In March 2006, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at North Carolina State University. My dissertation work explored the generation of decision-theoretic models of narrative planning for interactive 3D learning environments under the direction of James Lester and Michael Young within the IntelliMedia and Liquid Narrative groups at NC State. To create effective interactions within these environments, narrative planners must cope with the task's inherent uncertainty, including uncertainty about the user's intentions. To support decision making, I developed a decision-theoretic narrative planning architecture using a dynamic decision network (DDN).

A North Carolina native, I earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from NC State. In 1996, I earned a M.C.S. in Computer Science from NC State. Later that year, I entered the Ph.D. program at NC State working with Rance Cleaveland and other members of the formal methods group within the Department of Computer Science. During the next two years my research centered on applying formal methods to the design and implementation of concurrent systems. In 1998, I shifted my research focus from formal methods to artificial intelligence. I joined the IntelliMedia research group at NC State, working with James Lester, to investigate the design, construction, and empirical evaluation of computational mechanisms to support intelligent human-computer interaction and communication.

In addition to my academic experience, I have held positions at Emergent Game Technologies, IBM, Analysts International Corporation, and Nortel Networks. I am also an active entrepreneur with technology licenses and startup experience. In 2000, I co-founded LiveWire Logic, a venture-backed enterprise software startup, with colleagues from NC State. At LiveWire Logic, I served as the Vice President of Technology and worked with the development team to design, implement, and refine the RealDialog™ product suite — an automated customer service solution leveraging corpus-based computational linguistics. I led the design and implementation of the RealDialog authoring tool suite and natural language processing engine. LiveWire Logic was acquired by Astute Solutions in early 2006.

In 2002, Contraband Entertainment licensed an Atari 2600 emulator I developed to be used as the foundation for their work on the Activision Anthology video game for the Playstation 2. This game won the “Best Classic Game Compilation” from GameSpot for 2002. In 2003, I developed a highly-optimized Atari 2600 emulator for the Game Boy Advance platform for use in Aspyr Media’s port of Activision Anthology to the GBA. This classic compilation received an “Editor’s Choice Award” from IGN in December 2003.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science (2006)
North Carolina State University

M.C.S., Computer Science (1996)
North Carolina State University

B.S., Computer Science (1994)
North Carolina State University

B.S., Computer Engineering (1994)
North Carolina State University

Honors

Member, Phi Kappa Phi.
Member, Upsilon Pi Epsilon.

Publications

Probabilistic Goal Recognition in Interactive Narrative Environments, Bradford Mott, Sunyoung Lee, and James Lester. To appear in Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2006), Boston, 2006.

U-DIRECTOR: A Decision-Theoretic Narrative Planning Architecture for Storytelling Environments, Bradford Mott and James Lester. In Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2006), Hakodate, Japan, 2006.

Narrative-Centered Tutorial Planning for Inquiry-Based Learning Environments, Bradford Mott and James Lester. To appear in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS-2006), Jhongli, Taiwan, 2006.

Narrative-Centered Environments for Guided Exploratory Learning, Bradford W. Mott, Scott W. McQuiggan, Sunyoung Lee, Seung Y. Lee, and James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the Agent Based Systems for Human Learning Workshop at the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (ABSHL-2006), Hakodate, Japan, 2006.

The Role of Syntactic Analysis in Textual Case Retrieval, Bradford Mott, James Lester, and L. Karl Branting. In Proceedings of the Textual Case-Based Reasoning Workshop at the Sixth International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (TCBR 2005), Chicago, IL, 2005.

Conversational Agents, James Lester, Karl Branting, and Bradford Mott. In The Practical Handbook of Internet Computing, Munindar Singh (Ed.) Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2004.

Dialogue Management for Conversational Case-Based Reasoning, Karl Branting, James Lester, and Bradford Mott. In Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2004), Madrid, Spain, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 3155, Springer-Verlag, 2004.

Towards Narrative-Centered Learning Environments, Bradford Mott, Charles Callaway, Luke Zettlemoyer, Seung Lee, and James Lester. In Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Narrative Intelligence, pp. 78-82, Cape Cod, MA, 1999.

Integrating Discourse and Domain Knowledge for Document Drafting, Karl Branting, Charles Callaway, Bradford Mott, and James Lester. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL'99), pp. 214-220, Oslo, Norway, 1999.

An Integrated Scenario Management Strategy, Thomas Alspaugh, Annie Antón, Tiffany Barnes and Bradford Mott. In Proceedings of the IEEE Fourth International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE'99), University of Limerick, Ireland, pp. 142-149, 1999.

Projects

Crystal Island
During 2005 and 2006, I developed Crystal Island, a prototype narrative-centered learning environment, which served as the test bed for my dissertation research. Crystal Island is a 3D virtual environment implemented using Valve Software's Source™ Engine (the Half-Life 2 game engine), a hierarchical task network planner, and the SMILE Bayesian inference engine.

Activision Anthology - Game Boy Advance
During the summer of 2003, I developed an Atari 2600 emulator for the Game Boy Advance platform to be used as the foundation for Aspyr Media’s port of Activision Anthology to the GBA. This classic compilation includes over 50 games and in December 2003 received an “Editor’s Choice Award” from IGN.

BSVC: A Microprocessor Simulation Framework
I developed BSVC, an object-oriented microprocessor simulation framework written in C++ and Tcl/Tk, as a senior design project at NC State. It includes a Motorola 68000 emulator and has been used at numerous universities and companies around the world.

Concurrency Factory
I worked as a research assistant on the Concurrency Factory project. This system provided an integrated toolset for the specification, simulation, verification, and implementation of concurrent systems such as communication protocols and process control systems. The project was a joint effort between the Computer Science departments of SUNY at Stony Brook and North Carolina State University.

Oonsoo: A Solitaire Card Game
I developed a solitaire card game, Oonsoo, for the X11 Windows system as a class project at NC State. The goal of the game is to arrange the twelve suits of cards, in order, onto the twelve playing decks.

Stella: A Multi-platform Atari 2600 Emulator
In late 1995, I started working on Stella, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator written in C++. Since its original release, numerous people have contributed to porting the emulator to other platforms and I have continued to refine the code to create a highly accurate Atari 2600 emulator.