Marc Cavazza is a Professor in the School of Computing, as well as Director of the Digital Futures Institute. His Research interests are in the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques to support user interaction, with a particular emphasis on virtual environments and virtual characters. Marc's group is mostly known for its work in Interactive Storytelling, but they have also been active in semantic systems for virtual and augmented reality. More recently work has been extended to affective multimodal interaction, mostly applied to the field of Digital Arts and Entertainment. Over the past years, Marc has served on most relevant programme committees in that area, including AAMAS, IVA, Smart Graphics, and more recently ACM Multimedia, ACM IUI and CASA. Professor Cavazza is the coordinator of the IRIS FP7 Network of Excellence on Interactive Storytelling, which started in January 2009, and is also involved in the FP6 Integrated Projects CALLAS and COMPANIONS. He was previously coordinating the FP5 ALTERNE project on Virtual Reality Art, which has proven an interesting domain to explore these issues and from which a lot of the Institute's work on virtual worlds' behaviour is drawn.