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| Established | 2006 |
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Parent institution | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| Affiliation | Baskin School of Engineering |
| Advisors |
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| Location | , , |
| Subjects | |
| Website | eis |
The Expressive Intelligence Studio is a research group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, established to conduct research in the field of game design technology. [1] The studio is currently being run by Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who work closely with the students in their research. [2]
When Michael Mateas formed the group back in 2006, his goal was to "stretch the students into being creative." He did not want the game design program at UCSC to be "just about photo-realistic graphics." Instead he wanted to form an ambitious group of students that grabbed the attention of the gaming industry. [1] According to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a major benefit for establishing the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UCSC is its proximity to Silicon Valley, where many game companies are located. [1] In 2011, UCSC was listed 7th on Princeton Review's list of top graduate game design programs. [3]
Most of the research done by the Expressive Intelligence Studio is done through major research projects, and focuses primarily on video game AI. [4] PhD students in the program work closely with the advisors on these projects, which have a wide range of topics. Some of these topics include automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. [5] This type of research in the field of game design is only being done in a small number of other institutions, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Southern California, and Georgia Institute of Technology. According to Mateas, however, the program at the University of California, Santa Cruz Expressive Intelligence Studio strikes a balance between technology and design. [1]
The studio has released several playable games based on research ideas, including Prom Week, the only university-produced finalist in the 2012 Independent Games Festival. [6]
The EISbot software (short for Expressive Intelligence Studio Bot) is an example for a human-level artificial intelligence which can play Starcraft. It was developed in 2010 for the Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE). The AIIDE Starcraft AI Competition is about a game playing agent, who has to win against a human player. EISbot was realized as an agent architecture, which contains submodules for reactive planning, machine learning and case-based reasoning. The reactive planner is the core of EISbot and was realized with A Behavior Language (ABL), [7] which is an action language similar to STRIPS. The behaviors are planned with so called managers who are responsible for subgoals like production, income, tactics and scouting behavior. [8]
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Benjamin F. Porter College, known colloquially as Porter College, is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is located on the lower west side of the university, south of Kresge College and north of Rachel Carson College. The college was founded in 1969 as College Five and formally dedicated on November 21, 1981. On that day the college was given the motto Ars Longa, Vita Brevis, and a series of college symbols, including a faculty mace and a college bell, were inaugurated.
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Façade is an artificial-intelligence-based interactive story created by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. It was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival and has been exhibited at several international art shows. In 2010, it was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.
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AgentSheets was one of the first modern block-based programming language for kids. The idea of AgentSheets was to overcome syntactic challenges found in common text-based programming languages by using drag and drop mechanisms conceptualizing commands such as conditions and actions as editable blocks that could be composed into programs. Ideas such as this are used in various other programming languages, such as Scratch. AgentSheets is used to create media-rich projects such as games and interactive simulations. The main building blocks of AgentSheets are agents which are interactive objects programmed through rules. Using conditions agents can sense the user input including mouse, keyboard and in some versions even speech recognition and web page content. Using actions agents can move, produce sounds, open web pages, and compute formulae.
The UCSC Silicon Valley Initiatives are a series of educational and research activities which together increase the presence of the University of California in Silicon Valley. To that end, UC Santa Cruz has set up a 90,000 square-foot satellite campus called the University of Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Campus (SVC), currently located on Bowers street in Santa Clara, California, where it has been since April 2016 The Initiatives, still in the early stages of their development, have had ambitious hopes attached to them by UCSC, among them the possibility of a home for the University's long-planned graduate school of management and the Bio|Info|Nano R&D Institute. It currently houses professional the SVLink incubator-accelerator program, programs and a distance education site for the UCSC Baskin School of Engineering, the UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, the Office of Industry Alliances and Technology Commercialization leadership, and the University of California's online learning program, UC Scout.
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E. James Whitehead is Professor and Chair of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. He served as the Chair of the Computer Science department University of California, Santa Cruz from 2010 to 2014. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1989, and a PhD in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, in 2000.
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Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a professor in the Computational Media department of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is an advisor for the Expressive Intelligence Studio. He is an alumnus of the Literary Arts MFA program and Special Graduate Study PhD program at Brown University. In addition to his research in digital media, computer games, and software studies, he served for 10 years as a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization.
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