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The Expressive Intelligence Studio (EIS) is a technical and cultural research group at UC Santa Cruz, directed by Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

EIS is dedicated to exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, art, and design. Our goal is to create compelling new forms of interactive art and entertainment that provide deeply autonomous, generative, and dynamic responses to interaction. A major thrust of this work is advanced AI for interactive narrative and video games. This includes dynamically-constructed branching narratives; intent-driven game generation; social simulation and autonomous characters; language, story, and world generation; game data analysis; and intelligent support for media design.

By viewing AI as an expressive medium, our work raises and answers new and interesting AI research questions while pushing the boundaries of the conceivable and possible in interactive experiences.

For more on our research, see these three pages:

  • Analyses & Approaches, deepening understanding of computational media and design approaches that can make it more effective,
  • Tools & Technologies, enabling new possibilities for making and understanding media, and
  • Media Experiences, design research toward new genres of audience experience.