I recently completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California with an emphasis in Natural Language Processing applied in the domain of Digital Interactive Storytelling.
Most of my research as a student was conducted with my advisor Andrew Gordon at the Institute for Creative Technologies.
After graduating I spent a year at the Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development lab.
I am currently a Postdoc at the University of California Santa Cruz in the Computational Cinema grou, which is part of the larger Games and Playable Media program in Computer Science.
My research focuses on developing player driven digital interactive storytelling applications in which the full breadth and depth of real-world human experience can be explored in the virtual world.
My thesis explores a mixture of information-retrieval, machine-learning and natural language processing techniques to tap into a vast amount of knowlege about common activities implicit in the stories they tell on their weblogs every day.
This information is then used as the basis for a large-scale case-based reasoning system to drive an open domain collaborative writing system, Say Anything, in which a user and computer take turns writing sentences of a story.
The goal is to leverage the massive amounts of personal narrative content, authored by individuals in their weblogs everyday, to enable a computer agent to generate coherent narrative sentences in response to human authored content with a human authored content.