Stephen Ware, a computer science professor at the University of New Orleans, has recently been awarded a two-year $138,000 grant by the National Science Foundation. The grant will further his development of artificial intelligence systems that interact more naturally with people.
Ware teaches classes at the university on artificial intelligence and game development, including focused studies on interactive narrative, planning and digital games.
According to UNO, the grant will enable researchers in the Narrative Intelligence Lab, which Ware runs, to study how people reason hypothetically when reading and writing stories.
On Ware’s personal website, he writes, “Narrative pervades the way we think and communicate. By empowering computers to reason about them we can build interactive systems which teach, train, and entertain more effectively.”
“Imagine a video game that tells a story, or an intelligent tutoring system that adapts to the individual needs of the student, or a military training simulation that responds to the choices of the trainee,” Ware said. “All of these systems need to change the narrative as they are used, and to make those changes they need some way to reason about narrative.”