March 29, 2007
AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies
AAAI symposia, held each Fall on the east coast (often in the Boston or DC area) and Spring (often at Stanford), are small, not-too-expensive conferences with just a few tracks, each focused on a specific AI topic. They’re a good place to meet like-minded folks and go deep on a topic over the course of 2-3 days.
10 years ago now, as a young developer-researcher from the game industry, these meetings were a great way for me to dip my feet into the academic waters and gently wade into the research scene. It was at one of these symposia in 1997 at MIT, on socially intelligent agents, that I first met then-grad-student Michael, which later led to our collaboration (borne in a hottub, to continue the water metaphor for a moment). Other past AAAI symposia I attended included meetings on narrative intelligence (resulting in this edited volume), and game AI. The game AI symposium track has since grown into the bigger AIIDE conference, so I haven’t been to symposia in several years.
Good news though: Brian Magerko and Mark Riedl are co-chairing a new symposium on AI-based narrative, for this November.
CFP for the AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies
http://gel.msu.edu/aaai-fs07-int/Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia, November 8-11, 2007
Submissions due: May 1, 2007Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture in both entertainment and education. As the reliance on digital technology for both entertainment and education technology increases, the need for more innovative approaches to represent, perform, and adapt narrative experiences increases as well. The term “narrative intelligence” was coined to refer to the ability in both humans and computers to organize experience into narrative form. Previous and current work that in this field has produced results in narrative understanding, narrative generation, storytelling user interface modalities, narrative performance by autonomous embodied agents, cognitive models of narrative, and common-sense reasoning.
Our goal is to bring together a multidisciplinary group of researchers
interested in discussing the fundamental issues in representing,
presenting, adapting, and reasoning about narrative in digital media.
To this end we invite AI researchers interested in interactive and
non-interactive narrative, psychologists, narrative theorists, media
theorists, and members of the interactive entertainment industry to
contribute to the symposium. We intend to interleave paper
presentations with creative, collaborative working sessions and
innovative programming, such as an improvisational acting workshop.
Contributors are encouraged to send in papers describing completed or
ongoing research, and proposals for discussion topics that will be of
interest to the community at large.Topics of interest:
– Narrative/story understanding/generation
– Agents, in the context of narrative performance
– Believability
– Emotion
– Personality
– Autonomy
– Interactive narrative/storytelling systems
– Authoring tools and narrative co-construction support tools
– Computational models of narrative
– Narrative psychology, theory, and narratology
– Narrative in commonsense reasoning
– Narrative in intelligent learning environments, serious games, and
edutainment
– Narrative in commercial and experimental interactive entertainment
– Narrative structure in interface design
– Complimentary technologies
– Virtual cinematography
– Computational models of creativity and aesthetics
– Natural language generation/understanding for narrative
– Music generation for dramatic effect
– Production/comprehensionDue to the broad and multidisciplinary nature of narrative studies, we
will also seriously consider other complimentary topics that are not
included on the list.Submission:
We welcome submissions describing (1) finished or ongoing relevant
research and systems, including theories and models that can inform the
development of systems; and (2) proposals for discussion topics that
will be of interest to the symposium. Long papers should be at most 8
pages; short papers should be at most 4 pages; proposals for discussion
topics should be at most 2 pages. Please submit electronically in PDF
format following AAAI style guidelines to magerko@msu.edu.We encourage you to demo your systems. If would like to demo a system,
please indicate so at the time of submission. If there are enough
demos, we will arrange for a special demo session.Limited travel scholarship opportunities exist for students. Contact
Brian Magerko (magerko@msu.edu) or Mark Riedl (riedl@ict.usc.edu) for
more details.We intend to actively seek out and partner with an appropriate journal
with which to publish a special issue devoted to outstanding papers
submitted to the symposium.Symposium Format:
The symposium will consist research presentations organized into tracks
(to be decided based on submissions), interleaved with creative,
collaborative working sessions and innovative programming, such as an
improvisational acting workshop. Discussions and panels will be
organized in response to submitted topic proposals.Important Dates:
Submission deadline: May 1, 2007
Notification of acceptance: May 21, 2007 Camera-ready due: TBD
Symposium: November 8-11, 2007Organizing Committee:
Brian Magerko (co-chair), Michigan State University
Mark Riedl (co-chair), University of Southern California
Bryan Loyall, BAE Systems
Michael Young, North Carolina State University
Michael Mateas, University of California, Santa CruzProgram Committee:
TBD
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:36 am
[…] ogies Deadline Extended
by andrew @ 12:36 am
fyi, the submission deadline for AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium on Int […]
August 19th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Wow – this certainly expands the concept of digital storytelling – it just highlights how much I have to learn in this area – thanks for the symposium reference.
September 29th, 2007 at 3:11 am
[…] Games Festival for this February’s GDC. The program is up for this November’s AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Te […]
November 14th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
[…] were held in Arlington, just outside Washington, DC. Nick, Michael and I were there for the Intelligent Narrative Technologies symposium, among 60 people in attendance from the Americas, Europe, Australia and Asia. Like the 1999 […]