The Adventure Continues

I am continuing to work on Collective A.I. through a company I co-founded called Giant Otter Technologies, inc.  We will be blogging from http://giantotter.com/blog/, as well as posting updates on Twitter: @GiantOtterTech.  See you there.

Defense Abridged

I've been meaning to blog a reader's digest version of my PhD thesis defense since December.  Now that six months have passed, it's about time to follow through with that plan.  You can also watch my AI Summit talk from the GDC Vault (starts at 20:45), which is a condensed version of my defense, minus the study results.  The complete thesis document is available here:  Collective Artificial Intelligence: Simulated Role-Playing from Crowdsourced Data

PhD? PhDone.

I defended my PhD in December, and got the document all signed off in January.  I will eventually write a "reader's digest" summary post (with figures and videos). But for now, for those interested, the document is online here:

Collective Artificial Intelligence: Simulated Role-Playing from Crowdsourced Data
http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/papers/orkin_phd_thesis_2013.pdf

You can read the Abstract here:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/research/jeff_orkin_phd_abstract.html

Game Development in the 21st Century: Meet my A.I. Team

Over the past couple months, I've been working with a team of seven people to create thousands of variations of restaurant behavior and dialogue, drawing from our database of recorded games.  (See my previous post for some background on the project).  The interesting thing is that my team members don't know anything about A.I., they're not programmers, they don't have any previous game development experience.  They are random people that I hired on the internet, with minimal vetting, and they're doing great work!   

More after the jump...

Thesis Proposal Recap

I'm long overdue for a new blog post.  2011 has been a busy year.  I've been making a lot of research progress, which has kept me too busy to blog!  I've hit a number of milestones in recent months -- my thesis proposal was approved in August, a prototype of my new planner came together in October, and I launched a crowdsourced data annotation effort in November.  This post will briefly recap the proposal that I presented to my committee. 

I'm building a new planner that combines plan recognition with case-based reasoning, to simulate reasoning from a collection of episodic memories.  My approach is production-oriented, in that it is mindful of the content authoring bottleneck (where content is AI behaviors and dialogue lines), and attempts to make it as easy as possible to get an enormous variety of content into the system.  The approach leverages the realities of the world we live in today, where it is possible to crowdsource repetitive tasks to non-experts, and opts for powering the system with lots of mundane data annotation rather than cleverly programmed AI.

For background information on this project, see the previous recaps: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

More after the jump...

Improviso: Month One Highlights, and now on Mac OSX!

Improviso has been online for about one month, so I thought I would share some highlights so far.

The big news is that we released the Mac OSX version today.  If you are still holding out for the iOS version, DON'T!  There is not going to be an iOS version!!  So download Improviso for Windows or OSX and play today:  http://gambit.mit.edu/improviso


More after the jump...

Play Improviso!

Screenshot from Improviso.

PAX East just wrapped up, where we debuted our new data collection game: Improviso!  Players of Improviso are paired anonymously online as the Lead Actor and Director of a low budget sci-fi movie. The Lead Actor plays Ted, a struggling reporter who wakes up tied-up on an alien spaceship. The Director selects scenes, summons special effects, and plays the supporting cast members: the G-Man, Scientist, Alien, and Little Girl. Improviso is a collaboration between the Media Lab and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.  Download Improviso yourself and play today!

More after the jump...