Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia, November 9-11, 2007

Important Info

• Symposium schedule now posted.

• The AAAI INT Symposium will run an extra half-day longer to accomodate a special workshop on improvisational acting by Carnegie Mellon's Brenda Harger. Please plan on staying for the entire duration of the symposium activities on Sunday (ending at 5:30pm) if at all possible.

Description

Narrative 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/comprehension

Due to the broad and multidisciplinary nature of narrative studies, we will also seriously consider other complimentary topics that are not included on the list.

The AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium Series website can be found here.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: May 15, 2007
• Notification of acceptance: June 27, 2007
• Camera-ready due: September 14, 2007
• Symposium: November 9-11, 2007

Submission Instructions

Submissions are now closed.  Please see the AAAI Call for Participation Brochure.

Camera ready copies are to be submitted to the AAAI web site (details forthcoming) by September 14, 2007.  Camera ready copies must be in PDF format according to AAAI Style Guidelines.

Symposium Organization

Organizing Committee

Brian Magerko (co-chair), Michigan State University
Mark Riedl (co-chair), USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Bryan Loyall, BAE Systems
R. Michael Young, North Carolina State University
Michael Mateas, University of California at Santa Cruz

Program Committee

Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University
Selmer Bringsjord, RPI
Marc Cavazza, University of Teesside
Richard Evans, Electronic Arts
Pablo Gervas, Universidad Complutense Madrid
Andrew Gordon, USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Art Graesser, University of Memphis
David Herman, Ohio State University
Ian Horswill, Northwestern University
Katherine Isbister, RPI
Arnav Jhala, North Carolina State University
James Lester, North Carolina State University
Stacy Marsella, University of Southern California
Rafael Perez y Perez, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Cuajimalpa), México
Ashwin Ram, Georgia Institute of Technology
Scott Neil Reilly, Charles River Analytics
Jonathan Rowe, North Carolina State University
Marie-Laure Ryan, Independent Scholar
Magy Seif El-Nasr, Pennsyvania State University
Mei Si, University of Southern California
Nicolas Szilas, University of Geneva
Jim Thompson, North Carolina State University
Peter Vorderer, University of Southern California
Peter Weyhrauch, Mad Doc Games
Robert Zubek, Thee Rings Design

Symposium Program

Friday, November 9

9:00am - 9:15am Opening Remarks

9:15am - 10:30am Session 1: Authoring

• A Genre-Independent Approach to Authoring Interactive Screen Media Narratives (30 min)
  Marian F. Ursu, Jonathan J. Cook, Vilmos Zsombori, Ian Kegel
• An Authoring Tool For An Emergent Narrative Storytelling System (30 min)
  Michael Kriegel, Ruth Aylett, João Dias, Ana Paiva
• Learning Player Preferences to Inform Delayed Authoring (15 min)
  David Thue, Vadim Bulitko, Marcia Spetch, and Eric Wasylishen

10:30am - 11:00am Break

11:00am - 11:30am Session 2a: Narrative and Psychology

• Emotion Discourse as Design Heuristic: Creating Emotional Intelligence for Virtual Narrative Agents (15 min)
  David Herman and Joshua Steskal
• Psychopathology, Narrative, and Cognitive Architecture (15 min)
  Ian Horswill

11:30am - 12:30pm Session 2b: Authoring Discussion

The Authoring Bottleneck in Creating AI-Based Interactive Stories
Moderated by Michael Mateas, UC Santa Cruz

12:30pm - 2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm - 3:30pm Session 3: Interactive Fiction

• Using Feature Value Distributions to Estimate Player Satisfaction Through an Author's Eyes (30 min)
  David L Roberts, Christina R. Strong, and Charles L. Isbell
• Ordering Events in Interactive Fiction Narratives (30 min)
  Nick Montfort
• Drama Management Evaluation for Interactive Fiction Games (30 min)
  Manu Sharma, Santiago Ontanon, Manish Mehta, and Ashwin Ram

3:30pm - 4:00pm Break

4:00pm - 5:30pm Session 4: Affective and Synthetic Characters

• Affective Storytelling based on Characters' Feelings (30 min)
  David Pizzi and Marc Cavazza
• Building synthetic actors for interactive dramas (30 min)
  Sandy Louchart and Ruth Aylett
• Are we telling the same story? Balancing real and virtual actors in a collaborative story creation system (30 min)
  António Brisson and Ana Paiva

Saturday, November 10

9:00am - 10:30am Session 5: Interactive Narratives

• Affective Interaction Design and Narrative Presentation (30 min)
  Joshua Tanenbaum and Angela Tomizu
• Narrative Presence in Intelligent Learning Environments (30 min)
  Jonathan P. Rowe, Scott W. McQuiggan, and James C. Lester
• Driving Interactive Drama Research through Building Complete systems (15 min)
  Manish Mehta, Santiago Ontanon, and Ashwin Ram
• S-MADE: Interactive Storytelling Architecture Through Goal Execution and Decomposing (15 min)
  Yundong Cai, Zhiqi Shen, Chunyan Miao, and Ah-Hwee Tan

10:30am - 11:00am Break

11:00am - 11:30am Session 6a: Design

• How Can We Be Serious in a Game? Application of a Commercial RPG with a Pedagogical Purpose (15 min)
  João Catarino, Tiago Moreiras, Pedro Faria Lopes, Joaquim Esmerado, and Isabel Machado Alexandre
• Measuring Dramatic Believability (15 min)
  Brian Magerko

11:30am - 12:30pm Session 6b: Parallel Discussions

12:30pm - 2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm - 3:30pm Session 7: Dialogue and Theory

• Rational Dialog in Interactive Games (30 min)
  Maria Arinbjarnar
• The Limitations of a Propp-based Approach to Interactive Drama (30 min)
  Zach Tomaszewski and Kim Binsted
• Emergent Story Generation: Lessons from Improvisational Theater (15 min)
  Ivo Swartjes and Joost Vromen
• The Story Molecule: Narrative as Information (15 min)
  Beth Cardier

3:30pm - 4:00pm Break

4:00pm - 5:30pm Session 8: Demonstrations

Sunday, November 11

9:00am - 10:30am Session 9: Story Generation

• Generating Educational Tourism Narratives from Wikipedia (30 min)
  Brent Hecht, Nicole Starosielski, and Drew Dara-Abrams
• Collaborative Narrative Generation in Persistent Virtual Environments (30 min)
  Neil Madden and Brian Logan
• A Computer Model for Visual-Daydreaming (30 min)
  Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Ricardo Sosa, and Christian Lemâitre

10:30am - 11:00am Break

11:00am - 12:30pm Session 10: Story Representation and Reasoning

• A Platform for Symbolically Encoding Human Narratives (30 min)
  David K. Elson and Kathleen R. McKeown
• Understanding Goal-Based Stories through Model Finding and Planning (30 min)
  Erik T. Mueller
• Narrative Presentation and Meaning (15 min)
  Emmett Tomai and Kenneth D. Forbus
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit: A Case-study in Story-sense Reasoning (15 min)
  Malcolm Ryan, Nicholas Hannah, and Joshua Lobb

12:30pm - 2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm - 5:30pm Bonus Session: Improv Acting Class

Lead by Brenda Harger, Carnegie Mellon University