[Purple-Blurb] Special talk, Rafael Pérez y Pérez of Mexico City

[Nick Montfort]

I hope you have all been enjoying the rain and its recent absence. I'm 
looking forward to Purple Blurb being back on a regular schedule this 
Fall. Until then, there are two events that may be of interest to you. I'm 
speaking July 14 on "Interactive Fiction: Virtual Reality You Read," at 
the AXIOM Gallery in Jamaica Plain (Green Street stop on the Orange Line), 
7:30-9pm.

And we have a special summer Purple Blurb event...


Rafael Pérez y Pérez
UAM and UNAM, Mexico City
Wednesday July 15 6pm-7pm
MIT, room 14E-310

Next week, the Purple Blurb series offers a second special summer talk by 
a leading researcher in creative text generation, Rafael Pérez y Pérez. He 
will speak on ...

MEXICA: A Computer Model for Plot Generation of Prehispanic Stories

MEXICA is a computer model that generates plots for short stories about 
the Mexicas, the old inhabitants of what today is México City, based on 
the engagement-reflection cognitive account of writing. During engagement 
MEXICA generates material guided by content and rhetorical constraints, 
avoiding the use of explicit characters’ goals or story-structures. During 
reflection the system breaks impasses, evaluates the novelty and 
interestingness of the story in progress and verifies that coherence 
requirements are satisfied. In this talk I will explain the main 
characteristics of the system, I will show how emotions are employed to 
progress a story in a coherent way and generate novel situations, and how 
the dramatic tension of the story in progress might be employed to 
evaluate its interestingness. I will present results showing how story 
generation is affected by various model parameters and I will compare 
MEXICA with other story-generators programs. Finally, I will mention how 
we are employing MEXICA as starting point for new research projects.

Pérez y Pérez will speak on Wednesday July 15, 6pm-7pm, at MIT in room 
14E-310. This is in the same location as Pablo Gervás’s talk in May, and 
just one more floor up the stairs from the Trope Tank, where other Purple 
Blurb events were located. The talk is (as with all Purple Blurb 
presentations) open to the public.

Rafael Pérez y Pérez earned a BSc. in Electronics and Computers at 
Universidad Iberoamericana in México City, a MSc. in Knowledge Based 
Systems and a DPhil. in Artificial Intelligence at Sussex University in 
England. His research has focused on computer models of creativity. He and 
his students have developed programs that write short stories, compose 
music, and solve geometry problems, among other things. In 2006 he 
organised the Mexican Creativity, Cognition and Computers research group 
(MCCC) which aims to gather together a multidisciplinary group of 
researchers and students interested in computational creativity. He has 
published different papers in the area and has participated as a PC member 
and co-chair in international events related to computational creativity. 
Currently he is a researcher and lecturer at The Autonomous Metropolitan 
University (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana or UAM) in México City and 
an invited Lecturer in the MSc and PhD programs in Computer Science at The 
National Autonomous University of México (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de 
México or UNAM).

-- 
-   Nick Montfort         nickm at nickm.com     http://nickm.com
--
-   Associate Professor of Digital Media
  -  Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies, MIT
--  77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307