CV

Education

  • 2012–2018 Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • 2009–2012 M.F.A in Interactive Media, University of Southern California
  • 2004–2009 B.S. in Software Engineering and Computer Science (Double Major), Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)

Employment

  • Fall 2018–Present Associate Professor, Pomona College Computer Science
  • Winter 2017–Spring 2018 Research Assistant, NSF Scenario Generation Project
  • 2015–2016 Research Assistant, GAMECIP Game Metadata Citation Project, University of California, Santa Cruz—Bridged C emulator cores and video transcoders with JavaScript UI
  • 2013–2015 Research Assistant, CHEKOFV Crowd-Sourced Formal Software Verification Project, University of California, Santa Cruz—ActionScript programming connecting formal verification goals to citizen science games
  • 2011–2012 Research Assistant, Annenberg Innovation Lab, University of Southern California—JavaScript multitouch interface prototyping and exploration
  • 2010–2011 Research Assistant, Game Innovation Lab, University of Southern California—Lua game scripting in PlayStation Home online environment
  • 2009–2010 Research Assistant, Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California—Python multitouch interface prototyping and exploration
  • 2006–2007 Game Designer/Scripter, Vicarious Visions (Activision)—Created boss encounters and dynamic mission system using in-house tools (Spiderman 3 PSP/PS2/Wii)

Fellowships, Scholarships, and Grants

  • 2022–2024 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level II) HAA-290396-23
  • 2019 Hahn Teaching with Technology Grant
  • 2012–2013 University of California Chancellor’s Fellowship
  • 2009–2011 USC Annenberg Fellowship
  • 2004–2009 RIT Presidential Scholarship
  • 2004–2009 National Merit Scholarship

Honors and Awards

  • 2024 Best Paper Award (The Potential of Cited Executable State for Software Object Access, Validation, and Research)
  • 2021 Best Paper Award (MappyLand: Fast, Accurate Mapping for Console Games)
  • 2019 Best Paper Nomination (Is Your Game Generator Working? Evaluating Gemini, a Purposeful Generator)
  • 2017 Best Student Paper (HyPED: Modeling and Analyzing Action Games as Hybrid Systems)
  • 2017 Best Paper Honorable Mention (Refining Operational Logics)
  • 2017 Outstanding TA Award 2016–2017
  • 2015 Best Paper Nomination (Combat in Games)
  • 2011 Best Presentation (Ensemble: Incremental Character Story Generation for Interactive Media)
  • 2010 IGDA Student Showcase

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Kaltman, E. and Osborn, J. 2025. Hypercitations of historical hypertexts: Two case studies in electronic literature. Proceedings of the 36th ACM conference on hypertext and social media 113–117.
Kaltman, E. and Osborn, J.C. 2024. The potential of cited executable state for software object access, validation, and research: A preview of the GISST system. International conference on digital preservation.
Kaltman, E. and Osborn, J.C. 2024. Curating and sharing interactive moments with GISST. Electronic literature organization conference and media festival.
Kaltman, E. and Osborn, J.C. 2024. Curating game moments and performances with emulated citation. Save the games symposium.
Osborn, J.C. and Kaltman, E. 2024. Toward a game citation and reference workbench. Foundations of digital games.
Osborn, J.C., Wieser, K. and Brody, M. 2024. RetroFit: Post-facto accessibility for retro games. Foundations of digital games.
Li, C. and Osborn, J.C. 2024. Translating between game generators with Asterism and Ceptre. Workshop on procedural content generation.
Kaltman, E. and Osborn, J.C. 2023. The game and interactive software scholarship toolkit (GISST): Enabling interactive software reference. Born digital cultural heritage.
Osborn, J.C., Li, C. and Wieser, K. 2021. Asterism: Operational logics as a game engines engine. Workshop on programming languages and interactivity.
Osborn, J.C., Summerville, A., Dailey, N. and Lim, S. 2021. MappyLand: Fast, accurate mapping for console games. Artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference.
Kim, C., Kim, J. and Osborn, J.C. 2020. Synthesizing retro game screenshot datasets for sprite detection. Workshop on experimental AI in games.
Summerville, A., Sarkar, A., Snodgrass, S. and Osborn, J.C. 2020. Extracting physics from blended platformer game levels. Workshop on experimental AI in games.
Kreminski, M., Dickinson, M., Osborn, J.C., Summerville, A., Mateas, M. and Wardrip-Fruin, N. 2020. Germinate: A mixed-initiative casual creator for rhetorical games. Artificial intelligence and digital entertainment conference.
Sarkar, A., Summerville, A., Snodgrass, S., Bentley, G. and Osborn, J.C. 2020. Exploring level blending across platformers via paths and affordances. Artificial intelligence and digital entertainment conference.
Bentley, G. and Osborn, J.C. 2019. The videogame affordances corpus. Workshop on experimental AI in games.
Osborn, J.C., Dickinson, M., Anderson, B., Summerville, A., Denner, J., Torres, D., Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Mateas, M. 2019. Is your game generator working? Evaluating Gemini, a purposeful generator. Artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference.
Kaltman, E., Osborn, J.C. and Aycock, J. 2019. S4LVE: Shareable videogame analysis and visualization. Foundations of digital games.
Zeleke, Y., Osborn, J.C. and Sanfelice, R. 2019. Analyzing action games: A hybrid systems approach. Foundations of digital games.
Summerville, A. and Osborn, J.C. 2019. Model assignment: The Minecraft projects. AAAI conference on educational advances in AI.
Greenberg, M. and Osborn, J.C. 2019. Teaching discrete mathematics to early undergraduates with Software Foundations. Fifth international workshop on Coq for programming languages.
Summerville, A., Martens, C., Samuel, B., Osborn, J.C., Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Mateas, M. 2018. Gemini: Bidirectional generation and analysis of games via ASP. Artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference.
Osborn, J.C., Ryan, J. and Mateas, M. 2017. Analyzing expressionist grammars by reduction to symbolic visibly pushdown automata. International workshop on intelligent narrative technologies.
Osborn, J.C., Samuel, B., Summerville, A. and Mateas, M. 2017. Towards general rpg playing. Workshop on experimental AI in games.
Osborn, J.C., Lambrigger, B. and Mateas, M. 2017. HyPED: Modeling and analyzing action games as hybrid systems. Artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference.
Osborn, J.C., Summerville, A. and Mateas, M. 2017. Automated game design learning. IEEE conference on computational intelligence and games.
Osborn, J.C., Summerville, A. and Mateas, M. 2017. Automatic mapping of NES games with Mappy. Workshop on procedural content generation.
Osborn, J.C., Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Mateas, M. 2017. Refining operational logics. Foundations of digital games.
Kaltman, E., Osborn, J.C. and Wardrip-Fruin, N. 2017. Getting the GISST: A toolkit for the creation, analysis and reference of game studies resources. Foundations of digital games.
Kaltman, E., Osborn, J.C. and Wardrip-Fruin, N. 2017. Game and interactive software scholarship toolkit (GISST). Foundations of digital games demonstrations track.
Summerville, A., Osborn, J.C., Holmgård, C. and Zhang, D.W. 2017. MARIO: Mechanics automatically recognized via interactive observation. Foundations of digital games.
Summerville, A., Osborn, J.C. and Mateas, M. 2017. CHARDA: Causal hybrid automata recovery via dynamic analysis. International joint conference on artificial intelligence.
Osborn, J.C. and Mateas, M. 2017. Evaluating a solver-aided puzzle design tool. Workshop on mixed-initiative co-creative interfaces.
Osborn, J.C. and Mateas, M. 2017. Against forward models. Workshop on what’s next for AI in games?
Martens, C., Summerville, A., Mateas, M., Osborn, J.C., Harmon, S., Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Jhala, A. 2016. Proceduralist readings, procedurally. Workshop on experimental AI in games.
Fava, D., Shapiro, D., Osborn, J.C., Schaef, M. and Whitehead, E.J. 2016. Crowd-sourcing program preconditions via a classification game. International conference on software engineering.
Osborn, J.C. and Mateas, M. 2016. Programming interactivity requires both semantics and semiotics. POPL off the beaten track workshop.
Osborn, J.C., Samuel, B. and Mateas, M. 2015. Playspecs: Regular expressions for game play traces. Artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference.
Osborn, J.C., Lederle-Ensign, D., Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Mateas, M. 2015. Combat in games. Foundations of digital games.
Logas, H., Vallejos, R., Osborn, J.C., Compton, K. and Whitehead, E.J. 2015. Visualizing loops and data structures in Xylem: The code of plants. Foundations of digital games.
Osborn, J.C., Samuel, B., McCoy, J.A. and Mateas, M. 2014. Evaluating play trace (dis)similarity metrics. Artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference.
Osborn, J.C. and Mateas, M. 2014. Visualizing play traces of arbitrary games. Foundations of digital games.
Logas, H. et al. 2014. Software verification games: Designing Xylem, the code of plants. Foundations of digital games.
Osborn, J.C., Grow, A. and Mateas, M. 2013. Modular computational critics for games. Artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference.
Compton, K., Osborn, J.C. and Mateas, M. 2013. Generative methods. Workshop on procedural content generation.
Kahn, A.S., Shen, C., Lu, L., Ratan, R.A., Coary, S., Hou, J., Meng, J., Osborn, J.C. and Williams, D. 2013. The trojan player typology: a cross-genre, cross-cultural, behaviorally validated scale of video game play motivations. Annual meeting of the international communication association.
Osborn, J.C. and Sennott, M. 2011. Ensemble: Incremental character story generation for interactive media. Annenberg graduate fellowship program research and creative project symposium.
Osborn, J.C. 2011. Procedural minimalism. DiGRA conference.
Copier, M., Swain, C., van den Berg, L., Osborn, J.C. and Taylor, B. 2010. So happy together: Tips and tricks for global collaboration between universities and the industry. Game developers conference IGDA education summit.
Bolas, M., Olson, J., Osborn, J.C. and Bolas, N. 2010. Design approach for multi-touch interfaces in creative production environments. Engineering patterns for multi-touch interfaces workshop, ACM SIGCHI symposium on engineering interactive computer systems.
van den Berg, L., van Hooren, M., Teunisse, B., Nishikawa, G., Farmer, S. and Osborn, J.C. 2010. Paper cakes. Independent games festival student showcase.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Kaltman, E., Osborn, J.C. and Wardrip-Fruin, N. 2019. From the presupposition of DOOM to the manifestation of code. Digital humanities quarterly. (pending minor revisions).
Summerville, A., Martens, C., Harmon, S., Mateas, M., Osborn, J.C., Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Jhala, A. 2019. From mechanics to meaning. IEEE transactions on games. 11, 1, 69–78. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCIAIG.2017.2765599.
Osborn, J.C., Samuel, B. and Mateas, M. 2017. Visualizing the strategic landscape of arbitrary games. Sage journal of visual analytics.
Kahn, A.S., Shen, C., Lu, L., Ratan, R.A., Coary, S., Hou, J., Meng, J., Osborn, J.C. and Williams, D. 2015. The trojan player typology: A cross-genre, cross-cultural, behaviorally validated scale of video game play motivations. Computers in human behavior.

Book Chapters

Lowood, H., Kaltman, E. and Osborn, J.C. 2017. Histories of performance documentation: Museum, artistic, and scholarly practices. G. Giannachi and J. Westerman, eds. Routledge.

Demos and Popular Press

Kaltman, E. and Osborn, J. 2025. Enacting software history with the game and interactive software scholarship toolkit. Demonstration at SIGCIS meeting.
Brogan, J. 2017. Meet Mappy, a software system that automatically maps old-school Nintendo games. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/08/16/mappy_automatically_maps_nes_levels.html.

Invited Talks

  • 2026-10 CMC Ath Debate on the Role of AI in Education
  • 2026-09 Pomona College Blue Room Talk: Understanding “AI”
  • 2026-04 Panel: Top Challenges on the Road Ahead for Games and Software Engineering, International Conference on Software Engineering Games & Software Engineering Workshop (GAS)
  • 2026-02 AI Workshop with Pomona’s Quantitative Skills Center
  • 2025-11 AI conversation with Pomona Scholars of Teaching
  • 2025-06 “How to College” session at PG Retreat
  • 2025-04 Lunch Conversation with Pomona Scholars of Mathematics
  • 2024-05 Claremont Library All-Staff Meeting: What Problem is a Large Language Model Solving?
  • 2024-05 Claremont Center for Teaching and Learning AI Fellows AI Day plenary talk
  • 2024-04 Claremont Discourse Presents Dr. Joseph Osborn: Thinking Critically About AI
  • 2024-01 Claremont Center for Teaching and Learning: Introduction to Generative AI
  • 2023-05 Panel: Pedagogical Issues in Games and Software Engineering, International Conference on Software Engineering Games & Software Engineering Workshop (GAS)
  • 2022-05 CSU Channel Islands Computer Science Seminar Series
  • 2019-11 Reclaiming Personal Computing: or, Your Life in Plain Text, Digital Humanities @ the Claremont Colleges Research Studio Series
  • 2017-11 Modeling and model-checking videogame characters as hybrid systems, UCSC Hybrid Systems Lab
  • 2017-11 Hybrid planning in the videogame domain, USC IDM Lab

Invited Symposia

  • 2018 CRA CCC Early-Career Researcher Symposium, Washington DC
  • 2016 BIRS Workshop 16w5160, Computational Modeling in Games, Banff, Canada

Service

  • 2026 Reviewer, ParaAdapt 2026
  • 2025 Committee Chair, Pomona College Curriculum Committee
  • 2025 Program Committee, ICSE Workshop on Games and Software Engineering
  • 2024 Foundations of Digital Games Tutorial on Playable Citations Co-Organizer
  • 2023–2024 Track Chair, Games Pedagogy, Foundations of Digital Games
  • 2022– Committee Member, Pomona College Curriculum Committee
  • 2022 Outreach Chair, AAAI Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE)
  • 2020–2021 Committee Member, Pomona College Teaching and Learning Committee
  • 2020–2021 Doctoral Consortium Evaluator, Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing
  • 2021 Program Committee, IEEE Conference on Games
  • 2021–2022 Program Committee, Educational Advances in AI
  • 2021 Co-chair, AIIDE Workshop on Programming Languages and Interactive Entertainment
  • 2019–2020 Committee Member, Pomona College Information Technology Services Advisory Committee
  • 2020 Workshops and Tutorials Chair, AAAI Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE)
  • 2019–2020 Program Committee, Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment
  • 2019 Doctoral Consortium Chair and Career Panel Facilitator, AAAI Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE)
  • 2019 Chair, Foundations of Digital Games 2019 Game Educators’ Symposium
  • 2019 Program Committee, Foundations of Digital Games User Experience of Artificial Intelligence Workshop (UXofAI)
  • 2019–2020 Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Games (ToG)
  • 2017–2019 Chair, AAAI Workshop on Knowledge Extraction from Games (KEG 2018, 2019)
  • 2017, 2019–2020 Program Committee, Foundations of Digital Games Workshop on Procedural Content Generation
  • 2017 Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games (TCIAIG)
  • 2017, 2020–2026 Program Committee, Foundations of Digital Games
  • 2016, 2017 Program Committee, Workshop on Experimental AI in Games (EXAG 2016, 2017)
  • 2013–2014 UCSC Computer Science Department Graduate Student Council

I have also served on every CS department tenure-track candidate search committee since starting at Pomona in 2018, and on the third-year or tenure review committee of all of my colleagues for which I have been eligible to serve.

Courses Taught

  • CSCI 050 PO Fundamentals of Computer Programming
    A Python introductory course in a half-semester format, taught in parallel with CSCI 051 PO
  • CSCI 51a PO Intro to Computer Science with Topics in AI
    A Python introductory course with assignments motivated by neural networks, adversarial search, and other AI topics.
  • CSCI 054 PO Discrete Mathematics and Functional Programming
    Introductory course (second in sequence) teaching discrete math concepts in the context of functional programming, with both informal proofs and formal proofs in the Coq proof assistant or the Haskell programming langauge (depending on the year).
  • CSCI 105 PO Computer Systems
    Core course in CS department covering computer organization, operating systems, and programming in C.
  • CSCI 151 PO Artificial Intelligence
    Advanced elective in AI covering automated decision making from constraint satisfaction and planning to optimization and prediction.
  • CSCI 181G PO Game Engine Development
    Advanced graphics and software engineering elective. Students build 2D and 3D game engines and games in a team setting on low-level graphics APIs with an eye towards systems performance.
  • CSCI 190 PO Senior Seminar
    Senior exercise; a discussion-based class driven by student presentations on research papers in computer science. Students learn how to read, write, and present on CS research.
  • Computational Media 80K Foundations of Video Game Design, University of California, Santa Cruz
    Introductory game design, development, and critique class; three different game-making tools in five weeks