AI Lunch and Seminar

Rogelio Cardona-Rivera - Toward the Holodeck: Computational Models of Interactive Narrative and their relation to Human Cognition

Interactive narratives are used for an ever-expanding array of purposes: educational settings, training simulations, and even organizational behaviors have had narratives woven around them because these are made more compelling in a dramatic framing. Despite their ubiquity, they remain difficult to engineer. One reason is because we lack a precise understanding of human narrative intelligence, which would explain how we interact with stories. In this talk, I will present my approach to developing a computational-cognitive model of narrative affordances, which centers on predicting how users imagine themselves taking actions in an unfolding narrative virtual environment. I will discuss this approach in the context of applications of automated planning and activity recognition to model a user's search of an author's intended meaning. Concluding the talk I will discuss the potential for this approach to enable more engaging narrative experiences, through the next generation of intelligent and adaptive virtual environments.

Speaker Bio

Rogelio Cardona-Rivera is an ABD Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at North Carolina State University. He researches technologies to improve interactive narrative design and development through artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Rogelio has been a recipient of the National GEM Fellowship, and the Department of Energy's Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Rogelio has published at diverse, high-impact venues in and around intelligent narrative technologies. His work has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) in 2012, a Best Student Paper on a Cognitive Science Topic at the Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative in 2012, and an Honorable Mention for Best Paper at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference in 2016. He has served on numerous program committees, and will co-chair the Intelligent Narrative Technologies track at ICIDS in 2016. Rogelio received his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and has interned as a computational narratologist at Sandia National Laboratories and Disney Research.