The goal of the research described in this paper is to develop an application-independent presentation tool that automatically designs effective graphical presentations (such as bar charts, scatter plots, and connected graphs) of relational information. Two problems are raised by this goal: The codifi-cation of graphic design criteria in a form that can be used by the presentation tool, and the generation of a wide variety of designs so that the presentation tool can accommodate a wide variety of information. The approach described in this paper is based on the view that graphical presentations are sentences of graphical languages. The graphic design issues are codified as expressiveness and effectiveness criteria for graphical languages. Expressiveness criteria determine whether a graphical language can express the desired information. Effectiveness criteria determine whether a graphical language exploits the capabilities of the output medium and the human visual system. A wide variety of designs can be systematically generated by using a composition algebra that composes a small set of primitive graphical languages. Artificial intelligence techniques are used to implement a prototype presentation tool called APT (A Presentation Tool), which is based on the composition algebra and the graphic design criteria.

This paper presents solutions for one requirement of autonomous characters in animation and games: the ability to navigate around their world in a life-like and improvisational manner. These "steering behaviors" are largely independent of the particulars of the character's means of locomotion. Combinations of steering behaviors can be used to achieve higher level goals (For example: get from here to there while avoiding obstacles, follow this corridor, join that group of characters...) This paper divides motion behavior into three levels. It will focus on the middle level of steering behaviors, briefly describe the lower level of locomotion, and touch lightly on the higher level of goal setting and strategy.

this paper we discuss our research and development towards creating an architecture, and a story design using this architecture, that integrates a broad and shallow approach to natural language processing, a novel character authoring language and a novel drama manager, in order to build an interactive drama about human relationships. Faade: an experiment in interactive drama In Faade, you, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening gettogether at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trips marriage. No one is safe as the accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By the end of this intense oneact play you will have changed the course of Grace and Trips lives motivating you to replay the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time. Figure 1. Real-time rendered characters Grace and Trip in Faade, with player-typed text and hand cursor. Faade is an attempt to create a real-time 3D animated experience akin to being on stage with two live actors who are motivated to make a dramatic situation happen. Instead of providing the player with 40 to 60 hours of episodic action and exploration in a huge world, we want to design an experience that provides the player with 20 minutes of emotionally intense, unified, dramatic action. The player's actions should have a significant influence on what events occur, which are left out, and how the drama ends. The experience should be varied enough that it supports replayability; only af...

this paper will try to accomplish several goals (in parallel): We will argue that the actor model is an appropriate way to think about parallel computation. Since many actors may be actively sending or receiving messages at the same time, actors are inherently well suited to modelling parallel systems. We will present some specific actors which we feel should be included in the programmer's tool kit for writing parallel programs. We will show examples illustrating the use of these primitives. Futures are actors which represent the values computed by parallel processes. They can be created dynamically and disappear when they are no longer needed. Other actors may use the value of a future without concern for the feet that it was computed in parallel. Synchronization is provided by serializers, which protect actors with internal state from timing errors caused by interacting processes. We will show how these primitives have been implemented in Act 1. Act I has been implemented on a serial machine, but it simulates the kind of parallelism that would occur on a real multiprocessor machine. Discussion of the implementation will give a more concrete picture of the mechanisms involved and will also show what would be needed for an implementation on a real network of parallel processors. 12. Traditional techniques for parallelism have been inadequate

This research was funded in part through fellowships from the Litton and Intel Corporations. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsors.

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.

Actors are a model of concurrent objects which unify synchronization and data abstraction boundaries. Because they hide details of parallel execution and present an abstract view of the computation, actors provide a promising building block for easy-to-use parallel programming systems. However, the practical success of the concurrent object model requires two conditions be satisfied. Flexible communication abstractions and their efficient implementations are the necessary conditions for the success of actors. This thesis studies how to support communication between actors efficiently. First, we discuss communication patterns commonly arising in many parallel applications in the context of an experimental actor-based language, THAL. The language provides as communication abstractions concurrent call/return communication, delegation, broadcast, and local synchronization constraints. The thesis shows how the abstractions are efficiently implemented on stock-hardware distributed memory mul...

We present an unsupervised approach to automated story picturing. Semantic keywords are extracted from the story, an annotated image database is searched. Thereafter, a novel image ranking scheme automatically determines the importance of each image. Both lexical annotations and visual content play a role in determining the ranks. Annotations are processed using the Wordnet. A mutual reinforcement-based rank is calculated for each image. We have implemented the methods in our Story Picturing Engine (SPE) system. Experiments on large-scale image databases are reported. A user study has been performed and statistical analysis of the results has been presented.

This paper deals with the automatic translation of route descriptions into graphic sketches. We discuss some general problems implied by such inter-mode transcription.

This paper introduces Vignette Semantics, a lexical semantic theory based on Frame Semantics that represents conceptual and graphical relations. We also describe a lexical resource that implements this theory, VigNet, and its application in text-to-scene generation. 1