Kara Cassell is a research software engineer in the Center for Educational Informatics at North Carolina State University.  Dr. Cassell contributes to the design, implementation, and testing of various game-based learning environments.She enjoys balancing the needs of game and software design as well as research design principals.

Dr. Cassell has 15 years of software development experience, 10 of which have involved game development.  For the past 8 years, she has worked in the game industry developing serious games for social emotional and STEM learning environments.  Her research has involved narrative and discourse generation for 2D and 3D games and narrative experiences, with a focus on AI planning algorithms to generate short machinima and comic strips.

Dr. Cassell joined the Center for Educational Informatics in 2022.  She is excited to continue the amazing work done by the group while supporting its research goals, and to pursue the intersection of narrative generation and AI-driven environments.

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science (2019)
North Carolina State University

M.S. Computer Science (2014)
North Carolina State University

B.S. Computer Science (2006)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

B.A. Economics (2006)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Journal Articles

Young, R.M., Ware, S.G., Cassell, B.A., and Robertson J. Plans and Planning in Narrative Generation: A Review of Plan-Based Approaches to the Generation of Story, Discourse, and Interactivity in Narratives. SDV. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung. 2014.

Conference Papers

Cassell, K, Young, R. M. (2019) Leveraging Machinima to Characterize Comprehension of Character Motivation. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling.

Workshop Papers

Young, R.M., Thomas, J., Bevan, C., Cassell, B.A. (2011). Zócalo: A Service-Oriented Architecture Facilitating Sharing of Computational Resources in Interactive Narrative. In the Working Notes of the Workshop on Sharing Interactive Digital Storytelling Technologies at the Fourth International Conference on Digital Storytelling.

Cardona-Rivera, R.E., Cassell, B.A., Ware, S.G., Young, R.M. (2012). Indexter: Computational Model of the Event-Indexing Situation Model for Characterizing Narratives. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative.

Cassll, B.A., Young. R.M. (2012). A Comprehension Based Cinematic Generator for Virtual Environments. In the Working Notes of the Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference. 

Bahamon, J., Cassell, B., Young, R. M., Thomas, J., Hinks, D., Lang, E. and Litzsinger, Z., IC-CRIME: A Collaborative, Web-Based, 3D System for the Investigation, Analysis, and Annotation of Crime Scenes. In the 5th International Workshop on Computational Forensics (IWCF 2012), held in conjunction with ICPR 2012

Cassell, B., Young, R. M. (2013) Ember, Toward Salience-Based Cinematic Generation.
In the working notes of the Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies at the Ninth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference.

Projects

Crystal Island – EcoJourneys
An intelligent game-based learning environment for middle school science and literacy education.