Mark J. Nelson
I'm a professor in the computer science department at American University, with a research focus on artificial intelligence (AI).
My main area is AI & games. This includes technical research on game playing as a paradigmatic example of sequential decision-making; design-support work using AI for automated and semi-automated design; and conceptual work on formal models of games' mechanical and meaning-making elements.
Recently I have also been investigating how to harness the strengths of large language models (LLMs) for open-domain reasoning while constraining their tendency towards generating hallucinated and otherwise incorrect outputs.
In common with others who identify with the broad AI tradition (rather than with narrow technical subfields), I have fairly wide academic interests, across AI, formal logic, machine learning, programming languages, theoretical computer science, etc. – more or less anything relevant to the computationalization of intelligence.
Background: I did my B.S. in Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College, where I was influenced onto my current research path by Belinda Thom, Jim Marshall, and Melissa O'Neill; and my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where my thesis advisors were Michael Mateas and Charles Isbell. I subsequently worked in various roles at the University of California Santa Cruz, the IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and Falmouth University (UK), before coming to AU.
Teaching at AU: I most frequently teach Artificial Intelligence (CSC-468/668) and Programming Languages (CSC-421/621). I have also taught Game Development (GAME-615), Operating Systems (CSC-465/665), and several special-topics courses (CSC-496/696), most recently on generative AI.
News:
- October 1: Happy to have Arnav Jhala visiting us
- September 19: Invited to an AI dinner at the Atlantic Festival
- August 26: Designed a new syllabus for my AI class that tries to balance coverage of fundamentals like search and reinforcement learning with emerging topics like large language models
- June 25: Visit to Google DC on behalf of the AU College of Arts and Sciences
- June 3-4: On a grant review panel for the National Science Foundation CISE/IIS Robust Intelligence program
- May 21-24: At the Foundations of Digital Games Conference, with new papers on LLM-PCG replication and Prototyping Slice of Life
- [older news...]
Research:
- Publications
- Also at DBLP and Google Scholar
- Projects & collaborators
- Professional activities
- An occasional blog
- Paper-reading log
Contact:
- Email: mnelson@american.edu
- GitHub: anadrome
- GitHub org: NelsonAU