The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fall Series Symposium (FSS) is the first international gathering in North America in the field of computational aspects of affective narrative, bringing together participants from a long list of contributing disciplines. One of the aims of the Symposium is to attract students to a new and exciting multidisciplinary area, where it is still easier to attract the experts' attention and mentoring. The goal of this grant is to subsidize travel, registration fees, and housing expenses of students selected to participate in the Symposium which will be held, along with several other AAAI Fall Symposia, on November 2-4, 2012, in Arlington, VA.
The Symposium calls for long and short papers both from leaders in the field of computational aspects of affective narrative and pertinent areas and from graduate students as well as poster presentations from the undergraduate students interested in the subject. Papers from undergraduates, attracted through Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and Senior Research Opportunity Program (SROP) networks as well as solo graduate contributions will be carefully mentored to the level of poster or short paper eligibility. The multi-format program of the Symposium will also accommodate special student sessions, especially for promising but not fully developed ideas.
The AAAI FSS Symposium on computational aspects of affective narrative provides a valuable opportunity for the next generation of multidisciplinary researchers in a variety of pertinent disciplines to enter the computational affective narrative research community. It is expected that the Symposium will attract underrepresented populations as well as provide benefit to future development of computational systems from better understanding of affective narrative as the inherently human phenomenon.
Funds were requested, granted, and expended to ensure students' full participation in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fall 2012 Symposium on the Artificial Intelligence of Humor. The Symposium was selected among a number of competing proposals to recognize the increasing significance of humor, an important universal human faculty, in computation. For successful human-computer interaction in any number of especially social applications, the computer must be able to detect and to generate humor. A high-powered multi- and transdicsiplinary effort has been made at the intersection of a couple of dozen disciplines, from engineering to literary studies and from philosophy to medicine, led by computational linguistics and cognitive psychology, to understand and describe the phenomenon in a way that will enable its computation. The Symposium, organized by an internationally prominent organization and programming committee gathered a group of researchers who engaged in a vigorous discussiohs of various issues raised in their papers. Graduate and undergraduate students were selected nationally to present their humor research at the symposium. Both graduate and undergraduate, they contributed research papers and posters at the conference. Their contributions recieved interested and producted feedback by prominent humor researchers, thus creating a unique pedagogical and research experience for the students, whose excitement was palpable. Several student publications resulted from this and follow-up experiences. Additional support, with the funds remaining for the no-cost-extension year, has led to a new undergraduate participant's delivery of a research paper at the follow-up symposium at an international conference in humor research, and this experience has led to a summer internship. The Symposium produced a published collection of papers, produced by AAAI both electronicall and in print as well as a colective report on this and other symposia in the AI Magazine.
