[game_edu] Postdoc position open at University of California, Santa Cruz

[Michael Mateas]

University of California, Santa Cruz
Postdoctoral Scholar
SIREN: Social Games for Conflict Resolution with Natural Interaction

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Scholar position within the 
Center for Games and Playable Media at the Baskin School of Engineering, 
focused on research in Procedural Narrative Generation and Drama 
Management for adaptive pedagogical games. This position is under 
supervision of professors Arnav Jhala, Michael Mateas, and Noah 
Wardrip-Fruin.

The position is funded through the European Union project SIREN. SIREN 
is a 3-year EU-funded STREP project. The successful candidate will 
contribute to research, development, and evaluation of an adaptive 
conflict generator for an educational social game. This entails close 
cooperation with the other research partners (IT University of 
Copenhagen-Denmark, INESC-ID Portugal, and National Technical University 
of Athens-Greece) and transferring research technology to the industry 
partner Serious Games Interactive for implementation on the game engine. 
In addition to managing research activities, the postdoctoral researcher 
is expected to help with supervision of 1 to 2 graduate assistants.

The SIREN project aims to create a new type of educational game that 
takes advantage of recent advances in serious games, social networks, 
computational intelligence and emotional modeling to create uniquely 
motivating and educating games that help shape how children think about 
and handle conflicts, with particular focus on cross-cultural conflicts. 
Through the game and tools developed during the project, teachers will 
be able to automatically generate conflict scenarios that fit the 
educational needs of particular groups of children with varying cultural 
background, maturity, and technical expertise, and the desired learning 
outcomes as specified by a teacher. This will enable the system to be 
used by teachers all over Europe, without specific technical training. 
To realize this vision, a number of advances to the state of the art 
will be made throughout the various disciplines. The research activities 
of the postdoctoral researcher will focus on modeling conflict scenarios 
in an intelligent narrative generation and drama management system, and 
development of AI modules and authoring interfaces for drama management 
within the Unity game engine.

Rank: Postdoctoral Scholar – Employee

Salary: $50,000

Minimum Qualifications: Ph.D. or equivalent in Computer Science or 
related field with emphasis on Artificial Intelligence; strong 
communication, interpersonal, and organizational skills.

Preferred Qualifications: Strong interest and experience developing 
computational models of narrative; experience with programming on game 
engines and deploying playable experiences.

Term of Appointment: One year, with the possibility of extension of one 
year contingent upon funding and positive performance evaluation.

Closing Date: This position is open until filled.

About UCSC: University of California, Santa Cruz is a leader in computer 
games research and education. It boasts the first computer games degree 
in the University of California system, with nearly 400 undergrads 
currently enrolled, and is one of the largest and most active technical 
game research groups in the world. We are located near a leading region 
of game development and innovation (Silicon Valley) on a beautiful 
campus with a strong history of interdisciplinary innovation. This year 
UCSC will open a new Center for Games and Playable Media.

Apply To: Applications should send a CV, summary of research interests, 
and contact information for three references electronically to 
jhala at cs.ucsc.edu, or by mail to:

Dr. Arnav Jhala
Computer Science Department
MS: SOE3
University of California
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA – 95064