# PhD in Computing Science

Kory W. Mathewson · 2019-04-15 · https://korymathewson.com/phd/ · Defending my PhD thesis 'Humour-in-the-loop: Improvised Theatre with Interactive Machine Learning Systems' at the University of Alberta.

Tue Apr 16, 2019, from 10–11am MST, in the [Computing Science Centre (room 3-33) at the University of Alberta](https://goo.gl/maps/SHCpSDKVSZD2), I presented a public presentation of my thesis work. You can watch the recorded live stream here ([slides to follow along with](https://bit.ly/kory-slides)):

[YouTube video: Public presentation of my PhD thesis, University of Alberta, April 2019](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8drJiqAC6Mk)

Following the talk, I was sequestered to a private examination room. In the room, the thesis committee (including supervisor [Dr. Patrick M. Pilarski](https://sites.ualberta.ca/~pilarski/)) asked questions, made comments, then decided that my thesis, the oral presentation, and the examination were worthy of granting me a doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D.) in computing science.

My responsibility was to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the examining committee that I possess: 1) adequate knowledge of the thesis and an ability to defend it, and, more generally, 2) the ability to pursue and complete original research at an advanced level.

## Humour-in-the-loop: Improvised Theatre with Interactive Machine Learning Systems

Improvisation is a form of live theatre where artists perform "real-time, dynamic problem solving" to collaboratively generate interesting narratives ([Magerko et al., 2009](https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~riedl/pubs/magerko-cc09.pdf)).

The main contribution of my thesis is the development of artificial improvisation: **improvised theatre performed by humans alongside intelligent machines**.

In this talk, I start by presenting the background underlying the art of improvisation and the scientific fields of interactive machine learning and dialogue generation.

Then, I present [Pyggy](https://korymathewson.com/building-an-artificial-improvisor/), the first experiment on live stage human-machine improvisation and A.L.Ex., the Artificial Language Experiment (from [HumanMachine](https://humanmachine.live)) which addresses several critical technical improvements over Pyggy. [Improbotics](https://improbotics.org/) is then presented which details audience evaluation of Turing test-inspired live improvised performance using A.L.Ex. ([Mathewson and Mirowski, 2018](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.01807)).

Two novel contributions to machine-assisted narrative generation are then presented and discussed. The first of these contributions, Shaping the Narrative Arc, is a model incorporating an underlying narrative arc to improve response generation ([Mathewson et al., 2019](https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.11528)). The second contribution, dAIrector, synthesizes a plot graph with contextual information to generate contextual plot points and serve as the director ([Eger and Mathewson, 2018](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03423)).

The talk concludes by discussing public reflections on live artificial improvisation performances from around the world and interesting future directions to explore -- including automated presentation generation ([Winters and Mathewson, 2019](https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.09308)) and improved automated dialogue evaluation metrics (Dziri et al., [2018](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.01063), [2019](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03371)).

My work presents fundamental advances in human-machine interaction through the lens of improvised theatre, the ideal evaluation testbed for collaboration between humans and intelligent machines.

This work would not be possible without a huge amount of support [from collaborators around the world](https://twitter.com/korymath/status/1118288326857900032).