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, Programming Concepts-Java, and the graduate level Analysis of Algorithms course. I am currently serving as a Research Assistant in the IntelliMedia Center for Intelligent Systems.

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). This will be my second year in the program, and I urge any NCSU computer science students interested to consider joining.

Education

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

Honors

Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award 2008
Best Paper Award - INTETAIN 2008
NCSU Graduate Dean's Fellowship

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

Jonathan Rowe, Bradford Mott, Scott McQuiggan, Jennifer Robison, Sunyoung Lee, and James Lester. Crystal Island: A Narrative-Centered Learning Environment for Eighth Grade Microbiology. To appear in Proceedings of the AIED'09 Workshop on Intelligent Educational Games, Brighton, UK, 2009. [pdf]

Jennifer Robison, Jonathan Rowe, Scott McQuiggan, and James Lester. Predicting User Psychological Characteristics from Interactions with Empathetic Virtual Agents. To appear in Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA-09), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009. [pdf]

Jonathan Rowe, Scott McQuiggan, Jennifer Robison, and James Lester. Off-Task Behavior in Narrative Centered Learning Environments. To appear in Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED-09), Brighton, UK, 2009. [pdf]

Jonathan Rowe, Scott McQuiggan, Jennifer Robison, Derrick Marcey, and James Lester. StoryEval: An Empirical Evaluation Framework for Narrative Generation. In Working Notes of the 2009 AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, Stanford University, pp. 103-110, 2009. [pdf]

Jonathan Rowe, Eunyoung Ha, James Lester. Archetype-Driven Character Dialogue Generation for Interactive Narrative. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA-2008), Tokyo, Japan, pp. 45-58, 2008. [pdf]

Scott McQuiggan, Julius Goth, Eunyoung Ha, Jonathan Rowe, and James Lester. Student Note-Taking in Narrative-Centered Learning Environments: Individual Differences and Learning Outcomes. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Montreal, Canada, pp. 510-519, 2008. [pdf]

Scott McQuiggan, Jonathan Rowe, Sunyoung Lee, and James Lester. Story-Based Learning: The Impact of Narrative on Learning Experiences and Outcomes. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Montreal, Canada, pp. 530-539, 2008. [pdf]

Scott McQuiggan, Jonathan Rowe, and James Lester. The Effects of Empathetic Virtual Characters on Presence in Narrative-Centered Learning Environments. In Proceedings of the 2008 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence, Italy, pp. 1511-1520, 2008. [pdf]

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]