Mike Murtaugh is another example of the MIT UROP program. Mike began working for IC grad student Gilberte Houbart in his junior year and liked it so musch he stayed on for a Masters' Degree. He worked on the Wheel Of Life project where he designed and built a video game having to do with keeping monkeys from drowning in a river while real people ran around inside a fifty foot mylar balloon. (You had to be there).

Mike's research focuses on representation and browsing tools for media databases. And other than the monkey game, he is responsible for ConArtist, the knowledge representation layer supporting Agent Stories and Viewpoints On Demand. Mike has also made contributions to Boston Renewed Vistas. It is described in his Masters thesis, The Automatist Storytelling System.

Mike wrote the Web-page generation software that was used in the award-winning Web-based HyperPortrait Jerome B. Wiesner: A Random Walk though the 20th Century. This system was also used to generate a Web version of Boston: Renewed Vistas. He also reworked it to create the Elastic Catalog, another remarkable interface to content.

Davenport G; Murtaugh M (1997). Automatist storyteller systems and the shifting sands of story IBM Systems Journal, vol.36, no.3, 1997, pp.446-56. Publisher: IBM, USA. Murtaugh M (1996). The Automatist Storytelling System. MIT MS Thesis. Davenport G; Murtaugh M (1995). ConText: Towards the Evolving Documentary. ACM Multimedia '95, November 1995.