OOO Speaker Scheduling Live Interactive Narratives (International Game Developer’s Association – Triangle)

It's time for another Out of Office Game Industry Speaker Event! Our topic is "Scheduling Live Interactive Narratives." How do you orchestrate a live interactive experience where players, actors, props, and storylines all have to come together at exactly the right time? Live interactive experiences are part game, part theater, and part logistical nightmare. This talk explores how AI can automatically schedule actors, locations, resources, and branching narratives to make immersive experiences easier to design, operate, and adapt. I'll also share a brief tour of my broader work in game AI, including believable social characters, procedural storytelling, mixed reality, and generative AI for game creation.

Speaker: Dr. Sasha Azad

Dr. Sasha Azad is a Research Scientist at Jabali, where she builds AI tools that help creators make games using conversational AI, multimodal generation, and believable social characters. Her research spans game AI, social simulation, and interactive storytelling, with previous work at Disney Research and IBM Research. She loves making complex game and narrative AI approachable, and is usually found working alongside her dog, Bhoomi, who has yet to be impressed by large language models.