For my doctoral dissertation, I work on modeling social competence, with special interest in conversational characters for computer games. I am currently developing a theory of stereotyped social engagement that is both robust and computationally inexpensive. The realization of this theory will be an agent capable of elementary social interactions with humans, playing along with them in actual multiplayer computer games.

This problem domain naturally blends with a number of topics that are only partially related, but always interesting: knowledge representation, computational linguistics, behavior-based action selection, reasoning under tight performance constraints, embodied intelligence, and game AI development.