About

I'm Adam M. Smith, a 6th year PhD candidate in computer science. Actually, I'm in my 7th year now (in the middle of writing my dissertation), and I just realized this page is out of date. Meanwhile... Michael Mateas is my research advisor at the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz where I apply artificial intelligence to the game design process. I received a BS in computer science with comprehensive honors from UC Santa Cruz in 2005. Having been with the School of Engineering since before the inception of the game design program, I am regularly amazed to see both the breadth and depth of the game design work going on around me at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

My research strives to be equally true to academic artificial intelligence and game design as it is practiced in the wild. My devotion to curiosity directly drives not just my dissertation research in computational creativity and my passion for teaching, but it also motivates a wide array of side projects during my time in grad school.

I have also done research with professors James Davis and Manfred Warmuth in the areas of computational photography and statistical machine learning respectively.

~~You can find my CV on github. Hire me, I'm planning to get out of here during Summer of 2012.~~ My human resources are unavailable at this time.

Research

Interests

Artificial Intelligence
- computational creativity (theoretical frameworks and artifact generation techniques)
- knowledge representation and reasoning (abductive logic and answer set programming)
- inductive logic programming and statistical-relational learning (interactive learning in type-rich domains)
- statistical machine learning on manifolds (exponential-family distributions on Lie groups)
Game Design
- procedural content generation (machine authoring and content pipeline automation)
- assisting/automating the game design process (collecting/generating/collating design feedback)
- exploratory design practices (support tools, iteration, and reflection)
Other
- computer graphics and vision (computational photography and graphics in the cloud)
- computer music (synthesis and automatic composition)
- programming languages (declarative programming, domain specific languages, and embedded compilers)

Dissertation Research

My research explores the intersection of machine creativity (which traditionally focuses on aesthetic artifact generation), discovery systems (which traditionally automate the scientifc or mathematical discovery processes), and game design (which is traditionally carried out by particularly creative humans), with the aim of producing a system that creatively discovers game design knowledge through experimental experiences (popping out sweet games along the way).

Ultimate goal: Dramatically increase the creative resources available to our civilization by using machines to amplify the creativity of those facing complex design problems.

Thesis Proposal (July 2009):
Committee: Michael Mateas, Jim Whitehead, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Simon Colton

Talk: pdf (65 slides)

Document: pdf (44 pages)

I'm writing up something else, but it is very similar.

Teaching

I am deeply passionate about teaching technical topics, particularly where I can steer them to overlap with creative and aesthetic endeavors. I regularly volunteer to give guest lectures, design new projects, and consult on the curriculum for new classes. I provide lifetime support to my students on selected topics and delight in hearing the challenges they encounter in industry and grad school elsewhere.

Teaching assistantships: introduction to computer graphics; scientific visualization and computer animation; game engine architecture; fundamentals of game design; game design studio; advanced analysis of algorithms; computer literacy.

Guest lecture topics: game programming with python; the spectrum of game engine architectures; designing a simple game framework; image compositing; non-photorealistic rendering; programmer-oriented tools for creativity in graphics; livecoding for music, sculpture, and poetry; overlapping notions of time in programming languages and software engineering.

Controversial curriculum I advocate: Bayesian inferential calculus; geometric algebra; computational thinking and procedural literacy.

Awards: 2006 Outstanding Teaching Award (School of Engineering); 2007 Excellence in Teaching Award for Teaching Assistants (UCSC Grad Division)

Publications

Journals

2011: Adam M. Smith, Michael Mateas, "Answer Set Programming for Procedural Content Generation: A Design Space Approach," IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 2011.

Conferences

2012: Adam M. Smith, Erik Andersen, Michael Mateas, Zoran Popović, "A Case Study of Expressively Constrainable Level Design Automation Tools for a Puzzle Game," In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2012), 2012.; Adam M. Smith "Strange Loops in cfml, A Livecoder's Riddle" In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Music (ICMC 2012), 2012.
2011: Adam M. Smith, Michael Mateas, "Knowledge-Level Creativity in Game Design," In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 11), 2011.; Adam M. Smith, Michael Mateas, "Towards Knowledge-Oriented Creativity Support in Game Design," In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 11), 2011.
2010: Adam M. Smith, Mark J. Nelson, Michael Mateas, "Ludocore: A Logical Game Engine For Modeling Videogames," In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, 2010.; Adam M. Smith, Michael Mateas, "Variations Forever: Flexibly Generating Rulesets from a Sculptable Design Space of Mini-Games," In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, 2010.; Kathleen Tuite, Noah Snavely, Dun-Yu Hsiao, Adam M. Smith, Zoran Popović, "Reconstructing the World in 3D: Bringing Games with a Purpose Outdoors, In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2010), 2010.
2009: Adam M. Smith, Mark J. Nelson, Michael Mateas, "Computational Support for Play Testing Game Sketches," In Proceedings of the 5th Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE 2009), 2009.
2008: Zachary Pousman, Mario Romero, Adam M. Smith, Michael Mateas, "Living with Tableau Machine: A Longitudinal Investigation of a Curious Domestic Intelligence," In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 08), 2008.; Adam M. Smith, Manfred K. Warmuth, "Learning Rotations," In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 08), 2008.

Workshops and Symposia

2012: Kate Compton, Adam M. Smith, Jim Whitehead, "Anza Island: Novel Gamepaly Using ASP," In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop of Procedural Content Generation in Games (PCGames 2012), 2012.
2011: Adam M. Smith, Michael Mateas "Computational Caricatures: Probing the Game Design Process with AI," In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in the Game Design Process (IDP11), 2011.; Adam M. Smith, "Two Methods for Voxel Detail Enhancement," In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop of Procedural Content Generation in Games (PCGames 2011), 2011.
2010: Sherol Chen, Adam M. Smith, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Arnav Jhala, "RoleModel: Towards a Formal Model of Dramatic Roles for Story Generation," In Proceedings of the Intelligent Narrative Technologies III Workshop (INT3), 2010.
2008: Adam M. Smith, Mario Romero, Zachary Pousman, Michael Mateas, "Tableau Machine: A Creative Alien Presence," in Proceedings of the 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium on Creative Intelligent Systems, 2008.

Technical Reports

2011: Adam M. Smith, Chris Lewis, Kenneth Hullet, Gillian Smith, Anne Sullivan, "An Inclusive Taxonomy of Player Modeling," Technical Report UCSC-SOE-11-13, 2011.
2010: Adam M. Smith, Manfred K. Warmuth, "Learning Rotations Online," Technical Report UCSC-SOE-10-08, 2010.
2008: Adam M. Smith, James Skorupski, James Davis "Transient Rendering," Technical Report UCSC-SOE-08-26, 2008.

Demos and Posters

2011: Adam M. Smith, Chris Lewis, Kenneth Hullett, Gillian Smith, Anne Sullivan, "An Inclusive View of Player Modeling," In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2011), 2011.
2010: Adam M. Smith, Michael Mateas, "Variations Forever: A Game of Exploring Game Design Spaces," Demonstration at the Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2009), 2009.
2009: Adam M. Smith, Mark J. Nelson, Michael Mateas, "Prototyping Games with BIPED," in Proceedings of the Fifth Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Games Conference (AIIDE'09), 2009.; Adam M. Smith, James Skorupski, James Davis, "Understanding Video at 30 Billion Frames Per Second with Transient Rendering," Poster at Bay Area Vision Meetup (BAVM 2009), 2009.