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In his work “Mere Generation: Essential Barometer or Dated Concept?”, Ventura (Ventura 2016) categorizes creative processes along a spectrum of increasing creativity. While the spectrum provides insight into the dimensions through which creativity can be augmented, it does not of itself provide insights into how to advance a system through these dimensions. In this paper, we present some theoretical and practical insights on advancing along one commonly problematic rung of this ladder, namely from a system that exhibits generalization (i.e., the ability to generalize beyond an inspiring set) to a system that exhibits filtration (i.e., the ability to self-evaluate and filter results). One potential challenge in this transition is that filtration requires having a sufficiently large number of solutions to filter from the generalizing model. We propose that one solution to this problem is achieved not through increasing the size of the inspiring set (an obvious solution that brings additional problems), but rather through amplifying the generalization of the system to produce a greater set of novel artefacts to filter. We compare a new version of a system, NhMMonic, for generating creative mnemonic devices with a new conceptualization model that allows greater generalization. We demonstrate how filtration, which was not possible in the early version of NhMMonic, only becomes feasible with the more generalizable model.

ICCC&#39;20

A Leap of Creativity: From Systems that Generalize to Systems that Filter

greater generalization

diminishing solution space

creative systems

Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalising what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.


ICCC'20

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.
Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviors that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalizing what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.



poster

With its ability to capture, model, and generate real-and-virtual combined environments, Extended Reality (XR) opens unique opportunities for designing creative agents. In this paper, we present HeyLo, a system for generating meaningful, visual conversation cues in XR. HeyLo autonomously analyzes user tweets to identify common interests and visualizes these interests as conversation cues using emoji. We argue that this system demonstrates creativity using four metrics that characterize novelty, value, and intentionality in the domain of conversation cues: specificity, inter- and intra-user variance, and relevance. We discuss several potential research questions that we hope to answer in the future using this system and the broader implications of a creative system that is capable of bridging arbitrary interests to innovate its own creative ideas.

Exploring CC in XR: Visualizing Creative Conversation Topics to Facilitate Meaningful Face-to-Face Interaction

This paper presents a large dataset of drum patterns and compares two different architectures of artificial neural networks that produce latent explorable spaces with some recognizable genre areas. Adversarially constrained autoencoder interpolations (ACAI) show better results in comparison with a standard variational autoencoder. To our knowledge, this is the first application of ACAI to drum-pattern generation.

Drum Beats and Where To Find Them: Sampling Drum Patterns from a Latent Space

"To a human storyteller, a story is more than a textual artifact. Rather, as stories are both generated and generative, each is also a blueprint for performances to come. Tellers must draw on their own bodily affordances – from voice and gesture to
movement around a stage – to bring stories to life, much as a conductor and an orchestra must translate a written score into actual music.
This work explores the creative challenge of translating from a story-text to a story-performance, from words to physical actions and characters to embodied actors. The mapping requires distinct models for gesture, narration, orientation, 
dialogue and stage direction if computer-generated tales are to transcend the limitations of their production process. Using the Scéalability framework, we evaluate the interlocking role of spatial metaphor and pantomime in turning a narrative artifact into a coherent performance."

Show, Don’t (Just) Tell: Embodiment and Spatial Metaphor in Computational Story-Telling

High-quality human-created artifacts are distinguished by cohesion and semantic richness that can be difficult for computational systems to emulate effectively. Certain classes of artifacts feature relationships between their constituent elements (e.g. words in a story) that naturally form a hierarchical structure that underpins the artifact's meaning. We formalize a tractable method for programmatically extracting such artifacts' structures framed in hierarchical Bayesian program learning (HBPL) and present HIEROS, a creative system that uses linguistic and semantic structures---collectively called formats---extracted from human-written six-word stories to guide the creation of novel stories. We describe how HIEROS infers formats from exemplar stories, how those formats inform its selection of words when writing novel stories, and how the system evaluates its stories to search for high-quality output. We present and evaluate stories HIEROS has written and discuss how our format model enhances the system's creativity.

Creating Six-word Stories via Inferred Linguistic and Semantic Formats

We present a methodology to understand and name, from a computational creativity perspective, the agency of algorithm and artists in  interactive processes. It consists in first analysing precisely the algorithm creation and then the back and forth creative loop during the interaction. We focus on a particular inteactive setting and in which a painter and various neural style transfer algorithms interact on a real canvas. We gather a set of paired painting-pictures images and analyse the style transfer  predictivity. Then, in the creative interaction , the algorithm outputs were perceived as a source of inspiration for human painters, portraying the machine as a \textit{computational catalyst}.

Interactive neural style transfer with artists

Modular creative systems employ specialized modules that take on challenging responsibilities. Such modules can be expensive to develop and are often imperfect, leading to uncertainty in whether a system's poor results are due to module imperfection or larger systemic issues. Computational creativity research would benefit from a method for validating the design of creative systems before expending development resources implementing them. We present ideal-module prototyping (IMP), a design validation paradigm that serves these needs by using modules that delegate responsibilities to humans as an ideal against which to compare system expectations and performance. We relate an experiment we conducted in applying IMP to an existing creative system to demonstrate the insights that can be gained from this method. We argue for the widespread adoption of modular creative system design validated by ideal-module prototyping.

Humans in the Black Box: A New Paradigm for Evaluating the Design of Creative Systems

Not all knowledge is created equal. A hierarchical architecture is a method to classify knowledge for use in the field of human cognition and computational creativity. This paper introduces an Insight-Knowledge Object (IKO) model as a framework for Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI), a step forward in the pursuit of replicating general human intelligence with computing machinery. To achieve ACI, it is hypothesized that a fundamental rethinking of the architecture of human cognition and knowledge processing is required. One possible novel architecture could be the IKO model. The authors include a description of on-going work at Carnegie Mellon University that applies the IKO model in practice with an artificial music improvisation embodiment.

Artificial Creative Intelligence: Breaking the Imitation Barrier

Interactive fictions, or text-adventures, are games in which a player interacts with a world entirely through textual descriptions and text actions. Text-adventure games are typically structured as puzzles or quests wherein the player must execute certain actions in a certain order to succeed. In this paper, we consider the problem of procedurally generating a quest, defined as a series of actions required to progress towards a goal, in a text-adventure game. Quest generation in text environments is challenging because they must be semantically coherent. We present and evaluate two quest generation techniques: (1) a Markov model, and (2) a neural generative model. We specifically look at generating quests about cooking and train our models on recipe data. We evaluate our techniques with human participant studies looking at perceived creativity and coherence.

Toward Automated Quest Generation in Text-Adventure Games

"We present a system for real-time lyrical improvisation between a human and a robot in the style of hip hop. Our system takes vocal input from a human rapper, analyzes the semantic meaning, and generates a response that is rapped back by a robot over a musical groove. Previous work with real-time interactive music systems has largely focused on instrumental output, and vocal interactions with robots have been explored, but not in a musical context. Our generative system includes custom methods for censorship, voice, rhythm, rhyming and a novel deep learning pipeline based on phoneme embeddings. The rap performances are accompanied by synchronized robotic gestures and mouth movements. Key technical challenges that were overcome in the system are developing rhymes, performing with low-latency and dataset censorship.
We evaluated several aspects of the system through a survey of videos and sample text output. Analysis of comments showed that the overall perception of the system was positive. The model trained on our hip hop dataset was rated significantly higher than our metal dataset in coherence, rhyme quality, and enjoyment. Participants preferred outputs generated by a given input phrase over outputs generated from unknown keywords, indicating that the system successfully relates its output to its input. "

Shimon the Rapper: A Real-Time System for Human-Robot Interactive Rap Battles

The field of bisociative literature-based discovery aims at exploring scientific literature to reveal new discoveries based on yet uncovered relations between knowledge from different, relatively isolated fields of specialization. This paper outlines selected outlier-based literature mining approaches, which focus on finding outlier documents as means for finding unexpected links crossing different contexts. Selected approaches to bridging term detection through outlier document exploration are briefly outlined, together with the lessons learned from recent applications in medical and biological literature-based knowledge discovery. Finally, the paper addresses new prospects in bisociative literature-based discovery, emphasizing the use of advanced embeddings technology for cross-domain literature mining.

A Leap of Creativity: From Systems that Generalize to Systems that Filter

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Exploring CC in XR: Visualizing Creative Conversation Topics to Facilitate Meaningful Face-to-Face Interaction

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Humans in the Black Box: A New Paradigm for Evaluating the Design of Creative Systems