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Picture of Lara with purple asymmetric hair, dangly earrings, and a blue/maroon striped dress

Lara J. Martin, PhD

Assistant Professor in
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County


Human-Centered AI Neurosymbolic NLP Automated Story Generation AAC Dungeons and Dragons AI
Researcher
How to say Lara
I make systems that improve how people talk with computers and to each other through computers. Most of my career so far has been teaching computers how to tell stories (also known as automated story generation) and working my way towards an AI Dungeon Master. I also work on Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and speech technologies.

I'm an affiliate in the Information Systems Department and member of UMBC's Center for AI.
I run the LARA Lab and am a member of the Interactive Robotics and Language Lab (IRAL). My pronouns are she/they.

CV LARA Lab UMBC Personal Page Interactive Fiction and Story Generation Resources

News

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Contact

Online
Bluesky LinkedIn
Email
In Person
Information Technology and Engineering (ITE) Building, Room ITE 342-A
1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250

Biography

Biography

About Me

My research interests include:
human-AI communication/collaboration
  • computational creativity
  • interactive narrative
  • narrative generation & understanding
  • dialog systems & conversational agents
  • cognitive systems
and computer-mediated human-human communication
I work from a blend of research and methods from various fields:
  • natural language processing/language technologies,
  • linguistics,
  • human-computer interaction,
  • cognitive science,
  • and artifical intelligence.

Some of my non-research passions include AI equity, science communication, and educating children about computer science and technology.

Check out my CV for more information.

Third-Person Bio

Dr. Lara J. Martin (she/they) is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the CSEE department, researching human-centered artificial intelligence with a focus on improving natural language processing tools for various applications. They have worked in the areas of automated story generation, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools, AI for tabletop roleplaying games, speech processing, and affective computing—publishing in top-tier conferences such as AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, and IJCAI. They have also been featured in Wired and BBC Science Focus magazine.
Previously, Dr. Martin was a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania working with Dr. Chris Callison-Burch. She earned her PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked with Dr. Mark Riedl. She also has a MS in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science & Linguistics from Rutgers University—New Brunswick.

Teaching

Teaching

I have a teaching certificate from Georgia Tech, Spring 2019.

CMSC 473/673 Natural Language Processing
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Spring 2025
Spring 2024
CMSC 491/691 Interactive Fiction and Text Generation
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Fall 2025
Fall 2024
CMSC 671 Principles of Artificial Intelligence
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Fall 2023
CIS 700 Interactive Fiction and Text Generation
University of Pennsylvania
Spring 2022
Co-taught with Dr. Chris Callison-Burch
CS 3790 Introduction to Cognitive Science
Georgia Institute of Technology
Summer 2018

Media

Media

Articles

A screenshot of the Discord bot Calypso's output. It gives information for rolling for a random encounter and below is the rating interface that Calypso experiment participants used to rate the system.

Hallucinating ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons by Thomas Claburn for The Register.
Aug 19, 2023.
A collage of Lara and two other UPenn postdocs posing for separate pictures.

Next-Gen Innovators: Penn Engineering Postdoctoral Fellows Lead the Way on Groundbreaking Research by Amy Biemiller for Penn Engineering Magazine.
Fall 2022.
A black and white photo of Lara.

Lara Martin: "How Can I get a system to tell a story about anything I want?" by Masoud Golsorkhi for TANK Magazine, Issue 88 (Narrative).
Autumn 2021.
A set of dice of different colors and numbers of sides. Below is the text 'Science Focus Podcast'.

Lara Martin on teaching AI to tell stories by Amy Barrett for Science Focus Podcast.
Mar 15, 2021.
A picture of Science Focus Magazine's cover for their Dark Stars issue. It has a stylized illustration of a dark star.

Alexa, tell me a story by Amy Barrett for Science Focus Magazine.
Feb 17, 2021.
A photo of a leather-bound notebook with a dragon etched on the cover. Above it are other tools for playing Dungeons and Dragons, including a few sets of dice.

Forget Chess—the Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D by Will Knight for Wired.
Feb 28, 2020.

Talks

7/11/2025 - Tingenuity AI podcast


9/11/2020 - Georgia Tech's NLP Seminar Series


5/5/2022 - USC's Natural Language Seminar


2/16/2024 - Johns Hopkins University's Center for Language & Speech Processing (CLSP)


Blog

Blog

A photograph of people striking with signs that say 'Writers Generate All of it! Writers Guild on Strike!' and 'No sleep til contract. Writers Guild on Strike!'

01

Jul 2023
ChatGPT will not replace writers...unless we let it
What you should and shouldn't be concerned about when it comes to your writing job. · 4 minute read

It looks like the Writers Guild (the union for people who write movies and TV...

A photograph of a complex web of strings suspended in a room.

21

Jun 2022
No, LaMDA Isn't Sentient
I explain at a high level why LaMDA can't be sentient. · 5 minute read

You might have come across an article being shared by some of your friends and...

Fun Facts

Fun Facts

icon of a cat and a dog raining onto an umbrella. created by Aenne Brielmann from the Noun Project

I have been collecting a list of American English idioms for foreign friends.

LOL Cat Bible cover. taken from the Wikipedia page for 'LOLCat Bible Translation Project'

I created a machine translation system with Vivian Robison for translating the Bible from LOLspeak to English.

Festvox logo; taken from http://www.festvox.org

I am a downloadable voice in the speech synthesis tool Festvox (voice "US English Female LJM").

The Association for Computational Heresy logo (parody of the ACM logo); taken from the sig bovik website

I presented at SIGBOVIK 2015 (a fake conference) on "Language Sequencing: Language as a Physical Entity" with Meghana Kshirsagar.