I entered the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University as a PhD student in the Fall of 2006. The previous Spring I graduated from Lafayette College, a small liberal arts and engineering school in eastern Pennsylvania. At Lafayette, I primarily studied Computer Science and Mathematics, and was fortunate enough to explore both through undergraduate research projects. This included work analyzing boolean representations of network reliability, and the development of the Cytosim toolkit for modeling intracellular dynamics. During my time on College Hill, I also competed for the Lafayette Men's Track and Field Team.

At NCSU, I have spent some time as a teaching assistant for a variety of classes, including Knowledge-Based Service Support Systems, Intro to Computing-Java, and the graduate level Analysis of Algorithms course. This Fall, I will be TAing CSC505 Design and Analysis of Algorithms for Matt Stallmann.

I joined the IntelliMedia group following the Spring of 2007, and am now working under the direction of Dr. James Lester. During the Summer of 2007, I worked as a research intern for Mark Riedl at the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina del Rey, CA. Together, we worked on developing a story authoring support tool called ReQUEST.

I am strongly interested in efforts to broaden participation in computing and mentoring other students. Along those lines, during the Fall and Spring I will be a member of the Raleigh STARS Academic Alliance (Students & Technology in Academia, Research & Service). For the Raleigh STARS, I will serve as an Evaluation Assistant to examine the effectiveness of the group's efforts, as well as mentor several undergraduate students.

Education

B.S. Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics
Lafayette College, Easton, PA

Honors

NCSU Graduate Dean's Fellowship
Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Computer Science Honor Society
Pi Mu Epsilon, Mathematics Honor Society
Lafayette College Trustee Scholar, College's second highest academic scholarship

Research

My research lies somewhere near the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction. More specifically, I am interested in computational models of narrative for use in educational settings.

My current research has focused on understanding the interactions between students and narrative-centered learning environments. Along these lines, I seek to better characterize this type of interaction and leverage it for the evaluation and construction of interactive narrative systems. I am also interested in machine learning, and its role in inducing models and inferring useful knowledge from narrative-centered interactions.

Publications

Scott McQuiggan, Jonathan Rowe, and James Lester. The Effects of Empathetic Virtual Characters on Presence in Narrative-Centered Learning Environments. To appear in Proceedings of the 2008 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI-2008).

Mark O. Riedl, Jonathan P. Rowe, and David K. Elson. Toward Intelligent Support of Authoring Machinima Media Content: Story and Visualization. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN), Playa del Carmen, Cancun Mexico, 2008. [pdf] (Best Paper Award)

Jonathan Rowe, Scott McQuiggan, and James Lester. Narrative Presence in Intelligent Learning Environments. In Working Notes of the 2007 AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies, Arlington, Virginia, 2007. [pdf]

Jonathan Rowe, Scott McQuiggan, Bradford Mott, and James Lester. Motivation in Narrative-Centered Learning Environments. In Proceedings of the AIED'07 Workshop on Narrative Learning Environments, Marina del Rey, California, 2007. [pdf]