PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mark Riedl

Also known as Mark O. Riedl

Mark Riedl is a Georgia Tech professor whose research asks how AI systems can tell stories, explain their decisions and learn human values. He earned a Ph.D. at North Carolina State University in 2004, worked as a research scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies from 2004 to 2007, and joined Georgia Tech's College of Computing in 2007. DARPA named him a Young Faculty Award recipient in 2011, and in 2014 he proposed the Lovelace 2.0 Test of creativity as an alternative to the Turing Test. With Brent Harrison, he unveiled the Quixote value-alignment system in 2016, and in 2017 he coauthored the Rationalization paper on natural-language explanations and a paper on event representations for neural story generation. He is the inaugural Githesh Ramamurthy Professor in AI and director of the Georgia Tech Machine Learning Center, both since 2026.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2004–2007

    PhD and research at USC

    He earns a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2004. From 2004 to 2007, he is a research scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, where he researches and develops interactive, narrative-based training systems.

  2. 2007

    Joining Georgia Tech

    He joins the Georgia Tech College of Computing in 2007 and studies AI approaches to story generation, interactive narratives and adaptive computer games. He directs the Entertainment Intelligence Lab there.

  3. 2011

    A DARPA Young Faculty Award

    In 2011, he receives a DARPA Young Faculty Award. Funded through the program, his Scheherazade system uses crowdsourcing to capture stories about a topic from many people and combines them into a situational model that users explore by making decisions.

  4. 2014

    The Lovelace 2.0 Test

    In 2014, he proposes the Lovelace 2.0 Test of creativity as an alternative to the Turing Test for determining whether an agent is intelligent. The test builds on earlier tests of creativity and allows a direct comparison of the relative intelligence of different agents.

  5. 2016

    Teaching values with Quixote

    In 2016, he and Brent Harrison unveil Quixote at the AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix. Quixote teaches value alignment by training robots to read stories, and it turns the plot graph that Scheherazade gathers into a reward signal for trial-and-error learning.

  6. 2017

    Rationalization for explainable AI

    In 2017, he coauthors "Rationalization: A Neural Machine Translation Approach to Generating Natural Language Explanations" with Upol Ehsan, Brent Harrison and Larry Chan. The paper introduces AI rationalization, which uses neural machine translation to turn an autonomous agent's internal state-action representations into natural language, and tests it on a Frogger-playing agent.

  7. 2017

    Event representations for stories

    In 2017, he coauthors a paper on automated story generation with Lara J. Martin, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Brent Harrison, among others. The approach splits the task into generating successive events, called event2event, and turning events into natural-language sentences, called event2sentence.

  8. Since 2026

    Endowed professor, ML Center director

    In 2026, he becomes the inaugural Githesh Ramamurthy Professor in AI and the new director of the Georgia Tech Machine Learning Center. His recent work covers story understanding and generation, computational creativity, explainable AI, mechanistic interpretability and teaching virtual agents to behave safely.

Career

  1. Since 2007Georgia Institute of TechnologyProfessor, Githesh Ramamurthy Professor in AI
  2. 2004–2007University of Southern CaliforniaResearch Scientist

Education

  1. 2004North Carolina State UniversityPhD

From the biography.

Videos

YouTube videos in which Mark Riedl speaks or appears, newest first. A model chose them from YouTube search results. List updated 22 October 2026.

  1. AI Storytelling Systems with Mark Riedl - #478The TWIML AI Podcast with Sam Charrington · 26 April 2021 · 47 min

Video data from YouTube API Services. By watching you agree to the YouTube Terms of Service. How we use YouTube data.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. People shaping AI work at a median of 3 organizations over a career: 3 for university starters and institute and lab starters, versus 2 for company startersIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. Across 6,853 people shaping AI with a dated work role, we estimate a median of 3 parent organizations over a career (mean 3.6), comparing role groups, starting sectors and starting decades from the 1950s to 2020–2026.
  4. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorateIncludes Georgia Institute of Technology. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorate. Across 2,116 people with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate recorded, we trace which undergraduate schools feed which doctoral programs, how often students stay at the same school, and how paths differ by birth-country region.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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  1. Mark Riedl | Research Community research.gatech.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Choose Your Own Sociocultural Training Adventure | DARPA darpa.mil. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. The Lovelace 2.0 Test of Artificial Creativity and Intelligence arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents | News Center news.gatech.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Rationalization: A Neural Machine Translation Approach to Generating Natural Language Explanations arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Event Representations for Automated Story Generation with Deep Neural Nets arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. School of IC Professor Receives Endowed Professorship | College of Computing cc.gatech.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Mark Riedl | School of Interactive Computing ic.gatech.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Mark Riedl - Human-Centered AI Lab eilab.gatech.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.