Games People Play (With Bots)

Donald Brinkman is a senior product manager for Microsoft AI & Research, where he drives the development of various conversational intelligence and chatbot-related products and technologies. Over the last ten years he has held a variety of roles at Microsoft, primarily focused on natural language processing, game design, and AI. In 2013 his project ChronoZoom, an infinitely-scaling and interactive HTML5 representation of the history of Everything, was awarded the top educational resource award at South by Southwest. In his role as research program manager of Games for Learning and Digital Humanities at Microsoft Research he helped to fund and design a variety of projects ranging from an emotional water cooler that encouraged people to drink more water to alternate reality games to encourage incoming university students to pursue pro-social behaviors correlated to better educational outcomes. Donald's latest work centers on the creation of emotionally intelligent and socially responsible open-domain social chatbots.