Arya Honraopatil
I am a computational storytelling researcher designing emotion-aware AI to help foster meaningful, collaborative partnerships between humans and machines.
I am a third year Ph.D. student at LARA Lab working with Dr. Lara J. Martin.
I’m currently working on expressive storytelling and Dungeons & Dragons AI. My research interests are:
- Interactive Narrative and Tabletop Roleplaying Agents
- Affective Computing and Emotion-Aware AI
- Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
I explore how AI systems can generate, adapt, and respond to dynamic story worlds in collaboration with users. I am particularly interested in affective computing and developing emotion-aware AI that can recognize, interpret, and simulate emotional context to enhance narrative engagement and user experience. I also focus on human-AI interaction and collaboration, investigating how AI can act as a creative partner in storytelling and decision-making environments.
I also have a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. Previosuly, I have worked as a Software Engineer at Principal Global Services in Pune, India.
news
| Aug 20, 2026 | Got accepted into the Doctoral Consortium at AIIDE 2026 (The 22nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment)! My research proposal is titled, “Cooperative Roleplaying with Affective, Symbolic Representation-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning”. |
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| Jul 17, 2026 | Gave a talk on ‘Wrong, Then Less Wrong: Lessons from a PhD in NLP and Storytelling’ for iAAMCS (Institute for African American Mentoring in Computing Sciences). Slides |
| Nov 09, 2025 | Volunteered at the Wordplay Workshop at EMNLP 2025. With the amazing organizers! Some were missing! |
| Sep 26, 2025 | Our paper titled, “Does Reasoning Help LLM Agents Play Dungeons and Dragons? A Prompt Engineering Experiment” was accepted to the Wordplay Workshop at EMNLP 2025. |
| May 02, 2025 | Won the Best Poster Award for the Emotional Storytelling work presented at 2025 CSEE Research Day held at UMBC. |
| Apr 05, 2025 | Presented the Emotional Storytelling work at Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL 2025) held at the Pennsylvania State University. |
| Jun 01, 2024 | Started my Ph.D. at LARA Lab working with my advisor Dr. Lara J. Martin. |