Hi! I'm a PhD student in computer science, working in artificial intelligence.
My dissertation is on formally representing and reasoning about videogame
mechanics, in a way that is both declarative and modifiable. The goal is to
provide the AI representation-and-reasoning groundwork to enable a game-design
support system that makes early game-design prototypes much more informative.
I'm a student in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, part of the
larger College of Computing. Since my
advisor, Michael Mateas, now
heads the Expressive Intelligence Studio
at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I work there as well. I've at
various times collaborated with Charles Isbell and his pfunk research group.
I also do work on interactive narrative, and longer ago did some on the
periphery of computer music. Lurking in the todo pile is some
as-yet-unpublished stuff on machine learning, mainly local regression methods
and regression forests. In my allegedly free time, I'm a Wikipedia sysop/administrator and editor.
Representing and reasoning about videogame mechanics for automated design support
This is my thesis work (described above).
Adam M. Smith, Mark J. Nelson, and Michael Mateas. Computational support for play testing game sketches.
In Proceedings of the 5th Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital
Entertainment Conference (AIIDE 2009), Palo Alto, California, USA,
October 2009.
Mark J. Nelson and Michael Mateas. Recombinable game mechanics for automated design
support.
In Proceedings of the 4th Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital
Entertainment Conference (AIIDE 2008), Palo Alto, California, USA,
October 2008.
Mark J.
Nelson and Michael Mateas. An interactive game-design assistant.
In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces (IUI 2008), pages 90–98, Maspalomas, Gran Canaria,
Spain, January 2008.
Mark J.
Nelson and Michael Mateas. Towards automated game design.
In AI*IA 2007: Artificial Intelligence and Human-Oriented
Computing, pages 626–637. Springer, 2007.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4733.
Declarative Optimization-Based Drama Management (DODM)
Drama managers watch a game (or other interactive experience) as it progresses,
and intervene when necessary to keep the experience interesting and in line
with an author's goals. DODM is a particular approach in which an author
declaratively specifies what it would mean for the experience to go well, along
with an abstraction of the story and a set of interventions the system can
make. The system then optimizes its interventions according to the given
criteria.
The basic approach was proposed by Joe Bates in 1992 and developed by Peter
Weyhrauch in 1997. We've since made a number of modifications, both to the
conceptual formulation and to the technical implementation.
Sherol
Chen, Mark J. Nelson, Anne Sullivan, and Michael Mateas. Evaluating the authorial leverage of drama management.
In Working Notes of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative
Technologies, Palo Alto, California, USA, March 2009.
Mark J.
Nelson and Michael Mateas. Another look at search-based drama management.
In Proceedings of the 23rd AAAI Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, Chicago, USA, July 2008.
A shorter version appeared in the proceedings of AAMAS 2008.
Sooraj Bhat,
David L. Roberts, Mark J. Nelson, Charles L. Isbell, Jr., and Michael
Mateas. A globally optimal algorithm for TTD-MDPs.
In Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous
Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2007), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA,
May 2007.
David L.
Roberts, Mark J. Nelson, Charles L. Isbell, Jr., Michael Mateas, and
Michael L. Littman. Targeting specific distributions of trajectories in MDPs.
In Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI 2006), Boston, USA, July 2006.
I evaluated MIDI performance as part of previous work (2003–2004)
with Belinda Thom at Harvey Mudd College. We were trying to
discover interesting things about jazz improvisation, but got
sidetracked into measuring the performance of our MIDI equipment,
since we needed to be able to put error bars on the data. You may
also want to take a look at the project's
site, which has code, circuit diagrams, and everything else you
need to run your own tests, as well as the detailed results of our
tests.
Mark J.
Nelson and Belinda Thom. A survey of real-time MIDI performance.
In Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on New Interfaces for
Musical Expression (NIME 2004), pages 35–38, Hamamatsu, Japan, June
2004.
