I'm super happy to be on the program committee for the 9th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling! The official call for papers can be found by clicking here. ICIDS (which, depending on who you talk to is pronounced with a hard c or a soft c) is a conference that:

...gathers researchers, developers, practitioners and theorists to present and share the latest innovations, insights and techniques in the expanding field of interactive storytelling and the technologies that support it.

My role in this year's ICIDS is a bit unique. Alongside Chris Martens, I am co-chair of the Intelligent Narrative Technologies Track, which aims to foster the study of artificial intelligence for the computational understanding and expression of narrative. As Chris and I wrote:

...this category focuses on computational systems to represent, reason about, create, adapt, and perform interactive and non-interactive narrative experiences.

This version of INT actually represents the 9th gathering of this Narrative+AI community, and marks the first time that INT goes to the conference-level. Prior iterations of this gathering were organized as workshops, which typically are more inclusive of less-than-fully developed ideas. It's exciting that INT is testing a transition to the conference stage, which I take to be a sign of maturity for the field. It's even more exciting for me that I get to help shape its future, especially because the INT workshop has been organized in the past by scholars that I look up to and aspire to be like.

Papers are due June 17th, 2016, 11:59 pm Hawaii Standard Time. Looking forward to Los Angeles!