The Center for Information Society Studies presents the fourth in its Research Seminar Series, Spring 2001.
R. Michael Young, Ph.D.
Assistant
Professor, Department of Computer Science and
Affiliated faculty member, Center for Information Society Studies
"Coherence and Control:
Lunch will be provided for faculty. If faculty wish to bring 1-2
students, we can provide lunches for them as well.
To register and reserve a box lunch, please contact
Beth Cassedy at
beth_cassedy@ncsu.edu, including
your name and dept., and indicate
your choice of turkey, chicken salad, roast beef, or vegetarian lunch. The
deadline for lunch reservations is WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4th.
The Inevitable Battleground of Interactive
Narratives"
Friday, April 6, 2001
12:00p.m.-1:15 p.m.
Caldwell Hall, M-8
NC State University
About the seminar
Just as new, incredibly powerful gaming consoles like Sony's Playstation
2 begin to find their way into our living rooms, companies developing
games for these systems are realizing the central role of narrative in
the titles that they produce. Research on the Holy Grail of gaming
software -- the automatic creation of compelling storylines that adapt to
a user's desires, capabilities and activities -- is only now
beginning to sketch out the potential to move gaming from its
violence-centered base to a new hybrid of interactive entertainment and
performance art. In this talk, I'll tell you why the next generations of
entertainment software will be more than child's play and how our
research group is using cold hard computer science to create storyworlds
that people step into with plotlines that they play a substantive role
in.
About R. Michael Young
Michael Young develops new technological tools in an effort to help
people that are not information technology specialists interact with
computers in more natural ways. Young led the development of the ideas
and technologies underlying the Longbow discourse planner, a key
component of several intelligent systems -- including the Sherlock
intelligent tutoring system at University of Pittsburgh's Learning
Research and Development Center and the Sage graphics display system at
CMU's Robotics Institute -- designed to interact with their users via
natural language. He leads the Liquid Narrative group at NCSU, a
interdisciplinary research group of undergraduate, graduate and faculty
researchers centered on computational models of interactive narraive.
Before coming to NC State, Michael was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie
Mellon's Robotics Institute. He earned a BS in Computer
Science at California State University, Sacramento (1984), and MS in
Computer Science from Stanford (1988) and a PhD degrees in Intelligent
Systems at the University of Pittsburgh (1997). He has published widely
on the uses of computers in interactive environments and in 2001 he was
awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the NSF's highest
award for young scientists.