The Liquid Narrative group at NC State University invites applications for an open Senior Research Software Developer position in the Department of Computer Science, in the broad area of narrative processing, with specific interests in the design and development of a research architecture for narrative understanding, generation and interaction.
The Senior Research Software Developer will participate in the development of a narrative processing system that reasons about various types of event data and uses a range of multi-media interfaces to tell compelling and informative stories about those events. The Senior Research Software Developer will work as part of a research team to design a range of narrative modeling and generation methods and will be a principal developer building a cloud-based architecture supporting these algorithms and their integration with 3D games, both for data acquisition, for automated machinima generation and for prediction of unfolding narratives. The Senior Research Software Developer will also contribute efforts to design and build an instrumented multi-player game and a general cinematic storytelling tool, both using 3D commercial game engines.
Qualified candidates must have a B.S. in computer science or related field with outstanding research record and experience. Applicants with advanced degrees (MS/PhD) must have experience building completed research systems in a team environment. Applicants with BS degree must have 5+ years industrial experience developing service-oriented architectures, virtual worlds, serious or entertainment-focused games or other relevant architectures/applications. The grant support will be for an initial year and renewable on an annual basis given adequate progress. Salary is competitive and based on experience and University policy.
The ideal candidate will have experience developing complex software in a team environment, have experience with game development and/or the development of artificial intelligences systems, especially those applicable to games or virtual worlds, and have strong communication skills. Prior experience in industry or academic research projects is a strong plus.
The goals of the multi-year project are to build a large-scale infrastructure for narrative processing. The long-term work will involve developing computational tools for extracting narrative structure from a range of media (e.g., game logs, film/video, text-based news reports), modeling the space of narratives that account for the media content and supporting generation and interaction tools that allow human users to understand and interact with that narrative space. First year efforts in this project look to build key infrastructure as well as to focus on a pipeline from game play logs to both multi-media summarization and prediction of narrative progression.
The research group working on this project includes Professors R. Michael Young and David Roberts. We expect the position to start as soon as a qualified candidate is identified but may consider hiring later in the academic year depending upon candidate and project constraints.
Interested candidates should view the official HR posting and submit applications through the NC State UNiversity HR web pages at: