Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture in both entertainment and education. As the reliance on digital technology for both entertainment and education technology increases, the need for more innovative approaches to represent, perform, and adapt narrative experiences increases as well. The term "narrative intelligence" was coined to refer to the ability in both humans and computers to organize experience into narrative form. Previous and current work that in this field has produced results in narrative understanding, narrative generation, storytelling user interface modalities, narrative performance by autonomous embodied agents, cognitive models of narrative, and common-sense reasoning.

Our goal is to bring together a multidisciplinary group of researchers interested in discussing the fundamental issues in representing, presenting, adapting, and reasoning about narrative in digital media. To this end we invite AI researchers interested in interactive and non-interactive narrative, psychologists, narrative theorists, media theorists, and members of the interactive entertainment industry to contribute to the symposium. We intend to interleave paper presentations with creative, collaborative working sessions and innovative programming, such as an improvisational acting workshop. Contributors are encouraged to send in papers describing completed or ongoing research, and proposals for discussion topics that will be of interest to the community at large.

Topics of interest:

• Narrative/story understanding/generation

• Agents, in the context of narrative performance

  • Believability
  • Emotion
  • Personality
  • Autonomy

• Interactive narrative/storytelling systems

• Authoring tools and narrative co-construction support tools

• Computational models of narrative

• Narrative psychology, theory, and narratology

• Narrative in commonsense reasoning

• Narrative in intelligent learning environments, serious games, and edutainment

• Narrative in commercial and experimental interactive entertainment

• Narrative structure in interface design

• Complimentary technologies

  • Virtual cinematography
  • Computational models of creativity and aesthetics
  • Natural language generation/understanding for narrative
  • Music generation for dramatic effect

• Production/comprehension

Due to the broad and multidisciplinary nature of narrative studies, we will also seriously consider other complimentary topics that are not included on the list.

Submission:

We welcome submissions describing (1) finished or ongoing relevant research and systems, including theories and models that can inform the development of systems; and (2) proposals for discussion topics that will be of interest to the symposium. Long papers should be at most 8 pages; short papers should be at most 4 pages; proposals for discussion topics should be at most 2 pages. Please submit electronically in PDF format following AAAI style guidelines to magerko@msu.edu.

We encourage you to demo your systems. If would like to demo a system, please indicate so at the time of submission. If there are enough demos, we will arrange for a special demo session.

Limited travel scholarship opportunities exist for students. Contact Brian Magerko (magerko@msu.edu) or Mark Riedl (riedl@ict.usc.edu) for more details.

We intend to actively seek out and partner with an appropriate journal with which to publish a special issue devoted to outstanding papers submitted to the symposium.

Symposium Format:

The symposium will consist research presentations organized into tracks (to be decided based on submissions), interleaved with creative, collaborative working sessions and innovative programming, such as an improvisational acting workshop. Discussions and panels will be organized in response to submitted topic proposals.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: May 1, 2007 Notification of acceptance: May 21, 2007 Camera-ready due: TBD Symposium: November 8-11, 2007

Organizing Committee:

Brian Magerko (co-chair), Michigan State University Mark Riedl (co-chair), University of Southern California Bryan Loyall, BAE Systems Michael Young, North Carolina State University Michael Mateas, University of California, Santa Cruz

Program Committee:

TBD