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I am broadly interested in research problems related to design, implementation and evaluation of intelligent characters in interactive experiences that are situated in real world and function outside of the lab, providing human participants with rich satisfying interactions. Examples of such interactive avatars include: as caretakers in healthcare environments, as instruction agents in training environments, as presentation agents for giving slide presentations, as guide agents on websites and for use in military and corporate applications.
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I am also interested in authoring environments that support the creativity of novice users (without programming and design experience), allowing them to create interactive characters. My particular focus over the past eight years of research career has been primarily on two research problems.
First, how can personal creativity of novice user (without programming and design experience) supported in authoring of intelligent character behavior sets and How can we support novice user in revising the authored behavior sets to changing circumstances, be it unexpected game scenarios or varied interests of the player population to improve player experience?
Second, what research is needed at individual artificial intelligent (AI) sub-systems to build robust large scale interactive gaming applications with intelligent characters and provide interesting player experiences?
I take an interdisciplinary approach towards these research problems. I draw upon ideas from various fields including game design, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and arts to pursue my research goals. I believe an interdisciplinary research approach allows exploration of novel research questions that would not be raised unless doing interactive characters research as an interdisciplinary research practice. My research philosophy is that an effective research pursuit in this area requires deploying such agents in completed experiences, evaluating the effectiveness of the agents in creating a compelling player experience, and using the results of the evaluation to guide future research. By not looking at how individual research pieces fit into an overall solution, research in the individual problems starts deviating too much from the real need in a real system.
More details about my various projects can be found here