2/26 Friday Seminar Speech

Location: Science Engineering Building II (csie building), Levture IV

Time: 2pm~5pm

Today’s Speaker： Prof. Nicolas Szilas from Switzerland Université de Genève。

Prof. Nicolas Szilas is the famous scholar in the Artificial Intelligence and Game Narrative Intelligence, we encourage you to participate.

Topic: Interactive Digital Storytelling: From Artificial Intelligence to Narrative Intelligence

Abstract:

The field of Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) has emerged since 15 years ago, when researchers and practitioners realized that in virtual environments, letting a user have a strong influence on events while preserving a good narrative experience was an interesting and difficult problem, which could not be solved by classical software approaches.

Two Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based approaches quickly became prominent to tackle the problem: autonomous agents and planning. The autonomous agents approach consists of developing rich story characters who, by interacting with each other, would produce a story. However, autonomous characters rarely produce a meaningful story because a story cannot be reduced to its characters. The planning approach consists of defining a story-end and letting the system calculate a path towards that end, while taking into account the user’s choices (via re-planning techniques). However, planning techniques seek the shortest path towards an end, which is different from the logic of stories: it is the path itself that is interesting and the path is rarely quick and easy. Both autonomous agents and planning lack something when it comes to describing a narrative.