June 19, 2006
ACE Past, AIIDE Tomorrow, CA and IVA Future, LA LA LA
We’ve neglected to point out that the second Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) conference is about to happen, this week in LA. I don’t think any of us from GTxA will be there this year unfortunately, although I believe one or two of Michael’s grad students will have posters there. Here’s the list of presentations, which includes a talk by a Sims 2 developer, “The Power of Projection and Mass Hallucination: Practical AI in The Sims 2 and Beyond”, as well as “Emotions in Human-Agent Interactions” by Jonathan Gratch, a leading researcher at the Institute for Creative Technologies, USC.
Last week, also in LA, was Advances in Computing Entertainment (ACE), an pretty pricey conference with an interesting line-up of presentations, including Michael presenting an experimental Alternative Reality version of Façade, work with his colleague Blair MacIntyre and others. Maybe Michael can add a comment describing ACE a bit for us?
Also, a reminder that Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) will be taking place August 21-23 in LA. This one both Michael and I plan to attend, to give a talk on developing Façade, and demo at the Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents (GALA). Hope to see you there.
But take a break from LA, in mid-July in Boston for an AAAI workshop on Computational Aesthetics: AI Approaches to Beauty and Happiness, which includes presentations on predicting happiness in smart home denizens, Fox Harrell on interactive poetry generation, a talk on suspense from Michael Young of NCSU’s Liquid Narrative research group, and lo! Nick Montfort on NLG and Narrative Variation in IF.
June 20th, 2006 at 9:26 am
I’m planning to write a post about ACE, as soon as I’m back in town again.
I’m looking forward to the Computational Aesthetics workshop. I’ll be at AAAI, so I’m going to drop by the workshop.
June 21st, 2006 at 11:10 am
The two students of mine with posters at ACE are Kate Compton, a recently-graduated IDT masters student who is moving on to work on the Spore team, and Mark Nelson, a CS Ph.D. student who has been working with me for the past two years in the area of drama management, and is currently transitioning into AI-models of creativity applied to game generation. Kate is presenting a poster on her masters work on procedural level design for platform games, while Mark is presenting a poster on authorship issues in using declarative optimization-based drama management.