About Me

I am currently a PhD student at NC State University working with Dr. Chris Martens in the POEM Lab. My research interest is the computational representation of knowledge acquisition and deduction processes, as found in narratives and games. One concrete application I am looking at is the generation of detective stories, where a detective character has to gather enough evidence to apprehend a criminal. Another application are games with asymmetrical information, like the cooperative game Hanabi, where players perform actions that give information to other players. In games such as these it is particularly important for a player to be able to reason about the mental states of other players, to enable them to perform actions that actually help the other player, and thus the team. More information about my research can be found under research

Before I was at NC State I got a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Computer Science from TU Graz in Graz, Austria. For my bachelor’s project I implemented an AI module based on behavior trees for the (now defunct) RoboCup Middle Size League team Mostly Harmless. My master’s thesis was an extension of Shape Grammars to handle connections between parts of the generated shapes. This extension is basically the equivalent of going from context-free to context-sensitive grammars for formal languages. However, in order to cut down on computational cost and to prevent unintended side-effects of context-sensitive rules, in my work these rules can be defined locally for a sub-part of the grammar. To demonstrate the capabilities of this language I also wrote a grammar that can produce variations of the design of the Eiffel Tower, down to individual rivets.

When I am not doing research, I like playing video and board games, but also making my own. A particular pet interest of mine lies with the creation of AIs for digital implementations of board games. Some examples of my work in this area can be found on my project page.