The fundamental research question we aim to answer:
How do people understand stories?
Despite storytelling being fundamental to the human experience we still do not understand exactly how to reliably achieve the inspiring, entertaining, and behavior-changing effects that make narratives so powerful.
The Story Understanding Artificial Intelligence (AI) Project is an initiative led by Dr. Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera that seeks to discover how to reliably exercise storytelling to evoke intended effects on audiences. The goal is to use AI techniques to simulate the possible effects a story has on a person’s cognition.
Ultimately, this work paves the way toward a society that better understands the power of narrative and can responsibly use that power in areas where we already rely on storytelling: personalized learning, rehabilitation therapy and healthcare communication, and intelligence analysis.