I am currently an independent researcher working on problems involving narrative, discourse, dialogue and machine learning.
Previously I was a Research Scientist at the Institute for Creative Technologies. I worked on projects with Andrew Gordon involving computational narrative interpretation and generation and with David Traum on story adaptation for conversational agents.
Prior to rejoining ICT, I was a postdoc in Computer Science at the University of California Santa Cruz. While there I worked with Marilyn Walker in the Natural Language and Dialogue Systems lab, Michael Mateas in the Expressive Intelligence Studio and Arnav Jhala in the Computational Cinematics lab. I received my Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Southern California while doing research at the Institute for Creative Technologies with my advisor Andrew S. Gordon. After graduating USC I spent a year at Disney Research & Development working on new technologies for enabling large-scale live action role-playing.
My research is focused around deep narrative understanding of personal stories. These types of stories contain causal and temporal knowledge about the world, people’s expectations about events, their goals and motivations, and subjective evaluations the events. This knowledge is critical to developing rich virtual environments that not only model the physical world, but also react to people’s social behaviors in a natural and believable way.
You can contact me at [my first name]@[this domain]