This is my blog for thinking through ideas about my research, which clusters around issues in artificial intelligence and cognitive architecture.  Most of my work has involved autonomous robotics, but more recently I’ve become interested in virtual characters (for games and interactive narrative) as a better medium for exploring issues in emotion and personality.  My current project involves the modeling of general mammalian social behaviors such as attachment, caregiving, and group affiliation in virtual characters.

I teach at Northwestern University, where I’m an associate professor in the departments of EECS and RTF.  I’m director of the Animate Arts Program, an integrated, team-taught curriculum in new media, that is a joint project of Northwestern’s schools of engineering, communications, music, and arts and sciences, as well as the EECS department’s Divsion of Graphics and Interactive Media.  You can contact me at ian@northwestern.edu.

I also work with the localStyle arts collective on interactive art installations.

In some quarters, I’m known for my hobby of building Lisp implementations, most recently the Meta programming language, a Scheme-like language I built for teaching programming, but which I also use for research and art projects.  Meta’s main features are (1) very good integration with .NET and (2) providing a nearly industrial-strength programming environment that is highly accessible for beginning programmers.