News

• 6/30/2025 - The Wordplay Workshop is hosting a shared task on Common-sense Personal-Grounded Dialogue this year, in collaboration with Sony!
• 4/21/2025 - Naren Sivakumar successfully defended his MS thesis! – Baltimore, MD
• 4/18/2025 - Shadab Choudhury successfully defended his MS thesis! – Baltimore, MD
• 12/16/2024 - I am a guest editor for a IEEE Transactions on Games special issue on Large Language Models and Games! Submissions are due December 1st December 16th!
• 9/10/2024 - I started a new language technologies seminar series called LaTeSS! Our first talk was by Dr. Jonathan K. Kummerfeld. – Baltimore, MD
• 8/16/2024 - Hosted the Wordplay Workshop at ACL with my co-organizers. – Bangkok, Thailand
• 8/16/2024 - Our paper on BERALL, the system that uses RAG to generate interactive fiction games, was accepted to the Wordplay Workshop at ACL 2024!
• 6/24/2024 - Foad Hamidi and I have won a COEIT Interdisciplinary Proposal award and will be working on "Investigating the Social and Affective Aspects of Large-Language Model-based Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems" together.
• 4/18/2024 - Gave a talk at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence – Baltimore, MD
• 2/16/2024 - Gave a talk at Johns Hopkins University – Baltimore, MD
• 10/8/2023 - CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Master's Assistants was presented at AIIDE 2023 – Salt Lake City, UT
• 10/4/2023 - Gave a talk at the University of Maryland, College Park's Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Colloquium – College Park, MD
• 10/8/2023 - CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Master's Assistants was presented at AIIDE 2023 – Salt Lake City, UT
• 8/19/2023 - Andrew Zhu's work on CALYPSO was featured in The Register.
• 7/9/2023 - A demo paper on "Human-in-the-Loop Schema Induction" was also published at ACL 2023! – Toronto, Canada
• 7/9/2023 - Two papers were published at ACL 2023! One in the main conference (FIREBALL) and one in Findings of ACL (CoRRPUS) – Toronto, Canada
• 6/5/2023 - Presented the paper "Author as Character and Narrator: Deconstructing Personal Narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community" at ICWSM 2023, which came out of a class project from my Spring 2022 class on Interactive Fiction and Text Generation – Limassol, Cyprus
• 4/21/2023 - Gave the keynote talk at Northeastern University's NULab Spring Conference on "Digital Bards: How Dungeons & Dragons will Make for Better AI" – Boston, MA
• 2/27/2023 - Gave a guest talk for UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department – Baltimore, MD
• 2/15/2023 - Gave a guest talk for Drexel's Information Science department – Philadelphia, PA
• 12/14/2022 - Featured in a Penn Engineering Magazine article about Next-Gen Innovators.
• 5/5/2022 - Gave a guest talk for USC ISI's NL (Natural Language) Seminar – Los Angeles, CA
• 1/13/2022 - 5/10/2022 - Co-taught a graduate course on Interactive Fiction and Text Generation with Chris Callison-Burch at UPenn.
• 11/29/2021 - Gave a guest talk for UCSC's CM (Computational Media) Seminar – Santa Cruz, CA (Virtual)
• 11/30/2021 - Gave a guest lecture for UPenn's NLP class.
• 10/14/2021 - Arranged the Doctoral Consortium at AIIDE 2021 – Virtual
• 6/11/2021 - Co-organized the Third Workshop on Narrative Understanding – Virtual
• 4/30/2021 - Gave a guest lecture for the University of Kentucky's Interactive Narrative (Topics in AI) class – Lexington, KY (Virtual)
• 3/15/2021 - The corresponding podcast to the Science Focus article is out!
• 2/12/2021 - My profile piece with BBC Science Focus magazine is available for purchase!
• 1/25/2021 - Gave a talk for UPenn's CLUNCH (Computational Linguistics Lunch) group
• 1/11/2021 - Started working at UPenn – Philadelphia, PA
• 12/7/2020 - Passed my defense!
• 10/19/2020 - 10/23/2020 - Publicity Co-Chair for AIIDE 2020! – Virtual
• 9/11/2020 - Gave a talk for Georgia Tech's NLP Seminar Series – Atlanta, GA
• 8/11/2020 - Awarded a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellowship!
• 7/9/2020 - Co-organized the First Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)
• 4/16/2020 - Article: Meet ML@GT: Lara J. Martin Trains AI Agents to Become Storytellers
• 2/28/2020 - Featured in an article on Wired, where I talk about where the future of AI should be going.
• 2/7/2020 - Presented at AAAI – New York City, NY
• 2/4/2020 - Article: Changing the Conversation: Georgia Tech Researchers Provide New Approach to Automated Story Generation
• 11/10/2019 - Paper on "Story Realization: Expanding Plot Events into Sentences" has been accepted at AAAI 2020!
• 10/30/2019 - Won the Foley Scholar Award!
• 10/8/2019 - Local Arrangements Chair for AIIDE 2019 – Atlanta, GA
• 9/18/2019 - Attended the Tapia Doctoral Consortium and won Best Doctoral Consortium Presentation (Slides here.) – San Diego, CA
• 8/10/2019 - Presented at IJCAI – Macau, China
• 8/1/2019 - Attended the 2nd Storytelling Workshop at ACL – Florence, Italy
• 4/22/2019 - Passed my proposal!