Who are we?

• Michael Mateas  is currently building Terminal Time, a system that constructs ideologically-biased documentary histories in response to audience feedback.  Terminal Time pursues a set of rhetorical goals in constructing its ideologically biased history. As these goals are pursued, the system dynamically selects historical events and constructs relations between these events so as to tell its story. This project, a collaboration with documentary filmmaker Steffi Domike and interactive artist Paul Vanouse, makes use of understandings of narrative in documentary films and the arts.
• Phoebe Sengers  has studied how to build behavior-based believable agents that actively structure their behavior so as to be narratively understandable by human observers. Borrowing ideas from Jerome Bruner's theory of narrative psychology, Sengers' system, the Expressivator, actively keeps track of what an agent has communicated to the human participant. This knowledge is used by the agents to decide on transitions that maintain coherent narrative flow when switching between behaviors.
• Kerstin Dautenhahn has been working on socially intelligent agents with a particular focus on autonomous robotic agents and interaction dynamics of embodied agents. Her current interest lies in autobiographic agents, namely robotic or virtual agents which develop a memory in terms of a history of their own sensori-motor experiences in relationship to interactions with the (social) environment. She recently started two projects using story-telling approaches for human-agent interaction involving robotic and virtual agents.
• Clark Elliott has built a system that, while using a fixed script, tells different stories by narrating the stories with different emotional emphases. This is an alternative to more traditional approaches to narrative generation which explore a combinatorial space of primitive story elements. The emotional behavior of the narration agent is generated by the Affective Reasoner, a cognitive appraisal model of emotion. Elliott's work demonstrates that human understanding of narrative makes use of an understanding of emotion.
• James Lester has built believable agents for educational environments that take into account pedagogical and believability constraints when sequencing their behaviors. Similar in spirit to the work of Sengers, these agents concern themselves with how they will be interpreted by human observers when selecting behaviors. Lester has collaborated extensively with designers, artists, and animators in building his agents, finding that the representational skills of artists are important in building agents whose behavior can be interpreted by humans.  Recently, Lester has

also begun a project in interactive fiction.
• Chrystopher Nehaniv has been developing algebraic tools for a mathematically rigorous framework expressing histories and, more generally, subjective views on the temporal experiences of (possibly non-human) agents. The framework provides formal support to realizing in robotics and software Dautenhahn's notion of a dynamic autobiographic agent. By opening up the possibility to use their own and each other's stories, this work provides narrative grounding to help release such agents from mere reactivity.

Michael Mateas, co-chair
Department of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
USA
email michaelm@cs.cmu.edu

Phoebe Sengers, co-chair
Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM)
Institute for Visual Media
Postfach 6909
D-76049 Karlsruhe
Germany
email phoebe@zkm.de

Kerstin Dautenhahn
Department of Cybernetics
University of Reading
Whiteknights, PO Box 225
Reading
RG6 6AY
UK

Clark Elliott
Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence
School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems
DePaul University
243 South Wabash Ave.
Chicago, IL 60604
USA

James Lester
Department of Computer Science
North Carolina State University
Raleigh NC 27695-7534
USA

Chrystopher Nehaniv
Interactive Systems Engineering
Faculty of Engineering & Information Sciences
University of Hertfordshire
College Lane
Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB
UK