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Instructor, Game Design

New York University

Visiting Researcher

Cornell University

Working jointly with Kevin Ellis and Zenna Tavares on intrinsic motivation and procedural environment generation.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Basis Research Institute

Working jointly with Zenna Tavares and Kevin Ellis on intrinsic motivation and procedural environment generation.

PhD Research Intern

Sakana AI (Tokyo, Japan)

Exploring open-ended VLM-driven content generation loops under the supervision of Sebastian Risi.

Instructor, AI and Games

New York University

Course design, lecturing and project mentorship.

Research Consultant (part-time, remote)

Microsoft Research

Continued work with Andrzej Banburski-Fahey to develop DreamGarden (see below), and explore multi-modal input for automatic game and environment generation.

PhD Research Intern

Microsoft Research

Working under the supervision of Andrzej Banburski-Fahey, as part of the Deep Learning and Speaking the World into Existence teams, to develop DreamGarden, a design assistant for generating simulations in Unreal Engine 5, with a hierarchical planning module and dynamic orchestration between submodules for generating C++ code, 3D assets, and procedural meshes.

PhD Research Intern

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) (London, UK)

Working under the supervision of Roberta Raileanu, as part of the Reinforcement Learning team, to explore the use of pretrained multi-modal generative models for environment generation. Developed DreamCraft, a text-guided NeRF approach for generating structures/environments in MineCraft, with a novel quantization and neural rendering scheme allowing for optimization over both in-game appearance of artifacts as well as their functional properties (i.e. adjacency constraints and block type frequencies).

Volunteer, Ambassador, and Speaker

Free the Children

Free the Children (now "We" charity) is a Canadian non-profit that aims to empower youth by increasing access to education in developing countries. I helped create a club at my middle school dedicated to fundraising and awareness for the charity. During my time on Degrassi, we partnered with the organization and travelled to various countries to learn about and assist with their projects (e.g. building schools, gardens, playgrounds, systems for providing clean water). We acted as public ambassadors for the charity (the trips were filmed and turned into short documentaries that aired on MTV), and I spoke at the charity's "We Day" events in Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, and Hamilton.

PhD

New York University

Computer Science

Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction

University of Toronto

Cognitive Science, Computational Cognition stream (Major), Computer Science (Minor), Cinema Studies (Minor)

Outstanding Reviewer Award

Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)

Best Paper Award Nominee

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE)

Video Game Level Design as a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Problem

Best Paper Award

Foundations of Digital Games (FDG)

DreamCraft: Text-Guided Generation of Functional 3D Environments in Minecraft