(updated 06.30.2009)

• First draft of a narrative psychology corpus, a collection of segmented narrative texts used in classical narrative psychology experiments (1975-2002). August 2009.
• Distinguished Contribution Award for paper in the IJCAI'09 Workshop on Intelligent Systems for Assisted Cognition, July 12, 2009.
• The case for Game AI as Storytelling, DiGRA'09. June 30, 2009.
• Group website is now live: Intelligent Narrative Computing. June 29, 2009.
• The AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, March 23-25.
• GVU Demo showcase on October 23, 2008. Posters: Story Generation, Interactive narrative, Virtual cinematography.
• Awarded Best Paper at INTETAIN'08 for: Toward Intelligent Support of Authoring Machinima Media Content: Story and Visualization.

My 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 my 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 me 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

Curriculum Vitae ("GT format") (updated 04.07.2009)

Students interested in doing research with me, please send your resume/CV and a statement of research interest to riedl @ cc.

Intelligent Narrative Computing Lab

Intelligent Narrative Computing Lab Webpage

Lab project quick links:

• Story Generation
• Automated Story Director
• Intelligent Authoring Tools
• Technologies for Accelerated Continuous Learning - Scenario Adaptation
• Narrative Intelligence
• Cambot

Other Projects

Digital Improvisation

The goal of the Digital Improv Project sis to investigate the cognitive functions of improv actors through the process of protocol analysis and behavioral coding. The end goal of this process is to establish an algothrium for creativity that can then be transferred to virtual characters.
Read more >

Refl-ex Autism Intervention

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have very individualistic needs, abilities, and are surrounded by very different social contexts. We are developing a software technique for social skill acquisition for young adults with high functioning ASD (HFASD). In addition, we are researching AI techniques to assist parents, guardians, teachers, and therapists with the development of individualized content.
Read more >

• Fall 2009
  • CS 8803: AI Storytelling in Virtual Worlds
• Spring 2009
  • CS 3600: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• Fall 2008
  • CS 4731/8803 (GAI): Game AI

Virtual
cinematography

David K. Elson and Mark O. Riedl. A Lightweight Intelligent Virtual Cinematography System for Machinima Production. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Palo Alto, California, 2007.

Narrative
generation

Mark O. Riedl and Neha Sugandh. Story Planning with Vignettes: Toward Overcoming the Content Production Bottleneck. Proceedings of the 1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (Formerly TIDSE and ICVS), Erfurt, Germany, 2008.

Mark O. Riedl and R. Michael Young. Story Planning as Exploratory Creativity: Techniques for Expanding the Narrative Search Space. New Generation Computing, 24(3), 2006. (A shorter version appears in Proceedings of the 2005 IJCAI Workshop on Computational Creativity, Edinburgh, 2005.)

Mark O. Riedl and R. Michael Young. An Objective Character Believability Evaluation Procedure for Multi-Agent Story Generation Systems. Proceedings of the 5th International Working Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Kos, Greece, 2005.

Mark O. Riedl. Narrative Generation: Balancing Plot and Character. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, 2004.

Mark O. Riedl and R. Michael Young. An Intent-Driven Planner for Multi-Agent Story Generation. Proceedings of the 3rd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems, New York, 2004.

Mark O. Riedl and R. Michael Young. Character-Focused Narrative Planning for Execution in Virtual Worlds. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Virtual Storytelling, Toulouse, France, 2003.

Interactive
narrative

David Roberts, Charles Isbell, Mark O. Riedl, and Merrick Furst. On the use of Computational Models of Influence for Interactive Virtual Experience Management. Proceedings of the 1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (Formerly TIDSE and ICVS), Erfurt, Germany, 2008.

Mei Si, Stacy Marsella, and Mark O. Riedl. Integrating Plot-Centric and Character-Centric Designs: An Mixed-Initiative Framework for Interactive Drama. Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), Palo Alto, California, 2008.

Mark O. Riedl, Andrew Stern, Don Dini, and Jason Alderman. Dynamic Experience Management in Virtual Worlds for Entertainment, Education, and Training. International Transactions on Systems Science and Applications, Special Issue on Agent Based Systems for Human Learning, vol. 4(2), 2008.

Mark O. Riedl and Andrew Stern. Believable Agents and Intelligent Story Adaptation for Interactive Storytelling. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Darmstadt, Germany, 2006. Awarded best paper.

Mark O. Riedl and Andrew Stern. Failing Believably: Toward Drama Management with Autonomous Actors in Interactive Narratives. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Darmstadt, Germany, 2006.

Mark O. Riedl and Andrew Stern. Believable Agents and Intelligent Scenario Direction for Social and Cultural Leadership Training. Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, Baltimore, Maryland, 2006. Awarded best paper.

Mark O. Riedl and R. Michael Young. From Linear Story Generation to Branching Story Graphs. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 26(3), 2006. Featured article of Special Issue on Interactive Narrative. (A shorter version appears in Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Marina del Rey, California, 2005.)

Mark O. Riedl, H. Chad Lane, Randall Hill, and William Swartout. Automated Story Direction and Intelligent Tutoring: Towards a Unifying Architecture. Proceedings of the 2005 AIED Workshop on Narrative Learning Environments, Amsterdam, 2005.

R. Michael Young, Mark O. Riedl, Mark Branly, Arnav Jhala, R.J. Martin, and C.J. Saretto. An Architecture for Integrating Plan-Based Behavior Generation with Interactive Game Environments. Journal of Game Development, vol. 1, 2004.

Mark O. Riedl, C.J. Saretto, and R. Michael Young. Managing Interaction Between Users and Agents in a Multi-Agent Storytelling Environment. Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems, Melbourne, Australia, 2003.

R. Michael Young and Mark O. Riedl. Towards an Architecture for Intelligent Control of Narrative in Interactive Virtual Worlds. Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Miami, Florida, 2003.

Intelligent Authoring Tools

Mei Si, Stacy Marsella, and Mark O. Riedl. Interactive Drama Authoring with Plot and Character: An Intelligent System that Fosters Creativity. Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Creative Intelligent Systems, Palo Alto, California, 2008.

Mark O. Riedl, Jonathan P. Rowe, and David K. Elson. Toward Intelligent Support of Authoring Machinima Media Content: Story and Visualization. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN), Playa del Carmen, Cancun Mexico, 2008. Awarded Best Paper.

Game AI and
Improv

Brian S. Magerko and Mark O. Riedl. What Happens Next?: Toward an Empirical Investigation of Improvisational Theatre. Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, Madrid, Spain, 2008.

Michael van Lent, Mark O. Riedl, Paul Carpenter, Ryan McAlinden, and Paul Brobst. Increasing Replayability with Deliberative and Reactive Planning. Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Marina del Rey, California, 2005.

David B. Christian, Mark O. Riedl, R. Michael Young. Conversation Starters: Using Spatial Context to Initiate Dialogue in First Person Perspective Games. Proceedings of the 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, Palo Alto, California, 2002.

Intelligent
user
interfaces

Robert St. Amant, Mark O. Riedl, Frank E. Ritter, and Andrew Reifers. Image Processing in Cognitive Models with SegMan. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2005.

Mark O. Riedl and Robert St. Amant. Toward Automated Exploration of Interactive Systems. Proceedings of the 2002 Inernational Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, San Francisco, California, 2002.

Robert St. Amant and Mark O. Riedl. A Perception/Action Substrate for Cognitive Modeling in HCI. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 55(1), 2001.

Robert St. Amant, Christopher G. Healey, Mark O. Riedl, Sarat Kocherlakota, David A. Pegram, and Mika Torhola. Intelligent Visualization in a Planning Simulation. Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2001.

Mark O. Riedl. A Computational Model and Classification Framework for Social Navigation. Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2001.

David A. Pegram, Robert St. Amant, and Mark O. Riedl. An Approach to Visual Interaction in Mixed-Initiative Planning. Proceedings of the 1999 AAAI Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Intelligence, Orlando, Florida, 1999.