Mark received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at North Carolina State University (2004). From 2004-2007 he was a research scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.

His research involves artificial intelligence, storytelling, and entertainment computing. Narrative is a cognitive tool used by humans for communication, sense-making, entertainment, education, and training. The goal of his research is to discover new computational algorithms and models that can facilitate the development of intelligent computer systems that can reason about narrative in order to be better communicators, entertainers, and educators. Some of the topics that interest him are as follows:

• Artificial intelligence
• Narrative generation for education, training, and entertainment
• Interactive narratives for education, training, and entertainment
• Artificial intelligence for computer games and virtual worlds
• Intelligent cinematography
• Believable autonomous agents
• Mixed-initiative problem-solving
• Discourse generation