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Michael named program chair for FDG 2009

 

Michael Young will serve as the program chair for the Fourth Annual Foundations of Digital Games conference to be held April 26 to April 30, 2009 on-board the Disney Wonder cruise ship, sailing from Orlando, FL.  FDG '09, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, is a focal point for academic efforts in all areas of research involving computer and console games, game technologies, game play and game design. Previously known as the Conference on Game Development and Computer Science Education (GDCSE), this year's conference broadens its scope to cover the breadth of game research and education. The conference is targeted at researchers making contributions that promote new game capabilities, designs, applications and modes of play.

Read more about the conference here.

 

Research Interests

Michael's current research interests are in artificial intelligence, planning algorithms, discourse generation and computational models of interactive narrative. Michael directs the Liquid Narrative research group and is the founder and co-director of the NCSU Digital Games Research Center. He served as  the editor in chief of the Journal of Game Development for two years, from 2007 through 2008 and is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.  Michael's group distributes the Zocalo system for intelligent control of interactive virtual environments. Many of Young's papers are available electronically; here are some of the highlights:

  • An Objective Character Believability Evaluation Procedure for Multi-Agent Story Generation Systems by Riedl, Mark and Young, R. Michael, in The Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2007. [PDF]
  • From Linear Story Generation to Branching Story Graphs by Riedl, Mark, and Young, R. Michael, in the IEEE Journal of Computer Graphics and Applications, May/June 2006 pages 23- 31. [PDF].
  • Story and discourse: A bipartite model of narrative generation in virtual worlds by R. Michael Young,  in Interaction Studies, 2007. [PDF]
  • A Discourse Planning Approach for Cinematic Camera Control for Narratives in Virtual Environments by Jhala, Arnav and Young, R. Michael, in The Proceedings of the National Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. [PDF]
  • Open-World Planning for Story Generation by Riedl, Mark and Young, R. Michael, in the Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Edinburgh, Scotland, 2005. [PDF]

Teaching Interests

Young teaches the CSC graduate course on Computational Models of Interactive Narrative and the undergraduate classes on Game Design and Development. Previously, he taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Artificial Intelligence.

Michael also created and helps to run the Computer Science Undergraduate Concentration in Game Development.

 

Read more.