I began my Ph.D work at NCSU, in the Computer Science department in the fall of 2007. I am currently a Research Assistant with the IntelliMedia group, with Dr. James Lester. Previously, I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I was a member of the Knowledge Representation & Reasoning group, under the direction of Dr. Eyal Amir.

While at UIUC I minored in both mathematics and music performance. My last two years, I also became involved with ACM/UIUC. I was chair of the Special Interest Group (SIG) for computer music, SIGMusic for two years, doing projects in automated composition and robotic performance. I also spent a semester and a summer working with Dr. Sever Tipei on the DISSCO project, which is a synthesis and composition program.

Research Interests

In the broad sense, I am interested in computational models of creativity, in particular narrative generation and algorithmic music composition. I am currently involved with work in narrative understanding and writing support.

Education

Graduate Student, Computer Science (in progress)
North Carolina State University

B.S., Computer Science (2007)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Honors

NCSU Graduate Dean's Fellowship
NCSU Graduate Alumni Fellowship

Research Projects

Representing Actions in Description Logic
Summer 2006 - Summer 2007, Undergraduate Thesis Work
The goal of this project was to find a representation within Description Logics that could reason about action relationships, as well as projection. The eventual application was for narrative generation.

Tracking Kriegspiel Fall 2005
This project aimed to use Logical Filtering to reason about possible states in a variant of chess called Kriegspiel. Kriegspiel is different from ordinary chess in that you are not allowed to see your opponents pieces. Logical Filtering is a technique for reasoning about partially observable logical worlds.

Music Projects

Turing and the Wolf Fall 2005 - Spring 2006
This project generated harmonic transitions between two melodic lines using common-tone modulation. In addition, it would generate simple fugal variations on the melody in real time. The project was presented by the UIUC ACM SIGMusic chapter, and was awarded First Prize, in Undergraduate Research at UIUC's annual Engineering Open House.

Automated Instruments Fall 2006 - Spring 2007
We created a prototype interface which could control simple musical instruments (such as recorders) via MIDI signals. This project was presented by the UIUC ACM SIGMusic chapter at UIUC's annual Engineering Open House.