Biography

Rogelio is an Assistant Professor in the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program and in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, where he directs the Laboratory for Quantitative Experience Design. His research focuses on computationally modeling how game players think and act inside video games, as well as developing tools that use these models to help game designers design. Rogelio has interned as a computational narratologist at Sandia National Laboratories and Disney Research, and his research has been supported by the GEM Ph.D. Fellowship, the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects’ Agency, Oculus VR, and Activision | Blizzard.

Courses Taught in Fall 2021

• CS5963/CS6360: Virtual Reality

Research

• Computational Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Game Design
• Interactive Narrative
• Virtual Reality

Education

• Ph.D., 2019, North Carolina State University, Computer Science
• M.Sc., 2013, North Carolina State University, Computer Science
• B.Sc., 2010, University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, Computer Engineering

Awards

• EAAI New and Future Educator Award, 2017
• Honorable Mention for Best Paper (alongside Ignacio X. Domínguez, James Vance, and David L. Roberts), ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2016
• Best Paper (alongside Matthew Fendt, Brent Harrison, Stephen G. Ware, and David L. Roberts), International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, 2012
• Best Student Paper on a Cognitive Science Topic (alongside Bradley A. Cassell, Stephen G. Ware, and R. Michael Young), Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative at the International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2012
• Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, 2011
• National GEM Consortium Ph.D. Fellowship, 201

• Umbilicus: Ascension (alongside Ian Coleman)
  * Selected for the 2015 Github Game Off III showcase.
• BitBot
  * Runner-up at the 2014 Github Game Off II

Publications

• Chris Forsythe, Huafei Liao, Michael C. S. Trumbo, and Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera. Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Systems: Work and Everyday Life. CRC Press. 2014

Refereed Journal Articles

• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Thomas W. Price, David R. Winer, and R. Michael Young. Question Answering in the Context of Stories Generated by Computers. Advances in Cognitive Systems (4), pp. 227–246.  2016.Refereed

Conference Papers

• Chris Martens and Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera. Generating Abstract Comics. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS2016), pp. 168–175. 2016. (37.5% acceptance rate)
• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera and Boyang Li. PlotShot: Generating Discourse-constrained Stories around Photos. In Proceedings of the 12th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-16), pp. 2–8. 2016. (27.7% acceptance rate for oral presentation)
• Ignacio X. Domínguez, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, James Vance, and David L. Roberts. The Mimesis Effect: The Effect of Roles on Player Choice in Interactive Narrative Role-Playing Games. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2016), pp. 3438–3449. 2016. *Awarded Honorable Mention in the Best Papers Category (23.4% acceptance rate; 4% honorable mention rate)
• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Justus Robertson, Stephen G. Ware, Brent Harrison, David L. Roberts, and R. Michael Young. Foreseeing Meaningful Choices. In Proceedings of the 10th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-14), pp. 9–15. 2014. (28% acceptance rate for oral presentation)
• Titus Barik, Michael Everett, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, David L. Roberts, and Edward F. Gehringer. A community college blended learning classroom experience through Artificial Intelligence in Games. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE2013), pp. 1525–1531.  2013. (Acceptance rate unknown)
• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Kiran Lakkaraju, Jonathan H. Whetzel, and Jeremy R. Bernstein. Large-Scale Conflicts in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Complex Systems (COMPLEX2012), pp. 40–51. 2012. (Acceptance rate unknown)
• Matthew William Fendt, Brent Harrison, Stephen G. Ware, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, and David L. Roberts. Achieving the Illusion of Agency. In Proceedings of the 2nd Inter- national Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2012), pp. 114–125.
  2012. *Awarded Best Paper (29% acceptance rate)
• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera and R. Michael Young Characterizing Gameplay in a Player Model of Game Story Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2012), pp. 204–211.
 2012. (29% acceptance rate)