Wesley Center event
Check out the Digital Media Wesley Center event this Monday, where we will be speaking and presenting our latest work on digital improv, EarSketch, and other projects:
The Adaptive Media Lab explores how to create digital media experiences that tailor themselves to individual users. These adaptations may occur for dramatic purposes (e.g. interactive narrative), educational purposes (e.g. serious games), and / or purely for entertainment. This research involves work in design, artificial intelligence, and human computer interaction.
New Digital Improv video
Check out the new short demo video Chris has posted on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/30111572
Digital Improv video for CIF 2011
For those who are interested, here is the video for our submission to the 2011 Chicago Improv Festival. This was sent in as a normal troupe submission and granted us entry to do a three day demo installation at ComedySportz in Belmont in April 2011.
EarSketch project highlighted in GT Daily Buzz
The EarSketch project, recently funded for $1mil by the NSF CE21 program, is the headline for the local announcements at Georgia Tech today.
Congrats to everyone involved on the beginning to a great project.
Here is a video shot of some prototype work of ours: EarSketch Prototype demo
Postdoc Position at Georgia Tech
The Adaptive Digital Media (ADAM) Lab at Georgia Tech has a 1-year postdoc position open (with the potential for additional years) on the topic of computational creativity. This position is under the NSF CreativeIT-funded Digital Improv Project, a multi-year project focused on the study and modeling of human cognition and theatrical improvisation. This work involves studying human improvisers, better understanding the processes they employ to co-create stories, and the subsequent computational modeling of our formal findings.
This position will involve building an integrated AI system that extends our previous work on standalone models. This will involve research in the computational construction of shared mental models (similar to common ground), reasoning about ambiguous actions and story elements, and the application of narrative and improv constructs to shape an improvised scene with another agent or human interactor.
Prospective applicants should have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Psychology, or a related field and be capable of building advanced human behavior models. Experience in cognitive architectures, fuzzy logic, interactive narrative, narrative cognition, or human behavior modeling is a plus.
Please email a current CV and 1 page research statement to adamlabgt@gmail.com. This position will remain open until it has been filled.
CHI 2010 - Improv Talk
This video is from CHI 2010 where we presented “The Implications of Improvisational Acting and Role-Playing on Design Methodologies.” The talk describes how improvisational theatre and role-playing performance techniques work, how they have been used by designers and where the techniques differentiate from one another.
The Implications of Improvisational Acting and Role-Playing on Design Methodologies from Brian Magerko on Vimeo.
INT3 paper accepts
Congrats to the Digital Improv team for two paper accepts in the upcoming workshop. Only 8 papers were accepted for long presentations, so that is fantastic news.
The talk titles:
“Bottoms Up: Improvisational Micro-Agents” and
“Shared Mental Models in Improvisational Performance”
ICIDS 2009
Our talk went well yesterday. The first time we gave it, the first slide wound up crashing the projector (epic, epic fail) even though we had tested every single thing out earlier. Even still, got a ton of applause for our one slide presentation. Heh. Perhaps applause in jest, but hey 
The second attempt, which actually included content, went better, but with less applause per slide. Ana Paiva brought up an interesting observation about how case-based reasoning is an obvious formalism for covering some of our findings, which maps well onto our concept of using scripts and episodic memory. Work begats work.
Creativity and Cognition 2009
Our ACM Creativity and Conference presentation on the Digital Improv project went over very well. The talk (sans my incredibly sparse slides) was recorded and posted here:
Creativity and Cognition Conference, 2009 from Brian Magerko on Vimeo.