About

Jeff Burke is a professor of theater and associate dean for research and creative technology at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT). He co-directs REMAP, the Center for Research in Engineering, Media, and Performance, a joint effort of TFT and the Samueli School of Engineering at UCLA. His research interests are primarily in the use of emerging technologies in performance and other live experiences, with an increasing focus on how artists and human creative expression should guide fundamental technology development. Burke's work encompasses immersive theater and augmented reality, including experimental projects such as A Most Favored Nation set in the world of Amazon Studios’ The Man in the High Castle, and an adaptation of China Miéville’s The City and The City. He has integrated artificial intelligence into live performance, developing immersive performances like Xanadu that utilize AI to transform audience contributions into digital scenery using Unreal Engine. His research also explores data-centric network technologies such as Named Data Networking (NDN), which enables applications difficult to achieve on the current Internet, and has led collaborative efforts that won the Omidyar Network’s Future of Data Challenge. Additionally, Burke has contributed to research on real-time, interactive learning environments, including the creation of OpenPTrack, an open-source multi-camera tracking system, and is involved in immersive learning collaborations with UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. His work in experimental theater, workshops, and teaching explores sensing, real-time media, and computation at various scales, supported by awards from Google and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Since 2003, he has collaborated with Fabian Wagmister on cheLA, organizing workshops, performances, and developing supporting technologies for Latino-American experimental media. Burke’s projects also include moving image collaborations, interactive media installations, participatory sensing initiatives, and community-based public art, often involving sensing and real-time media. His career spans numerous projects that integrate technology, performance, and community engagement, reflecting a broad commitment to advancing the intersection of arts and emerging digital technologies.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sociology
• Computer Security
• Social Science
• Data science
• Telecommunications
• Computer network
• Human–computer interaction
• World Wide Web
• Psychology
• Distributed computing
• Cognitive science
• Engineering
• Management science
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• Designing an Adaptive Storytelling Platform to Promote Civic Education in Politically Polarized Learning Environments

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2026-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Xanadu: Generative Media Pipelines for Immersive Participatory Theater

  Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment · 2025-11-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We present Xanadu, a full-scale participatory theater production that integrated generative AI into a live musical. Over two weeks, 500 audience members contributed sketches, movements, and sounds that were transformed in real-time --via pipelines combining vision-language models, diffusion models, and moderation-- into images, 3D objects, poetry, and choreography rendered within an extended reality environment. Audience inputs were framed as ritual "offerings" to the Muses, with performers guiding participation and AI serving as interpretive intermediary. A hybrid hosting architecture combined controllable, research-driven models with fast foundation models, enabling 30–60 second generations while preserving stylistic and narrative coherence. We discuss design strategies and trade-offs that supported large-scale, group-level human-AI collaboration. This work contributes practical insights into deploying generative AI in live performance and highlights opportunities for designing AI systems that facilitate collective rather than individual creativity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Can Generative AI Promote Democracy? Countering Polarization with Digital Storytelling

  2025-07-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We evaluated the effects of an AI storytelling intervention designed to reduce affective political polarization among college students (N=321). Using difference-in-differences models, we found that listening to five AI-generated civic stories was associated with more favorable attitudes toward political out-group members. However, participants randomly assigned to receive stories with additional descriptive and emotive language did not exhibit greater changes in attitudes relative to the control group. Structural equation models indicated that emotional identification with out-group protagonists mediated attenuation of affective polarization and political stereotypes of out-group partisans, but not for in-group characters and attitudes. By examining potential moderation and mediation, our study clarifies mechanisms that may explain how adaptive AI storytelling can counter rising anti-democratic sentiment among youth.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Research Announcements for the Solar System

  2025-07-09

  preprintOpen access

  In collaboration with the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Solar System Collaboration (SSSC) and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC), the Can-Rubin team is developing a new communication platform designed to meet the modern needs of the Solar System research community. Called Research Announcements for the Solar System (RAFTs), this system is intended to streamline the sharing of discoveries, observations, and updates during the fast-moving era of wide-field time-domain surveys like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST. RAFTs are intended to address the unique needs of the Solar System research community in the era of large-scale surveys (such as LSST), providing a streamlined, moderated system for the timely sharing of observational alerts with announcements that are concise, scientifically relevant, and permanently archived. Hosted by the CADC, RAFTs will be freely accessible and easily discoverable with permanent DOIs assigned to each.Each announcement will feature a machine-readable section to facilitate rapid follow-up, and will be integrated with the LSST community forum to encourage further collaborations and engagement. The system will also feature a moderation process to help maintain scientific relevance and quality. The announcements are expected to be brief, relevant, and may be urgent. While urgency is not a requirement for publication, the RAFTs platform will be particularly well-suited for time-sensitive discoveries that benefit from prompt visibility and potential follow-up. The system is designed to be scalable, with the capacity to handle an increased volume of discoveries expected from the LSST. We will present a brief demonstration of the (in development) software interface, highlighting its user-friendly design and functionality for the community.

  PublisherDOI

• Designing an Adaptive Storytelling Platform to Promote Civic Education in Politically Polarized Learning Environments

  ArXiv.org · 2025-06-30

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Political polarization undermines democratic civic education by exacerbating identity-based resistance to opposing viewpoints. Emerging AI technologies offer new opportunities to advance interventions that reduce polarization and promote political open-mindedness. We examined novel design strategies that leverage adaptive and emotionally-responsive civic narratives that may sustain students' emotional engagement in stories, and in turn, promote perspective-taking toward members of political out-groups. Drawing on theories from political psychology and narratology, we investigate how affective computing techniques can support three storytelling mechanisms: transportation into a story world, identification with characters, and interaction with the storyteller. Using a design-based research (DBR) approach, we iteratively developed and refined an AI-mediated Digital Civic Storytelling (AI-DCS) platform. Our prototype integrates facial emotion recognition and attention tracking to assess users' affective and attentional states in real time. Narrative content is organized around pre-structured story outlines, with beat-by-beat language adaptation implemented via GPT-4, personalizing linguistic tone to sustain students' emotional engagement in stories that center political perspectives different from their own. Our work offers a foundation for AI-supported, emotionally-sensitive strategies that address affective polarization while preserving learner autonomy. We conclude with implications for civic education interventions, algorithmic literacy, and HCI challenges associated with AI dialogue management and affect-adaptive learning environments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bringing the Classics Back To the Classroom to Enhance Learning Experience

  2025-01-17

  articleOpen access

  of Matlab, a 7-segment display and an LED matrix to create a game that enhances students' hands-on experience in classroom.We hope that this new idea will make the class better and fun for students.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Secure Web Objects: Building Blocks for Metaverse Interoperability and Decentralization

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-07-21

  preprintOpen access

  This position paper explores how to support the Web's evolution through an underlying data-centric approach that better matches the data-orientedness of modern and emerging applications. We revisit the original vision of the Web as a hypermedia system that supports document composability and application interoperability via name-based data access. We propose the use of secure web objects (SWO), a data-oriented communication approach that can reduce complexity, centrality, and inefficiency, particularly for collaborative and local-first applications, such as the Metaverse and other collaborative applications. SWO are named, signed, application-defined objects that are secured independently of their containers or communications channels, an approach that leverages the results from over a decade-long data-centric networking research. This approach does not require intermediation by aggregators of identity, storage, and other services that are common today. We present a brief design overview, illustrated through prototypes for two editors of shared hypermedia documents: one for 3D and one for LaTeX. We also discuss our findings and suggest a roadmap for future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Secure Web Objects: Building Blocks for Metaverse Interoperability and Decentralization

  2024-08-12 · 5 citations

  article

  This position paper explores how to support the Web’s evolution through an underlying data-centric approach that better matches the data-orientedness of modern and emerging applications. We revisit the original vision of the Web as a hypermedia system that supports document composability and application interoperability via name-based data access. We propose the use of secure web objects (SWO), a data-oriented communication approach that can strengthen security, reduce complexity, centrality, and inefficiency, particularly for Meta-verse and other collaborative, local-first applications. SWO are application-defined, named, and signed objects that are secured independently of their containers or communications channels, an approach that leverages the results from over a decade-long data-centric networking research. This approach does not require intermediation by aggregators of identity, storage, and other middleware or middlebox services that are common today. We present a brief design overview, illustrated through prototypes for two editors of shared hypermedia documents: one for 3D and one for LaTeX. We also discuss our findings and suggest a roadmap for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Next Steps for Human-Centered Generative AI: A Technical Perspective

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023 · 14 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Sociology

  Through iterative, cross-disciplinary discussions, we define and propose next-steps for Human-centered Generative AI (HGAI). We contribute a comprehensive research agenda that lays out future directions of Generative AI spanning three levels: aligning with human values; assimilating human intents; and augmenting human abilities. By identifying these next-steps, we intend to draw interdisciplinary research teams to pursue a coherent set of emergent ideas in HGAI, focusing on their interested topics while maintaining a coherent big picture of the future work landscape.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Statement: The Metaverse as an Information-Centric Network

  2023 · 5 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security

  This paper discusses challenges and opportunities of considering the Metaverse as an Information-Centric Network (ICN). The Web today essentially represents a data-centric application layer: data named by URLs is manipulated with REST primitives. However, the semantic gap with the underlying host-oriented transport is significant, typically leading to complexity, centralization, and brittleness. Popular interest in "the Metaverse" suggests that the end-user experience of the Web will evolve towards always-on eXtended Reality (XR). With the benefit of a historical perspective, computing advances, and decades of experience with a global network, there is an opportunity to holistically consider the Metaverse not as an application of the current network, but an evolution of the network itself, reducing rather than widening the gap between network architecture and application semantics. An ICN architecture offers the possibility to achieve this with less overhead, low latency, better security, and more disruption tolerance suitable to diverse uses cases, even those facing intermittent connectivity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: From Intentional to Enacted Values in a Future Internet Architecture: Values in the Next Phase of Named Data Networking Research

  NSF · $226k · 2014–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Deborah Estrin

  Cornell University

  24 shared

• Mani Srivastava

  23 shared

• Mark Hansen

  21 shared

• Lixia Zhang

  UCLA Health

  16 shared

• Sasank Reddy

  Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education

  13 shared

• Alexander Afanasyev

  Florida International University

  11 shared

• Wentao Shang

  9 shared

• Katie Shilton

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation (NSF) support for research proje…
• NEA support for research projects
• Intel support for research projects
• Cisco support for research projects
• Qualcomm support for research projects