Michael Mateas Home Page

Artificial Intelligence-based Art and Entertainment

My work is in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based art and entertainment (Expressive AI). The fundamental research question in expressive AI is resolving the tension between autonomy on the part of the AI system and human authorship. I build AI architectures, in the context of interactive art and entertainment, that simultanously allow human artists to craft the experience while providing autonomous, generative and dynamic response to interaction. By viewing AI as an expressive medium, my work raises and answers novel AI research questions while pushing the boundaries of the conveivable and possible in interactive art.

A major thrust of my research is Interactive Drama. Façade, a collaboration with Andrew Stern, provides a good demonstration of interactive drama, showing how novel approaches to character AI, story AI (drama management) and natural language processing can be brought together to create a dramatically compressed, intense, first-person experience. My continuing work on interactive drama is supported by a generous grant from Intel.

This semester I'm teaching LCC6310: Computation as an Expressive Medium.