Bradford Mott is a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Informatics and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. His research is in the areas of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction with a focus on AI in education and entertainment, game-based learning, natural language processing, user modeling, and interactive narrative. His work includes the design, development, and investigation of advanced technologies for education, training, and entertainment, including work that investigates the use of game-based learning to promote K-12 computer science and artificial intelligence education. He serves as Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator on projects supported by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. He has also served as Co-Principal Investigator on projects supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His work has been recognized with several best paper awards and he has contributed to award winning video games, including one that received a game of the year award. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science with an emphasis on artificial intelligence from North Carolina State University in 2006.
In addition to his academic experience, Dr. Mott has many years of software development experience in industry, including extensive experience in the video game industry, having served as Technical Director at Emergent Game Technologies where he created cross-platform middleware solutions for Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation video game consoles. Prior to joining Emergent, he co-founded LiveWire Logic, a venture-backed AI-based enterprise software company. At LiveWire Logic, he served as the Vice President of Technology and led the design of an AI-based automated customer service solution. LiveWire Logic was acquired by Astute Solutions in early 2006. He is also a contributor to open source software projects, including the Stella Multi-Platform Atari 2600 Emulator, which he originally developed and later launched as an open source project to sustain its development. Stella has seen active development for over twenty-five years, has been used by video game enthusiasts around the world, and has received extensive use in the AI research community to develop advanced machine learning techniques to train AI agents to perform at superhuman levels through the Arcade Learning Environment and Gymnasium.
See Dr. Mott’s Google Scholar Page for a list of his publications.
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science (2006)
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
M.C.S., Computer Science (1996)
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
B.S., Computer Engineering (1994)
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
B.S., Computer Science (1994)
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Honors
Best Student Paper Award – EDM 2020
James Chen Best Student Paper Award – UMAP 2013
Best Paper Award – AIIDE 2011
Editor’s Choice Award – IGN 2003
Game of the Year Award – GameSpot 2002
Member: Phi Kappa Phi, Upsilon Pi Epsilon
Projects
Crystal Island
Dr. Mott developed Crystal Island, a prototype narrative-centered learning environment for middle school microbiology education, which served as the test bed for his dissertation research on narrative-centered tutorial planning. Crystal Island’s 3D virtual environment was implemented using Valve Software’s Source™ Engine (the Half-Life 2 game engine), a hierarchical task network planner, and the SMILE Bayesian inference engine. For almost 20 years, Crystal Island and its descendants, Crystal Island: Lost Investigation and Crystal Island: Uncharted Discovery, have been used to investigate game-based learning, intelligent tutoring, goal recognition, narrative planning, affective computing, self-regulated learning, problem solving, student modeling, and multimodal learning analytics.
Engage
Dr. Mott and colleagues at North Carolina State University designed, developed, and investigated the Engage game-based learning environment for middle grade computational thinking. Engage features story-centric problem solving that deeply integrates block-based programming into gameplay aligned with the K-12 Computer Science Framework. The learning environment has been used by thousands of students in public schools in North Carolina and Florida. Engage has been used to investigate computer science learning in middle school classrooms, block-based programming in game-based learning environments, procedural content generation in educational games, and stealth assessment in game-based learning.
Stella: A Multi-platform Atari 2600 Emulator
In late 1995, Dr. Mott started working on Stella, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator, to allow Atari 2600 games to be played on modern PCs running Linux. Since its original release, numerous people have contributed to porting the open source emulator to other platforms and have refined the code to create a highly accurate Atari 2600 emulator. Stella has seen active development for over twenty-five years. Stephen Anthony currently leads the development efforts on the open source project.
Flare
Dr. Mott developed the Flare open source toolkit for Unity that enables the creation of expressive user interfaces. Flare leverages the authoring capabilities of Adobe Flash Professional, e.g., vector graphics, animation, text, and sound, while integrating seamlessly into the Unity cross-platform game engine. At its most basic level, Flare can be viewed as a managed C# library for Unity to load and render files conforming to the Adobe Flash SWF file format. In the early days of Unity development, Flare enabled artists to create rich user interfaces for digital games, which were otherwise difficult to create with Unity’s limited user interface capabilities.
Activision Anthology – Game Boy Advance
Dr. Mott developed a highly-optimized Atari 2600 emulator for the Game Boy Advance platform during the summer of 2003 to be used as the foundation for Aspyr Media’s port of Activision Anthology to the GBA. The emulator employed a static translation approach for converting the 6502 machine code of the Atari 2600 to corresponding ARM assembly language code for the Game Boy Advance. This classic compilation includes over 50 games and in December 2003 received an “Editor’s Choice Award” from IGN.
BSVC: A Microprocessor Simulation Framework
Dr. Mott developed BSVC, an open source object-oriented microprocessor simulation framework written in C++ and Tcl/Tk for Linux, which features a Motorola 68000 emulator as well as devices such as the M68681 Dual Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter. BSVC was designed as a tool for Computer Organization courses centered around the Motorola 68000 to support students in developing and debugging assembly language programs. BSVC has been used by instructors and students at colleges and universities around the world, although few courses use the Motorola 68000 these days.