The ability to generate narrative is of importance to computer systems that wish to use story effectively for entertainment, training, or education. We identify two properties of story – plot coherence and character believability – which play a role in the success of a story. Plot coherence is the perception by audience members that character actions have relevance to the outcome of the story. Character believability is the perception that character actions are motivated by agents ' internal beliefs and desires. Unlike conventional planning in which plan goals represent an agent's intended world state, multiagent story planning involves goals that represent the outcome of a story. In order for the plans ' actions to appear believable, multi-agent story planners must determine not only how agents ' actions achieve a story's goal state, but must also ensure that each agent appears to be acting intentionally. We present a narrative generation planning system for multi-agent stories that is capable of generating narratives with both strong plot coherence and strong character believability. The planning algorithm uses causal reasoning and a simulated intention recognition process to drive plan creation. 1.

this paper, he looks at the use of space in human narratives. This detailed look at human Narrative Intelligence provides an important anchor in narrative theory for the Symposium.

Abstract. The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while promoting active learning. An IPD immerses the learner in an engaging, evocative story where she interacts with realistic characters. The learner makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of a character in the story, and sees the consequences of her decisions. The story’s characters are realized by autonomous agents. We discuss IPD in the context of Carmen’s Bright IDEAS (CBI), a multimedia title designed to teach problem solving skills to mother’s of pediatric cancer patients. CBI was an exploratory arm of a clinical trial and here we discuss key creative and technical aspects of the design and results from that arm.

Abstract: This paper presents a model of learning as a social process incorporating multiple distinguishable phases that constitute a cycle of personal and social knowledge-building. It explicitly considers the relationship of processes associated with individual minds to those considered to be socio-cultural. This model of collaborative knowledge-building incorporates insights from various theories of understanding and learning in hopes of providing a useful conceptual framework for the design of CSCL software, specifically collaborative knowledgebuilding environments (KBEs). By naming a set of cognitive and social processes, it suggests areas for computer support, including a set of specific illustrative KBE components.

This chapter discusses a core phenomenon for a theory of CSCL: building collaborative knowing. Rather than reviewing, one after another, various theories that are currently influential in the field of CSCL (and that are described in other chapters), a view of collaboration is outlined here that

Recent years have seen significant growth in work on interactive storytelling environments. A key challenge posed by these environments is narrative planning, in which a director agent orchestrates all of the events in a storyworld to create an optimal experience for a user, who is herself an active participant in the unfolding story. To create effective stories, the director agent must cope with the task’s inherent uncertainty, including uncertainty about the user’s intentions and the absence of a complete theory of narrative. Director agents must be efficient so they can operate in real time. In this paper, we present U-DIRECTOR, a decision-theoretic narrative planning architecture that dynamically models narrative objectives (e.g., plot progress, narrative flow), storyworld state (e.g., plot focus), and user state (e.g., goals, beliefs) with a dynamic decision network that continually selects storyworld actions to maximize narrative utility on an ongoing basis. The U-DIRECTOR architecture has been implemented in a narrative planner for Crystal Island, an interactive storyworld in which users play the role of a medical detective solving a science mystery. Preliminary evaluations suggest that the U-DIRECTOR architecture satisfies the real-time constraints of interactive environments and creates engaging narrative experiences. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems]: Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities.

: Social Sciences are increasingly interested in understanding the characteristics of Computer Mediated Communication and its effects on people, groups and organisations. The first effect of this influence is the revolution in the metaphors used to describe communication. After describing these changes, the paper outlines a framework for the study of computer-mediated communication and considers the three psychosocial roots of the process by which interaction between users is constructed -- networked reality, virtual conversation and identity construction. The paper also considers the implications of these changes for current research in communication studies, with particular reference to the role of context, the link between cognition and interaction, and the use of interlocutory models as paradigms of communicative interaction: communication is not only -- or not so much -- a transfer of information, but also the activation of a psychosocial relationship, the process by which interlo...

This paper is concerned with modeling the nature of expertise and its role in society in relation to research on expert systems and enterprise models. It argues for the adoption of a collective stance in which the human species is viewed as a single organism recursively partitioned in space and time into sub-organisms that are similar to the whole. These parts include societies, organizations, groups, individuals, roles, and neurological functions. Notions of expertise arise because the organism adapts as a whole through adaptation of its interacting parts. The phenomena of expertise correspond to those leading to distribution of tasks and functional differentiation of the parts. The mechanism is one of positive feedback from parts of the organism allocating resources for action to other parts on the basis of those latter parts past performance of similar activities. Distribution and differentiation follow if performance is rewarded, and low performers of tasks, being excluded by the f...

Because narrative plays such a central role in cognition and culture, narrative-centered curricula have been the subject of increasing attention. By taking advantage of the inherent structure of narrative, narrative-centered learning environments could provide engaging worlds in which students are actively involved in motivating storybuilding activities. The fundamental hypothesis of this research program is that by enabling learners to be co-constructors of narratives, narrative-centered learning environments can promote the deep, connection-building meaning-making activities that define constructivist learning. We outline the features of narrative that support constructivist learning, explore the key issues in introducing narrative into learning environments, consider how these environments can support one particular subject matter, literacy education, and sketch the research agenda required to make narrative-centered learning environments a reality.

gence in circumscribed, cooperative roles to aid human observers in organizing, selecting, managing, and interpreting data. CHARACTERIZATIONS OF DATA OVERLOAD Data overload is the problem of our age -- generic yet surprisingly resistant to different avenues of attack. In order to make progress on innovating solutions to data overload in a particular setting, we need to identify the root issues that make data overload a challenging problem everywhere and to understand why proposed solutions have broken down or produced limited success in operational settings. There are three basic ways that the data overload problem has been characterized (Woods, Patterson, and Roth, 1998): 1. As a clutter problem where there is too much data: therefore, we can solve data overload by reducing the number of data units that are displayed. This has not proven to be a fruitful direction in solving data overload because it misrepresents the design problem, is based on erroneous assumptions a