The rules of improvisation apply beautifully to life. Never say no, you have to be interested to be interesting, and your job is to support your partners.

- Scott Adsit

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bio

Mikhail JacobI am fascinated by the role artificial intelligence (AI) can play to enable and augment human creativity. I practice a human-centered AI research methodology — applying a combination of design, human-computer interaction, and AI/machine learning methods — to explore questions about AI and creativity. My current research at Microsoft Research Cambridge focuses on understanding how AI can best support designers and developers with the creation of engaging game agents (non-player characters and bots) in real-world commercial games.

I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science (2019) from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, USA) with the Expressive Machinery Lab. My dissertation investigated the effects of creative arc negotiation — a novel real-time decision-making paradigm for improvisation between people and computers — on player experience within VR games for improvisational theatre. I have previously studied the application of human-computer co-creativity in problems ranging from improvisational dance and pretend play to music recommendation. I received an M.S. in Computer Science (2013) from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.E. in Computer Science Engineering (2011) from the Manipal Institute of Technology (Manipal, India).

For a (relatively) quick overview of my research over (nearly) the last decade, you can watch this talk.

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research

publications

Jacob, M., Devlin, S., & Hofmann, K. (2020). “'It’s Unwieldy and It Takes a Lot of Time' — Challenges and Opportunities for Creating Agents in Commercial Games.” In the Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) 2020. Alberta, Canada. pdf

AIIDE 2020 Best Paper Award Winner.

Jacob, M. (2019). “Improvisational artificial intelligence for embodied co-creativity.” Doctoral dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology 2019. Atlanta, USA. pdf

Long, D., Jacob, M., & Magerko, B. (2019). “Designing co-creative AI for public spaces.” In the Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C) 2019. San Diego, USA. pdf

Smith, J., Jacob, M., Freeman, J., Magerko, B., & Mcklin, T. (2019). “Combining Collaborative and Content Filtering in a Recommendation System for a Web-based DAW.” In the Proceedings of the 5th International Web Audio Conference (WAC) 2019. Trondheim, Norway. pdf

Smith, J., Weeks, D., Jacob, M., Freeman, J., & Magerko, B. (2019). “Towards a hybrid recommendation system for a sound library.” In IUI Workshops: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Intelligent Music Interfaces for Listening and Creation (MILC) 2019. Los Angeles, USA. pdf

Jacob, M., Chawla, P., Douglas, L., He, Z., Lee, J., Sawant, T., & Magerko, B. (2019). “Affordance-based generation of pretend object interaction variants for human-computer improvisational theater.” In the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) 2019, Charlotte, USA. pdf

Jacob, M. & Magerko, B. (2018). “Creative Arcs in Improvised Human Computer Embodied Performances.” In the Proceedings of the 1st Curiosity in Games Workshop at the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2018. Malmö, Sweden. pdf

Jacob, M. (2017). “Towards Lifelong Interactive Learning for Open-ended Embodied Co-creative Narrative Improvisation.” In the Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium at the Eighth International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) 2017, Atlanta, USA. pdf

Long, D., Jacob, M., Davis, N., & Magerko, B. (2017). “Designing for Socially Interactive Systems.” In the Proceedings of the 11th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C) 2017, Singapore. pdf

Jacob, M. (2017). “Towards Lifelong Interactive Learning for Open-ended Embodied Narrative Improvisation.” In the Proceedings of the Graduate Student Symposium at the 11th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C) 2017, Singapore. pdf

Singh, K.Y., Davis, N., Hsiao, C.-P., Jacob, M., Patel, K., Magerko, B. (2016). “Recognizing Actions in Motion Trajectories using Deep Neural Networks.” In the Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) 2016, Burlingame, USA. pdf

Jacob, M. & Magerko, B. (2015). “Interaction-based Authoring for Scalable Co-creative Agents.” In the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) 2015, Provo, USA. pdf

Davis, N., Comerford, M., Jacob, M., Hsiao, C.-P., & Magerko, B. (2015). “An Enactive Characterization of Pretend Play.” In the Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C) 2015. Glasgow, Scotland. pdf

Jacob, M. & Magerko, B. (2015). “Viewpoints AI.” In the Proceedings of the Artwork Exhibition at the 10th ACM conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C) 2015. Glasgow, Scotland. pdf

Magerko B., Permar, J., Jacob, M., Comerford, M., & Smith, J. (2014). “An Overview of Computational Co-creative Pretend Play with a Human.” In the Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Playful Virtual Characters at the 14th Annual Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) 2014, Boston, USA. pdf

Jacob, M., Coisne, G., Gupta, A., Sysoev, I., Verma, G., & Magerko, B. (2013). “Viewpoints AI.” In the Proceedings of the 9th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) 2013, Boston, USA. pdf

Jacob, M., Coisne, G., Gupta, A., Sysoev, I., Verma, G., & Magerko, B. (2013). “Viewpoints AI: Demonstration.” In the Proceedings of the 9th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) 2013, Boston, USA. pdf

Jacob, M., Zook, A., & Magerko, B. (2013). “Viewpoints AI: Procedural Representation and Reasoning on Gesture Meaning.” In the Proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) 2013, Atlanta, USA. pdf