On November 20th Michael Mateas, associate professor of computer science and head of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, visited MIT as a part of CMS' Colloquium lecture series. As Mateas is perhaps best known as the co-creator of the groundbreaking interactive drama Façade, readers of this blog might be interested in knowing that the podcast of his lecture, "The Authoring Challenge for Interactive Storytelling", is now available from the CMS website.

From the event description:

Michael Mateas is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz where his research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI)-based art and entertainment. As head of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at Santa Cruz, he is involved in such projects as automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. Mateas is a collaborator on the interactive drama Façade (see interactivestory.net).

Although the autumn 2008 lecture series is coming to a close this week (scholar Christina Klein will be discussing globalization and anime in her talk "Transnational, U.S.-Asian Cinema: The Case of Tekkon Kinkreet"), be sure to bookmark the Colloquia and Forums page on the CMS website and check back in January for the announcement of the spring 2009 lineup. All lectures are free, open to the public, and serve as an excellent introduction to the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. Podcasts of previous lectures in the series can be found at http://cms.mit.edu/news/podcast.