Call for Participation:

          AAAI 1999 Fall Symposium on Narrative Intelligence

                          November 5-7, 1999
               Sea Crest Conference Center on Cape Cod
                    North Falmouth, Massachusetts

While narrative has long been a theme in AI, it has recently
experienced a surge of popularity.  Researchers in various subfields,
including story generation and understanding, agent architecture,
and interface agents, have taken independent forays into narrative,
finding it a fruitful way to rethink some basic issues in AI.  Strands
of work in Narrative Intelligence (NI) include the following:

- *Models of human narrative cognition*: Since narrative is an
important part of the way humans understand the world and each other,
some researchers are looking at ways in which artificial agents can
have similar narrative capabilities.

- *Architectures for generating narratively understandable behavior*:
Some researchers are building story-telling systems, autonomous
agents, and interface agents which can generate narratively structured
behavior.

- *Meta-studies of narrative as part of AI research*: AI researchers,
being human, themselves use narrative to understand their own work.
An understanding of this narrative process can improve the quality and
social applicability of AI technology.

Researchers in NI have drawn from many research traditions, including
art, literary theory, (narrative) psychology, and cultural studies.
The goal for our symposium, Narrative Intelligence, is to bring
researchers from these disparate perspectives together to talk about
what we have learned about narrative and its potential for AI.

Scope and questions of the symposium

Within AI, this symposium solicits work from, but not limited to, the
following areas:

* Story understanding
* Story generation
* Narrative structure in interface design
* Narrative structure in the design of autonomous agents
* Believable agents (insofar as they participate in narrative structure)
* Interactive story-telling

In addition, because NI researchers have drawn deep inspiration
from concepts of narrative from other disciplines, we hope to
broaden and solidify our understanding of narrative by including
several participants from other research traditions, including:

* Narrative psychology
* Narrative theory
* Art
* Cultural studies

More information about this symposium can be found at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~michaelm/narrative.html

Submission Information:

Potential participants should submit a short paper (3 to 5 pages -
see web page above for more information) describing their work in this
area.  The paper should make clear which approaches to narrative are
being drawn on and how they apply to AI.  All submissions should be
sent via electronic mail, in plain ASCII format, to Michael Mateas at
michaelm@cs.cmu.edu.

Submissions for the symposia are due March 31, 1999 
Notification of acceptance will be given by May 7, 1999 
Material to be included in the working notes of the symposium must be
received by August 27, 1999.  

Organizing Committee:

Kerstin Dautenhahn
    University of Reading Department of Cybernetics 

Clark Elliott
    DePaul University Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence

James Lester
    North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science

Michael Mateas (co-chair)
    Carnegie Mellon University Department of Computer Science

Chrystopher Nehaniv
    University of Hertfordshire Interactive Systems Engineering

Phoebe Sengers (co-chair)
    Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM Karlsruhe)

General Symposia Information:

This symposium is one of five being offered in the 1999 AAAI Fall
Symposium Series.  Symposia will be limited to between forty and
sixty participants.  Each participant will be expected to attend a
single symposium.  Working notes will be prepared and distributed to
participants in each symposium.  In addition to invited participants,
a limited number of interested parties will be able to register in
each symposium on a first-come, first-served basis.  Registration
information will be available in early July.  To obtain registration
information, write to:

AAAI Fall Symposium Series

445 Burgess Drive 
Menlo Park, CA 94025-3442 
Voice: 650-328-3123 
Fax: 650-321-4457 
fss@aaai.org 
www.aaai.org/Symposia/symposia.html