Michael Mateas

Michael Mateas is Director of the Center for Games and Playable Media. He is a Professor of Computational Media at University of California, Santa Cruz, where he helped launch the Computer Game Design degree, the first of its kind in the UC system. His work explores artificial intelligence-based art and entertainment, forging a new research discipline called Expressive AI. Michael, who holds the MacArthur Endowed Chair, runs the Expressive Intelligence Studio with Noah Wardrip-Fruin. EIS, as it is known, is one of the largest technical game research groups in the world. Current group projects include automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. Prior to Santa Cruz, Michael was a faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology. With Andrew Stern, he created Façade, an award-winning interactive drama that uses AI techniques to combine rich autonomous characters with interactive plot control, creating the world’s first, fully-produced, real-time, interactive story. Façade is available for free download at http://www.interactivestory.net/. Michael received his BS in Engineering Physics from the University of the Pacific (1989), his MS in Computer Science from Portland State University (1993), and his Ph.D. in Computer Science (2002) from Carnegie Mellon University.