Portugal

In the Middle of the Room is a fixed media work for voice, sampled and layered upon itself in counterpoint, to explore tenuous new connections among the word fragments that emerge. It reflects on the reminiscences of an elderly woman whose memories are fanciful, regretful, pensive, and failing, inspired by Elisabeth&#39;s friendship with an extraordinary woman who, sadly, passed away soon after creating this work.

## Please watch the explenatory video for this work:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2020-08-19/he23rdh/Morris-Blair-NMB2020.mp4

ICCC&#39;20

In the Middle of the Room

live sampling

wordplay

aging

voice

memory

Colleagues and Friends:

I am very happy to welcome you to the 14th annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, and to the first virtual edition of our meeting. I want to highlight the important work the CAN meeting chair, **Roger Thompson** and co-chair, **Alyson Fournier**, did to put together the great program we are offering this year. Moving to a virtual format required a complete re-design of the program, and both Roger and Alyson did a splendid job in providing us with an appealing and well adapted program for our first virtual event. I wish to thank them for this very important effort.

Highlights of this year’s scientific meeting include invited speakers **Michael Hausser, Franck Polleux, Gwyneth Card, Magdalena Götz**and Brain Prize winner **Huda Zoghbi**. Plenary and parallel symposia, proposed by our members complete our diverse [scientific program.](https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/program-2021/)

The 2021 Advocacy session, chaired and organized by CAN advocacy committee chair **Karun Singh**, will feature a special lecture and question period with Member of Parliament and past Science Minister **Kirsty Duncan**. This will be followed by a short overview of CAN’s advocacy activities over the last year. We invite you to participate in this session for insight from Dr. Duncan on the workings of Parliament Hill, and to learn more about what CAN has been doing to promote neuroscience research in Canada.

We are also excited to host **Lisa Willis** in the Equity Diversity and Inclusion session, organized by EDI committee chair **Jibran Khokhar**.

A special highlight of our meeting will be the lectures by award-winning young neuroscientists. We are please to host the CAN 2020 Young Investigator Award winner **Mihaela Iordanova**, and CAN 2021 Young Investigator Award winners **Aaron Phillips** and **Tabrez Siddiqui**. Highlights will also include presentation by the top three winners of the CAN-CIHR-INMHA Brain Star Award winners, **Claire Gizowski, Nuria Daviu Abant** and **Lukas Tamayo-Orrego**.

Independently organized satellite symposia complement and complete this exciting program, check them out here: https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/2021-satellite-symposia/

Some of the most engaging sessions are always the poster sessions featuring the work of our trainees, so make sure to log in to Gather Town during the poster sessions to chat with the presenters.
We hope you enjoy this program, and look forward to welcoming you, virtually.

Shernaz Bamji

President of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/b9aea25343a87d5aac3b9367dc780974.jpg)



Please head to https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/registration-2021/ to register. 

CAN-ACN 2021

14th Canadian Neuroscience Meeting from August 23rd-25th

In the Middle of the Room is a fixed media work for voice, sampled and layered upon itself in counterpoint, to explore tenuous new connections among the word fragments that emerge. It reflects on the reminiscences of an elderly woman whose memories are fanciful, regretful, pensive, and failing, inspired by Elisabeth's friendship with an extraordinary woman who, sadly, passed away soon after creating this work.

## Please watch the explenatory video for this work:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2020-08-19/he23rdh/Morris-Blair-NMB2020.mp4

technical paper

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.



## „Ghost Hunting – A field experience from hertz to gigahertz“ 

The corona pandemic has changed public life dramatically. Only recently have shops that do not provide basic services been allowed to reopen in isolated cases. Until then, the inner cities were deserted.  But what happens in the urban space when public life does not take place or only to a limited extent? 
„Ghost Hunting“ makes the world of electromagnetic fields tangible. In other words, the oscillation frequencies that cannot normally be perceived by the human ear.
We are not only surrounded by electromagnetic fields in cities. There they were created quasi unintentionally as a side effect of technological development.  Whether under the street lamp, at the junction box, at the ticket machine or at high-performance cables, Internet nodes or mobile phone transmission masts - electromagnetic fields surround us almost everywhere. They are also present in nature. Some of these fields overlap or form so-called interference fields. With increasing digitalisation and the expansion of mobile phone networks, their effects on health are also being discussed, as is the question of how to develop resilience in this context. 
Electromagnetic fields are usually hidden from the human ear. But wouldn‘t it be wonderful to be able to access this world? What do the electromagnetic fields of urban places tell us? What does urban space sound like at night when everything is quiet? What do the spirits that live in the electromagnetic landscapes tell us?
Are these areas not rather invisible spaces of poetry?



## Start the Ghost Hunting tour here:
## https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Start.htm

For further stations scroll down and activate the audio tracks on the map.


**Links to the sound files:**

01_Foundation Kuenstlerdorf: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Start.html

02_Vechte-swimming-pool: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Vechtebad.html

03_Plague-Cemetery: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Pestfriedhof.html

04_Church: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Kirche.html

05_City-Park: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Stadtpark.html

06_Old-town-hall-traffic-lights: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Rathaus.html

07_Parking-lot: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Parkplatz.html

08_Telecommunications-tower: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Fernmeldeturm.html



www.ghosthunting.431art.org 
In autumn 2020, „Ghost Hunting“ will be realized as an audio walk at 8 stations in downtown Frankfurt/Main. 



Ghost Hunting – A field experience from hertz to gigahertz

Paisajes distantes is a networked audio-visual performance linking human and non-human soundscapes and visuals from two cities — Bogota, Colombia and Pittsburgh, US — captured during the COVID-19 quarantine period of 2020. Conceived as a dialogue between two urban auras in isolation, the piece juxtaposes dissimilar atmospheres including sounds and imagery of ferrovial systems, water canals, urban fauna, and domestic life. These form the substrate for a live performance comprising digitally processed and computer-generated sounds including layers of granular synthesis, heavily processed guitar sounds, and additional samples. The piece will be produced remotely and in real time by the artists — who are also distant from each other, each one in one of the two cities — through a networked music performance (NMP) system. In Coimbra, the performance will be preferably experienced as an ambient intervention in an open area. Accompanying the sound will be a video screen or projection with a split image displaying visuals collected during the lockdowns in the two cities. With these elements, the piece employs digital mediations to explore different conceptions of distance — social, geographic, and affective. Captured while in the midst of an unprecedented moment of personal and collective isolation, the sonic and visual materials give structure to an improvisational, networked digital music performance. Paisajes distantes thus reflects on the possibilities of new encounters, new forms of presence, and new modes of creative engagement shaped by the necessity of isolation and enabled by digital networks and computational processes.

Paisajes distantes

We  argue  that  frameworks  employed  in  architecting self-adaptive systems allow the system to exhibit creative  behaviour,  and  that  many  of  the  existing  self-adaptive systems operating in domains which are typically not associated with creativity are inherently creative.  However, even the current state-of-the-art solutions do not fully exploit stronger forms of creative behaviour, which are required in complex environments, where the system constantly encounters fundamentally novel situations.  To this end, software development necessitates a paradigm shift parallel to moving from procedural design methodology toward self-aware systems where the system adapts to its context at run time.

On the Inherent Creativity of Self-Adaptive Systems

"With an increase in the number of mobile apps making their way to users, there is a growing need for tools to support the app design process. While many tools focus
on increasing the pace of development, few attempt to aide the designer in generating more creative solutions. In this work, we take creativity as the combination of novelty and utility. Particularly during development of user interfaces, assessment of utility (primarily usability) is iterative, rigorous, and time-consuming. The objective of the proposed work is to explore and evaluate the use of machine learning to predict usability measures for mobile app interfaces as a means to automate usability evaluations. Specifically, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to accurately (nearly 90%) predict three usability measures: regularity, complexity, and touchability. This tool automates the assessment of utility in app design, freeing up the designer to seek designs that are novel and thus creative."

Towards Enhanced Creativity in Interface Design through Automated Usability Evaluation

This presentation outlines how a system based on a society of many thousands of micro-agents could produce a narrative which describes a simple situation. The distributed nature of the system should allow for a more diverse range of possible pathways to be taken towards a solution as well as an interweaving of the processes of production and comprehension (or engagement and reflection). This should result in greater cognitive plausibility than models made up out of a small number of large modules.

Creative Language Generation in a Society of Engagement and Reflection

Creative problem solving (CPS) is a skill that can greatly improve resourcefulness and adaptability of existing artificial intelligence (AI) systems. In this paper, we discuss how CPS leverages theoretical aspects from Computational Creativity (CC) and planning in AI. We present a definition of CPS, and discuss how CPS is achieved using aspects of CC and problem solving in AI.

From Computational Creativity to Creative Problem Solving Agents

"Recently, models in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN) have gained a renewed interest because they could help analyze current limitations in Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and propose operational ways to address them. These limitations are related to difficulties in giving a semantic grounding to manipulated concepts,
in coping with high dimensionality and in managing uncertainty. In this paper, we describe the main principles and mechanisms of these models and explain that they can be directly transferred to Computational Creativity (CC), to propose operational mechanisms but also a better understanding of what creativity is."

Creativity explained by Computational Cognitive Neuroscience

This work describes the story of the Mexican International Colloquium on Computational Creativity, which has been carried out for 14 years. I describe the activities around this academic event and present a list of all invited speakers. I finish with some thoughts about the experience of organizing this Colloquium.

Mexican International Colloquium on Computational Creativity

"Sound and movement are closely coupled, particularly in dance.
Certain audio features have been found to affect the way we move to music.
Is this relationship between sound and movement something which can be modelled using machine learning? 
This work presents initial experiments wherein
high-level audio features calculated from a set of music pieces are included in a movement generation model trained on motion capture recordings of improvised dance.  Our results indicate that the model learns to generate realistic dance movements which vary depending on the audio features."

Towards Movement Generation with Audio Features

Creative design is often accomplished through teams, and the specific composition of those teams can limit or enhance the sum creativity. However, it is not known how team composition is related to a team’s ability to achieve good solutions over various problems (i.e., robustness). Here, we build that relationship between composition and robustness through a series of agent-based simulations. The factor that we specifically investigate is cognitive style, which describes the manner in which individuals solve problems and present solutions in social interactions based on cognitive processes. Under Kirton’s Adaption Innovation (KAI) Theory, cognitive style is related to creativity. Specifically, an individual’s KAI score, the defining measure of cognitive style, describes the degree to which they prefer high-utility solutions, or high-novelty solutions – the two necessary conditions for creativity. In many cases the long-term success of a team is closely tied to their ability to perform consistently well across multiple design problems, termed robustness. Leveraging computational agents, we use adaption-innovation theory as the primary factor to examine robustness among homogenous and heterogeneous agents. Different approaches to composing teams with homogenous and heterogeneous cognitive styles did not substantially impact robustness. However, the average robustness of the teams improved as team size increased.

In the Middle of the Room

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