New city, new job

Falmouth to Washington DC

A few days ago I moved to Washington, DC, to start a new job as Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department of American University. The CS department here is small but growing, and I'm looking forward to being a part of that. Thanks especially to profs. Mike Treanor and Nathalie Japkowicz for their part in hiring me and helping me to get oriented here.

For the past 2½ years I was Senior Research Fellow at the MetaMakers Institute, a grant-funded European Union research initiative attached to the Games Academy of Falmouth University, which is located in the remote but pretty region of Cornwall, in the far southwestern United Kingdom. Moving from a 20,000-person seaside village to the capital of the United States is a big change! A change for both good and bad naturally, but I'm optimistic overall.

In addition to my home in Computer Science, I'll be affiliated with the AU Game Lab. I'll teach a mixture of game-oriented courses and more standard computer science courses as a result. For Spring 2019 I'm teaching one of each: a special-topics course on AI & Games, and a core CS course, Programming Languages. I'm designing both with mostly new syllabi, which means things are pretty busy at the moment, but it promises to be interesting. I'll try to share some more on those courses once everything is worked out (classes start next week). It's nice that American University has small classes (~20 students), which allows for a little more experimentation with these things – I've got some more ideas for the coming years if things go well.