertainment that enables a player to make decisions that directly affect the direction and/or outcome of the narrative experience being delivered by the computer system. One common approach to building interactive narrative systems is to use a drama manager, a system that attempts to coerce the player's experience to conform to one of a few, possibly branching, narrative forms. I present an approach to interactive narrative that uses automated narrative generation to dynamically adapt the expected narrative structure to accommodate the user's actions. A generative approach to interactive narrative allows the system to present a coherent narrative experience while still being able to adapt to the user's actions and intentions. The generative drama management has been applied to entertainment contexts and training and education contexts. This talk will cover two research thrusts key to creating interactive narratives. The first thrust is to develop AI algorithms for generating narrative. Narrative generation is a complicated and open research problem in and of itself. The second thrust is to develop technologies for converting generated "linear" narratives into "branching" narratives that can be used to manipulate the dynamic, interactive experience of a user in a virtual world.

Also, attached is a short paper that overviews one of my current research projects that will be covered in my talk. It was recently accepted to the 3rd International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (to be held in December 2006). If any of your students are interested in delving further into the details of the research, I point them to my web page: http://people.ict.usc.edu/~riedl/, and especially the following two papers: http://people.ict.usc.edu/~riedl/pubs/riedl-young-aamas03.pdf and http://people.ict.usc.edu/~riedl/pubs/aamas04.pdf.

Bio: Mark Riedl is a Research Scientist at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). His research focuses on the application of artificial intelligence to interactive games for entertainment and education. Mark received his Ph.D. in 2004 in Computer Science from North Carolina State University where he studied a wide variety of human-computer interaction technologies, from computational modeling of human social navigation behavior to using storytelling as a technique for guiding intelligent agent behavior. His dissertation, "Narrative Generation: Balancing Plot and Character" presented a technique for automatically creating stories with recognizable plot structures and character fidelity. Mark is also researching AI technologies for interactive storytelling and computational cinematography. Interactive storytelling systems are computer systems that tell stories in which the user is a participant who can change the direction and/or outcome of the story. Computational cinematography is a field of AI and graphics aimed at creating movie-like visual effects in a 3D graphical environment. At the ICT, Mark is applying narrative AI for education and training. He is involved in several projects that range from using artificial intelligence for making combat opponents more adaptable and lifelike to using artificial intelligence to generate and adapt stories to ensure that trainees experience tacit learning objectives in training simulations.