Welcome to my homepage!
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at UCLA. I work at the Magix lab
at UCLA, where Demetri Terzopoulos is my advisor. My research focuses on
artificial intelligence for virtual worlds. Specifically, how can we make it computationally viable and worthwhile
to use academic artificial intelligence techniques, such as planning and natural language processing in modern
virtual worlds, such as video games or worlds such as Second Life?
Previously, after graduating from Stanford University with a Masters in Computer Science,
I developed artificial intelligence for several video games.
Publications
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“Partially Precomputed A*”
William Hewlett IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (Accepted February 2011, To Appear) [paper] |
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“A Modular Framework for Adaptive Agent-Based Steering”
Shawn Singh, Mubbasir Kapadia, William Hewlett, Glenn Reinmann and Petros Faloutsos ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, February 2011 [movie] [paper] |
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“Egocentric Affordance Fields in Pedestrian Steering”
Mubbasir Kapadia, Shawn Singh, William Hewlett, Glenn Reinmann and Petros Faloutsos ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, February 2009 [movie] [paper] |
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"Automatic Response Composition,"
William Hewlett and Michael Freed Workshop on Enhanced Messaging, AAAI, July 2008 [paper] |
Current Projects
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AI Fighter In this fast paced fighting game, you and your human opponent compete with by fighting each other's students. Each student AI, in turn, learns how to fight by observing its human teacher fight her opponent's student. The winner is the player who can teach their student to beat the other player first. Read about and download this PC game here . |
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Natural Language Generation in Virtual Worlds Existing Virtual Worlds and Video Games have extremely limited natural language generation capabilities. This project enables computer controlled agents to talk to each other in generated English. |
Published Games
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The Godfather, the Game |
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Lord of the Rings, The Third Age |
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Godai, Elemental Force |