Portugal

Many machine learning approaches are focused on defining artificial agents able to find solutions to a certain problem given fixed design tools or parameters to optimize. In order to do that, creators must have a certain knowledge of the solution space to define design parameters that ensure enough exploration allowing agents to find its best configuration. However, this approach may limit artificial agents since they are restricted by their initial conditions of a certain design problem. In addition, specific initial conditions also limit them to scale across multiple challenges. In this paper, we explore how the definition of more general design tools can allow artificial agents to better explore the solution space and generalize through multiple design problems. To do that, we compare design artifacts produced by an artificial agent that learns to construct 2D shapes with a fixed number of pieces to another artificial agent that also learns to add or remove pieces from its design proposal. We demonstrate how by allowing more freedom in design, an artificial system is able to produce more novel artifacts with higher performances in multiple scenarios.

ICCC&#39;20

Exploring the flexibility of a design tool through different artificial agents

creativity support tools

evolutionary computation

design process

genetic algorithms

computational creativity

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.



technical paper

Casual creators are a genre of creativity support tool that use generative systems to empower autotelic and enjoyable amateur creativity. They have been posited as a unique means of democratising creativity through the support of user exploration via system generativity, yet little is known about what casual creators are actually available to wider audiences. We conducted a qualitative analysis of currently available casual creators on the App Store. We found three categories of interaction techniques across 89 commercially available apps that qualified as casual creators, which we describe in their exploration potential, feedback speed, and user autonomy.

Creating a Typology of Casual Creators in the Wild

Being creative in movement-based improvisational environments, such as dance floors, poses a difficult challenge for computers. It is particularly challenging for computers to judge the creativity of inputs and responses in these open-ended domains. LuminAI is an improvisational dance installation where an artificially intelligent agent dances with a user. In this paper, we enable the agent to judge the creativity of dance gestures through the development of creativity metrics, including the novelty, value, and surprise of a gesture. We then use these metrics to implement a lead-and- follow dynamic: when the user is performing less creatively, the agent tries to lead by performing more creatively. A user study is performed to compare the original and lead-and-follow systems, with results showing users found the lead-and-follow system’s gestures lower in quality than the original, more surprising than the original, and found the original system more engaging and influential on their actions.

Creativity Metrics for a Lead-and-Follow Dynamic in an Improvisational Dance Agent

"This paper reports on the automatic selection of short-texts for amplifying the range of a given input's context, e.g. a news headline. Different methods are applied to select a corresponding expression from a list, which should be as semantically related to the input as possible. This study was developed for the Portuguese language, and considered expressions are proverbs, where figurative language is predominant.
The set of explored methods includes some based on word overlap, others on static word embeddings, and also on recent contextual embeddings. To compare the explored methods in this subjective scenario, a survey was answered by humans, who rated the value of the selected expressions in terms of relatedness with regard to the input, and the humoristic value that may arise from this selection. The main conclusion was that simpler approaches, which end up selecting expressions that share words with the headline, are more easily related and considered to be funnier than other more elaborate approaches, which are more focused on the context."

Comparing Different Methods for Assigning Portuguese Proverbs to News Headlines

Since the heydays of music informatics, around the 1950s, the modeling and prediction of musical structures manifested as symbolic representations have been continuously pursued. The operational property of such methods is to provide the conditional distribution over an alphabet -- i.e., the entire collection of unique musical events in a composition or corpus -- given a context -- i.e., a preceding sequence. This distribution unpacks temporal morphologies that support multiple applications for predictive and assisted creative tasks, such as the generation of new musical sequences that retain a structural resemblance to a modeled source. Despite their longstanding tradition, state-of-the-art methodologies for symbolic music modeling are yet to reach the music community. Naive models such as Markov chains, which are known to neglect the fundamental hierarchical nature of musical structure, remain common practice. In this paper, we extensively review existing methodologies for symbolic music representation and modeling, as the first steps towards a study on the resulting balance across familiarity and novelty in generative music applications.

Towards balanced tunes: A review of symbolic music representations and their hierarchical modeling

We describe a method and a proof of concept which allow the generation of rich and engaging dialogues between virtual characters from a formalised plot description. The structure of the dialogue generated borrows from inferential pragmatics, following the Geneva Model of discourse analysis, in order to provide realistic interaction between characters in the narrative. At a higher level, this discourse is organised following heuristics borrowed from narratology theory in order to elicit emotions linked to dramatic tension and thus favour narrative engagement. Besides enriching narrative generation systems embedded within simulation applications, our work also has the potential to be adapted to support engaging interactive dialogues between users and virtual conversational agents in narrative systems.

A Pragmatics-based Model for Narrative Dialogue Generation

"An interactive evolutionary system to generate letterings is presented. The system allows the creation of a wide range of alternative designs that can be used as stimuli for inspiration or for the creation of visual identities with different variations. This work began as a parametric system that generated glyph designs by recombining
parts of skeletons extracted from existing typefaces which are then filled with custom shapes. In this paper, we employ a Genetic Algorithm to evolve the input parameters of this parametric system. The experimental results show that the presented evolutionary system enables users to interactively create unique letterings according to their aesthetic preferences."

Which type is your type?

The importance of reproducibility has been recognised as one of the crucial elements of research especially in life sciences, but also in other disciplines, e.g. medicine, social sciences, natural language processing who have acknowledged the reproducibility crisis. In this paper, we discuss the issue of reproducibility in the field of computational creativity. We present the findings from an indirect reproducibility study that assesses the transparency of available information to allow reproducibility. The analysis of articles published in ICCC proceedings has shown that most computational creativity (CC) publications provide very little information with regard to documentation and resources needed for reproducibility and replicability of the published results. By reviewing best practices from the broader scientific community and considering the particularities of CC recommendations are put forward that will hopefully inspire the creation of practices related to reproducibility and improve the reusability of CC research within the community and beyond.

A Study on Reproducibility in Computational Creativity Research

We consider two works in computational criticism, a little studied but important area for computational creativity (Stiny and Gips 1978) & (Fisher and Shin 2019). The analysis results in the development of a more general, novel, extended model of computational criticism. Along with the more general model, we also provide the first formal attempt to discuss and distinguish meaningful computational criticism. This theoretical synthesis should be useful to the study and development of computational critics and help to spark further dialogue in this area.

Extending the Philosophy of Computational Criticism

Order and Progress: a sonic segue across A Auriverde is an abstract audiovisual sojourn across the Flag of Brazil realised as a sonified and politicised astronomy show, evoking emotions and responses through the use of fantasy, mystery, exaggeration, distortion and parallelism. The astronomy represented on the flag depicts a specific moment in time: the exact minute that Brazil declared its independence. Scientific data from these stars is treated as both raw material, a virtual generated stone sculpted into musical existence through figurative sonification; and as mathematical forces that forge the sounds and cultures of Brazil, both past and present, into an audiovisual blend of history, science, politics and ethnology.

Order and Progress: a sonic segue across A Auriverde

As a first step towards studying the ability of human crowds and machines to effectively co-create, we explore several human-only collaborative co-creation scenarios. The goal in each scenario is to create a digital sketch using a simple web interface. We find that settings in which multiple humans iteratively add strokes and vote on the best additions result in sketches with the highest creativity (combination of value and novelty). Lack of collaboration leads to a higher variance in quality and lower novelty or surprise. Collaboration without voting leads to high novelty but low quality.

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