I'm Adam M. Smith, a 6th year PhD candidate in computer science. 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.
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
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)
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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 Hullet, Gillian Smith, Anne Sullivan, "An Inclusive View of Player Modeling," In Proceedings of the 2011 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.
