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Projects

Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project

Chimeria:Grayscale

Tales of sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault are bubbling angrily through the wires. In late 2017, the media attention to this perpetual ill and the harrowing #metoo stories sparked us to share our own computational tale of fiction that we humbly hope can participate in this dialogue. The computer as a medium offers a unique expressive palette for storytellers. We can build models of crucial and moving issues in our world. As a step toward this aim as it relates to sexism, we are announcing the launch of our interactive narrative called Grayscale. The experience is intended to provoke players to reflect critically on sexism in the workplace, both overt and hostile and more subtle.

MazeStar Computing Workshops

We approach STEM education and access to high quality, relevant learning opportunities as a social justice issue of our time, this includes taking an anti-deficit ideological stance on students and their achievement. We start with student identified relevant themes, questions, challenges, and goals and see who students are and what they bring to the table as assets, important and rich resources to draw on. We utilize aspects of the nationally recognized Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum to spark student excitement about computing and focus on bringing the culture into the fabric of computing practice. We utilize a custom-made digital platform called MazeStar that allows students to explore their ideas while learning about human-computer interaction, web design, privacy, coding, debugging, and more. A component of MazeStar is a game-like programming environment called Mazzy in which students learn the building blocks of coding. 

Chimeria: Gatekeeper

“Chimeria:Gatekeeper” is a playable interactive conversational scenario, authored using the Chimeria Platform It uses a cognitive science-grounded model of social category membership to customize how conversational narratives unfold. Conversations between characters are important aspects of many videogames. However, most such conversational interactions in videogames are quite limited in how they take into account the identities of those characters. Conversation in videogames typically varies, if at all, based only on one aspect of the character such as an NPC referring to the character by race, class, or a gendered pronoun. Chimeria: Gatekeeper is an application of the Chimeria Platform, which seeks to developing conversational narratives that addresses such limitations.

Puzzlescript AI

We present an approach for automated evaluation and generation of videogames made with PuzzleScript, a description-based scripting language for authoring games, which was created by game designer Stephen Lavelle. We have developed a system that automatically discovers solutions for a multitude of videogames that each possess different game mechanics, rules, level designs, and win conditions. This was achieved by developing a set of general ruleset heuristics to assess the playability of a game based on its game mechanics. From the results of our approach, we showcase that a description-based language enables the development of general methods for automatically evaluating games authored with it. Additionally, we illustrate how an evolutionary approach can be used together with these methods to to automatically design alternate or novel game mechanics for authored games.

Steam-Player-Preference Analyzer and the AIR Status Performance Classifier

In this work, we investigate how people exhibit and construct forms of self-expression in virtual environments including computational systems such as online social networks, or videogames. For example, in everyday life people dress in certain ways to reflect their individual senses of fashion, thereby expressing their social and personal knowledge regarding clothing. However, looking at a large number of people, distinctive categories may become apparent such as “formal,” “business casual,” or “leisurewear.” Such identity-related phenomena take place in computational systems as well. In representing oneself in computational systems, certain aspects of one's identity, including preferences and knowledge, are imparted. By comparing and contrasting these representations between the different computational systems, we may begin to understand how these systems support, or hinder, the user in terms of representing themselves adequately. More importantly, we may begin to identify, and model, phenomena that exists within the real world computationally too, enabling us as developers and designers to understand the consequences and implications of choices made in the development and design of such systems.

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Gestural Narrative Interactive Expression

Gestural Narrative Interactive Expression (GeNIE) Project

Gestural Narrative Interactive Expression (GeNIE) Project

The Gestural Narrative Interactive Expression (GeNIE) Project (NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant) aims to develop and better understanding the use of gestural interfaces for expressive works of interactive narrative. Gestural interfaces have become more popular with the increasing prevalence of systems such as the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360, mobile phones with multi-touch screens and built-in gyroscopes and accelerometers, and laptop computers equipped with touchpads.

GRIOT Projects

Living Liberia Fabric

The Living Liberia Fabric, initiated in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia, is an interactive, web-based narrative supporting the goal of lasting peace after years of civil war (1979-2003). It links concerns for liberation, dignity, and the future with needs for cultural foundations, human rights, truth, and reconciliation. Our system is based in Liberia's culture and the specifics of the conflicts, hence representing our cultural computing perspective.

Loss, Undersea

Loss, Undersea is an interactive narrative/multimedia semantics project by Fox Harrell in which a character moving through a standard workday encounters a world submerging into the depths -- a double-scope story of banal life blended with a fantastic Atlantean metaphor. As a user selects emotion-driven actions for the character to perform, the character transforms -- sea creature extensions protrude and calcify around him -- and poetic text narrating his loss of humanity and the human world undersea ensues.
 
You can download  the application here:

Generative Visual Renku

Generative Visual Renku

The Generative Visual Renku project presents a new form of concrete polymorphic poetry inspired by Japanese renku poetry, iconicity of Chinese character forms, and generative models from contemporary art. Calligraphic iconic illustrations are composed by the system with both visual and conceptual constrains in response to user actions into a fanciful topography articulating the nuanced interplay between organic (natural or hand-created) and modular (mass-produced or consumerist) artifacts that saturate our lives.

Memory, Reverie Machine

Memory, Reverie Machine

Memory, Reverie Machine (MRM) is a text-based computational narrative system that is informed by stream of consciousness literature, cognitive linguistic theory of blending and analogy, artificial intelligence research and conventions of Interactive Fiction (IF). The system generates stories in which the main character shifts dynamically along a scale between a user-controlled avatar with low intentionality and an autonomous non-player character with high intentionality.

The Griot Sings Haibun

The Griot Sings Haibun

A griot is a revered storyteller in many parts of the African Diaspora. "The Griot Sings Haibun,"is an improvised performance of music, poetry, image, and computation. Live musicians fuel collective improvisation with Harell's GRIOT, a cybernetic system on which a human "plays" an ever-changing polypoem, an interactive multimedia polymorphic narrative poem. The core of GRIOT is the novel Alloy algorithm to generate new concepts and metaphors by blending, based on recent research in cognitive linguistics, computer science, and semiotics.

The Girl With Skin of Haints and Seraphs

The Girl With Skin of Haints and Seraphs

The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs is a polymorphic poem first implemented in a non-interactive form as the initial deployment of the Alloy algorithm for generative purposes within another system. It has been subsequently updated with each iteration of GRIOT and it provides a good example for tracing through the execution of an interactive polymorphic poem. As stated above, this polypoem is a commentary on racial politics, the limitations of simplistic binary views of social identity, and the need for more contingent, dynamic models of social identity.

Additional Projects

Re/Search: Art, Science, and Information Technology

This joint workshop between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to develop a national agenda for funding and collaboration integrating the arts and computing/information science. The event gathered 55 international thought leaders in the area. Attendees included leaders from the NSF and NEA, deans of arts programs, professors of computer science, nonprofit leaders, independent artists, and others advancing digital media and new forms of expression.

Define Me: Chimera

Define Me: Chimera

DefineMe: Chimera is a social networking (Facebook) application in which users define metaphorical profiles and avatars for each other, and several games and avatar creation systems where users' representations change dynamically based upon social context, user interaction, and artifact use. The DefineMe database is designed to be lightweight, dynamic, and extensible, while implementing categorical relationships between members.

Chameleonia

Chameleonia

Chameleonia: Days of Lost Selves is a prototype sketch of a game based on shifting identities where the construction of self is at stake. Players make gestures associated with traits such as aggression, commerce, ideology, and more. Player's avatars, and their opponents', then transform in response. One moment the player character is a bazooka-toting cowgirl/boy sipping a softdrink - at the next moment a gold chain and pocketwatch wearing tycoon with stock charts bursting from its top-hatted head.