Spring 2023: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday online from 12:00 PM to 12:50 PM
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Storytelling comes naturally to people, and narrative is a fundamental cognitive tool that we use to communicate and make sense of the world. Computers are far behind people in their ability to understand and generate stories. General storytelling ability requires extensive common sense knowledge, but even telling stories in limited domains faces significant computational challenges. These challenges multiply when stories become interactive and must be adapted online in response to new or unexpected actions. Adaptive interactive narratives are a promising tool for video games, training simulations, intelligent tutoring systems, and virtual reality therapy, but we must first develop artificial intelligence applications capable of reasoning about and generating interactive stories in tandem with human partners.
This is a seminar-style course for graduate students interested in how artificial intelligence can be applied to create dynamic interactive narratives. Each meeting, students will present research papers on this topic and discuss them. With guidance from the instructor, students will define and execute a project to explore a topic of interest related to interactive narratives.
After completing this course, students should:
Prof. Stephen G. Ware
Department of Computer Science
Davis Marksbury Building, Room 307
sgware@cs.uky.edu
Office Hours: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
This course is available to graduate students with consent of the instructor.
There is no assigned textbook for this course. Readings will be taken from scientific conferences and journals and provided in advance to students.
Final grades will be determined by two types of assignments:
| Assignment | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Attendance | 20% |
| Paper Presentations | 40% |
| Course Project | 40% |
The focus of a seminar-style course is the reading and dicsussion of research papers on AI for interactive narrative systems. Since presentations and discussion are central, attendance is required. Students will be assigned to present papers from the calender below. The presenter is responsible for reading the paper and distilling the important information from it. The presenter should present the paper to the class (using slides or some other visual aid) and lead a discussion. Presentations will be graded according to this rubric.
Each student will also define a small project that applies AI to interactive storytelling in order to explore some topic of interest in more depth. At the midterm, students will have a chance to propose their project to their classmates and instructor to receive feedback. The project scope should be defined by the midterm, and the final deliverable is due at the conclusion of the course.
These policies are in place to maintain professionalism and mutual respect:
All students are expected to follow UK's code of academic integrity. Violations of this policy will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, but punishment will be severe and may include failing the class and expulsion from the university.
Please be aware that copying code from another student or from an online repository such as GitHub without citing the original source is plagiarism and will be dealt with as such. Students are encouraged to build on the code of others, but copying a project whole cloth is cheating.
Your instructor is happy to provide, on a flexible and individualized basis, accommodations for any student with a disability that makes it difficult to participate in the course or its assignments. Please visit the UK Disability Resource Center for more information.
| Topic | Assignments |
|---|---|
| Monday, January 9 Introduction and Syllabus |
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| Wednesday, January 11 Narrative Intelligence |
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| Friday, January 13 Narratology and Cognitive Science |
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| Monday, January 16 Holiday |
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| Wednesday, January 18 Survey of Story Generation |
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| Friday, January 20 Discussion / Guest Speaker |
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| Unit 1: Early Systems (up to 2000) | |
| Monday, January 23 Survey of Early Systems |
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| Wednesday, January 25 Story Grammars (1975 - 1979) |
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| Friday, January 27 Tale-Spin and Author (1977 - 1981) |
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| Monday, January 30 Discussion / Guest Speaker |
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| Wednesday, February 1 Universe (1985) |
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| Friday, February 3 Minstrel (1993) |
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| Monday, February 6 Mexica (1999) |
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| Wednesday, February 8 Mimesis (2000) |
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| Friday, February 10 Discussion / Guest Speaker |
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| Unit 2: Drama Management | |
| Monday, February 13 Survey of Drama Management |
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| Wednesday, February 15 The Oz Project and Façade |
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| Friday, February 17 Optimization-Based Drama Management |
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| Monday, February 20 Player Modeling |
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| Wednesday, February 22 Narrative Mediation |
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| Friday, February 24 Proactive Mediation |
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| Monday, February 27 Discussion / Guest Speaker |
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| Unit 2: Strong Autonomy Systems | |
| Wednesday, March 1 Strong Autonomy |
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| Friday, March 3 Social Physics |
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| Monday, March 6 Discussion / Guest Speaker |
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| Wednesday, March 8 Project Proposals |
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| Friday, March 10 Simulation |
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| Sunday, March 26 Academic Holiday |
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| Monday, March 20 Sifting |
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| Wednesday, March 22 Large-Scale Multi-Agent Storytelling |
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| Unit 4: Strong Story Systems | |
| Friday, March 24 Plans as Narrative |
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| Monday, March 27 Planning for Narrative |
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| Wednesday, March 29 Intentional Planning |
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| Friday, March 31 Conflict Planning |
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| Monday, April 3 Belief Planning |
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| Wednesday, April 5 Discussion / Guest Speaker |
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| Unit 5: Data-Driven Approaches | |
| Friday, April 7 Annotated Text |
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| Monday, April 10 Crowd-Sourcing |
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| Wednesday, April 12 Deep Learning |
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| Friday, April 14 Combining Planning and Deep Learning |
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| Monday, April 17 Coherence in Neural Story Generation |
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| Unit 6: Miscellaneous Topics | |
| Wednesday, April 19 Project Checkpoint |
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| Friday, April 21 Cognitive Models in Narrative Plans |
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| Monday, April 24 Story Embeddings |
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| Wednesday, April 26 TBD |
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| Wednesday, May 3 Final Presentations |
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