Abstract: Storytelling is a pervasive part of the human experience--we as humans tell stories to communicate, inform, entertain, and educate. In this talk, I will lay out the case for the study of storytelling through the lens of artificial intelligence. I will explore the grand challenge of building an intelligent systems that learn to tell stories. I will specifically look at two challenges pertaining to neural generative processes: control of text generation to achieve goal-driven behavior, and the challenge of maintaining and transferring long-term world knowledge. While both of these challenges are necessary for automated story generation, they also appear in other artificial intelligence and natural language processing tasks as well.
Bio: Dr. Mark Riedl is an Associate Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. Dr. Riedl’s research focuses on human-centered artificial intelligence—the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that understand and interact with human users in more natural ways. Dr. Riedl’s recent work has focused on story understanding and generation, computational creativity, explainable AI, and teaching virtual agents to behave safely. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, ONR, the U.S. Army, U.S. Health and Human Services, Disney, and Google. He is the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award and an NSF CAREER Award.