Consultation workshop

Creativity

Written contributions

FET Proactive - FP7

Brussels, 28 November 2011

Participants list consultation workshop (in alphabetical order) CREATIVITY ________________________________________

• Moreno Andreatta, IRCAM-CNRS, Paris, FR

• Dick Bierman, University of Amsterdam, NL

• Margaret Boden, University of Sussex, UK

• Nick Bryan-Kinns, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

• Amílcar Cardoso, Universidade de Coimbra, PT

• Simon Colton, Imperial College, London, UK

• Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, ES

• David Moffat, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

• Anna Mura, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, ES

• Alok Nandi, Architempo, BE

• François Pachet, Sony CSL, Paris, FR

• Federico Peinado, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, ES

• Oliviero Stock, Istituto per la Ricercaa Scientifica en Tecnologica, Trento, IT

• Paul Verschure, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, ES

• Geraint Wiggins, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

• Wolfgang Boch, European Commission, DG Infso, Head of Unit Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive

• Wide Hogenhout, European Commission, DG Infso, Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive

• Mike Sharp, Rapporteur

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Table of content - contributions ________________________________________ page

Participants list 2

• Moreno Andreatta, IRCAM-CNRS, Paris, FR 5

• Dick Bierman, University of Amsterdam, NL 8

• Margaret Boden, University of Sussex, UK 9

• Nick Bryan-Kinns, Queen Mary, University of London, UK 12

• Amílcar Cardoso, Universidade de Coimbra, PT 16

• Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, ES 18

• David Moffat, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK 20

• François Pachet, Sony CSL, Paris, FR 23

• Federico Peinado, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, ES 25

• Oliviero Stock, Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica en Tecnologica, Trento, IT 26

• Geraint Wiggins, Queen Mary, University of London, UK 28

Agenda - 28 November 2011 –25 Avenue de Beaulieu, room S5 - Brussels

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09:30 Welcome and introduction

10:00 Presentation of participant's views

12:30 Lunch Break

13:30 Discussions and Conclusion

15:15 Coffee Break

15:30 Discussions and Conclusion (continued)

17:00 Close of day

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Position paper

Some ideas for the preparation of FET Work Programme 2013 Author: Moreno ANDREATTA Despite many attempts to grasp the essence of creativity within a given discipline and across different domains (Kaufman & Baer, 2005), there are very few studies aiming at discussing, in a comprehensive way, the relationships between the creative act and the current research in information and communication technology. As a result, if creativity is traditionally considered as linked to conceptual spaces formation and transformation, the conceptual level has rarely been approached in a comprehensive way (Mazzola, 2011). One way to do it would be to use the language of modern mathematics, whose conceptual character has been stressed by many contemporary mathematicians (Lawvere & Schanuel 1997; Connes & Boulez 2011) and to analyse its “unreasonable effectiveness” not only in the Natural Sciences but also in Human, Cognitive, and Information/Communication Sciences. Arts/Sciences represents, we believe, one of the most interesting research areas with respect to creativity. We therefore suggest analysing the way in which the creative process in arts fertilises the creative act in scientific research by opening at the same time new research perspectives in ICT. In particular, music research offers a variety of examples of theoretical constructions crucially contributing to the emergence of new areas in sciences and, more specifically, in mathematics. Historical examples include Marin Mersenne’s exhaustive explorations of all possible melodies obtained with a given number of elements, which introduced combinatory tools in mathematics well before the foundation of probability theory by Bernoulli; Leonhard Euler’s geometrical representation of collection of notes and search of minimal paths connecting two given points of the space and passing only once through the remaining points, marking in this way the official birth of graph theory as a field in mathematics, once again by starting from a genuine musical problem. And so on, until the more recent years in which open conjectures in mathematics (as the Fuglede or spectral conjecture) are approached starting from the musical problem of constructing rhythmic musical canons which tile the time axis by translation (see IRCAM’s Tiling Research). In all cases, algebraic and geometrical representations of musical structures and processes are providing a general framework for the creative act to express, according to the common assumption that “creativity results from combination of representations” (Thargard & Stewart 2011). The dynamics underlying what is currently referred to as “mathemusical” research (i.e. from a musical problem to a mathematical formalisation, its successive generalization and final application in the music-theoretical, analytical or compositional domain) is an example of conceptual framework in which to study the creative act in both musical and mathematical domains (Fig. 1). This scheme can also illuminate more general creative processes in Arts/Sciences interactions, under the assumption of reversing the usual perspective of application of scientific knowledge to artistic activity in order to make use of the imaginative power of artistic activity. The challenge will be, on one hand, to measure the impact of ICT research within such a multidisciplinary perspective and, conversely, to see how such a dynamical framework for Arts/Sciences interaction asks for new investigations in the field of ICT. In the previous scheme, OpenMusic visual programming language, currently developed at Ircam provides an instance of ICT as applied to many different aspects of music research (in particular music theory, analysis and composition).

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Fig. 1. The dynamics underlying contemporary “mathemusical” research in its relation to programming languages (OpenMusic)

Note that this is just one possible uses of ICT within a creative framework. A different possibility consists in the direct use of the technological environment in the formalisation process, as occurs in different areas of computational modelling, such as style modelling and improvisation. Artistic and, in particular, musical improvisation is nowadays one of the most fascinating approaches in an ICT-sensitive Arts/Sciences research. This not only asks for the conception of new technologies integrating in a common framework human and computer activities (Human-Computer Interaction) but it opens new research directions concerning formal models of cognition and perception, with respect to creativity. In fact, because of its complex dynamic structure, where temporality can be instantiated at any moment in multiple ways, a comprehensive approach in the domain of music improvisation and ICT will surely benefit from some mathematical constructions, such as Memory Evolutive Systems, which have been proposed to model emergence properties in complex hierarchical systems (Ehresmann & Vanbremeersch, 2007). This simple example also shows the new synergies this research would potentially create between existing communities sharing the same perspective on creativity and ICT but with very different methodologies. As a paradigmatic example consider the case of the Maths/Music community, on one side, and the Cognitive Musicological community, on the other side. Both communities are involved with computational methods in music research, but the cross-fertilisations between the two approaches are so rare that there is, at the present, no mutual contribution to the field of ICT and creativity. The possibility for abstract mathematical models to grasp relevant aspects of cognition processes suggests that the dialogue between these two communities, as suggested in Fig. 2 for the case of memory evolutive systems, is in fact possible (if not necessary). As previously observed in the case of the creative process in “mathemusical” activity (Fig. 1), the new scheme in Fig. 2 can be easily generalised to the case of Arts/Sciences research and its interaction with cognitive sciences, opening in such a way the discussion of the place of formal mathematics in the cognitive processes involved in the creative act.

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Fig. 2. Integration of Ehresmann & Vambremeersch’s Category-oriented model of memory evolutive systems, within the s framework of mathemusical research. Finally, concerning the future emerging technologies aspects, structural musical (and, more generally, artistic) complexity is very often coupled with computational complexity, meaning that in order to solve a given musical (or artistic) problem, different programming paradigms can be investigated, ranging from combinatory optimisation, constraint programming, local search, eventually leading to new programming languages (and, even more dramatically, to new architectures, such as massively parallel computers). This suggests the usefulness of involving FET-scheme within this Programme. Bibliography: Boden M. (2004), The Creative Mind: Myths and mechanisms (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Connes A. & P. Boulez (2011), “Creativity in music and in mathematics”, Mathematics and

Computation in Music Conference, Ircam, Espace de Projection, 15 May Ehresmann A. & J. P. Vanbremeersch (2007). Memory Evolutive Systems; Hierarchy,

Emergence, Cognition, Elsevier. IRCAM Tiling Research : http://repmus.ircam.fr/mamux/themes/tiling/home Kaufman J. C., Baer J. (2005), Creativity Across Domains. Faces of Muse, New Jersey:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers Lawvere W., Schanuel S., Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mazzola G., J. Park & F. Thalmann (2011), Musical Creativity, “Computational Music

Sciences” Series, Berlin: Springer OMAX Computer-Aided Improvisation Project: http://omax.ircam.fr/ OpenMusic Visual Programming Language: http://repmus.ircam.fr/openmusic/home Thagard P. & T. C. Stewart (2011), "The AHA! Experience: Creativity Through Emergent

Binding in Neural Networks", Cognitive Science 35, 1-33

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FET Input ICT & Creativity Dick J Bierman, University of Amsterdam., The Netherlands. !!!! In this note artistic creativity is not considered, just innovative solutions to already specified problems. Challenge The challenge is underspecified. Creativity is scientifically an ill-defined concept and research in this area is scattered and the results are chaotic. For any initiative the creative process should be divided in sub-processes like for instance Walas’ stage model and neuro-psychological research subsequently could shed light on these sub-processes. Suggested approach 1.Mathematical approach: The creation of new knowledge, new solutions to problems should be described mathematically. Sets of transformations of existing knowledge as well as the effect of the role of randomness in the transformations can be explored. ICT might play a role in introducing randomness in the creation of new knowledge. 2.Computers helping in the creative process: Computers are better in the production of randomness than humans and possibly can support human creativity in that aspect. 3.Computers measuring human creative performance: The use of divergesnt production tests is only tapping a small part of the creative process. Insight moment can be measured using a procedure akin to measuring intuition using the transfer of implicitly known grammar rules to explicitly known rules. A challenge is measuring the processes that play a role during the incubation phase of the creative process. 4.Computers helping to train creativity. Once a neurological model for creativity is formulated and validated, biofeedback techniques might be used tot train sub-processes of creativity. 5.Implementing Creativity in ICT: By studying the neural basis of the creative process, and by formulating a mathematical model of that process, it might be become possible to implement neural netwerk systems that are creative Target Outcome / Expected impact The most spectacular breakthrough would be the last item above, implementing creativity in a computer. However in order to implement a useful ‘creative’ tool, the system has to be extended with a method to specify a problem (in case of required innovation) that has to be solved in an original way. Such a system cannot be expected in the specified time-frame for the simple reason that a lot of research in human creativity is required and the progress is expected to be slow given the current poor state of that research (for a review see: Dietrich & Kanso (2010) A review of EEG, ERP, and Neuroimaging studies of creativity and insight, Psychological Bulletin, 136-5, 822-848). A major success indicator would be: convergent scientific agreement about what constitutes creativity Suitability Although several disciplines are involved it is not quite clear to me why main stream would not be able to handle the research questions on their own. The major problem I think is that main stream science is strongly dependent on PhD research that generally has a vision not extending 4 years. It would therefore be surprising if a road map extending over 15 years would exist. Communities Mathematics, Neuro-psychology, Computer science (neural networks, randomness). Minimum mass: 1 or 2 PhD projects in mathematics. A strong brain imaging group (4 PhD’s). A Computer Science group in the topic of neural networks ands Artificial Intelligence (2 PhD’s).

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Comments on Guiding Questions (Margaret A. Boden):

1. The motivation is mixed: (a) technological, in using ICT to aid and/or simulate creativity, and(b) theoretical, in understanding the nature of creativity. There’s a dialectic of success betweentasks (a) and (b).

Multidisciplinarity is essential. Crucial disciplines are: AI/A-Life; psychology; neuroscience;philosophy; history of art/science, including musicology and literary criticism. (The"psychology" here includes cognitive, dev elopmental, social, clinical, and evolutionaryapproaches.)

Ancillary disciplines include sociology and anthropology.

2. Theoretical (e.g. philosophical) research on creativity must accompany--indeed, precede--ICTresearch. If we don’t know what creativityis, we can’t hope to know how it works nor how toimitate it in AI-terms.

Creativity is the ability to generate ideas and artefacts that are new, surprising, and valuable.("New" always means psychologically new, to the individual concerned; sometimes it also meanshistorically new, to the whole of human history.)

"Valuable" means many different things, according to different domains and judged bydifferent social groups. Although science can sometimes explain why we value certain things(e.g. shiny surfaces), and can even identify some of the brain-mechanisms involved (e.g.oxytocin), sciencein principle cannot prove that any idea/phenomenon is indeed valuable. Even"survival-value" cannot bedeductively shown to be valuable. (Value-judgments rest not ondeduction, but on constraint-satisfaction.)

There are three forms of creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational. The firstof these refers to unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas; the last two arise within structuredconceptual spaces, or thinking styles, in the mind. Most scientific studies of creativity (whetherin psychology or neuroscience) concentrate only on the first. It’s important that the other two bestudied also.

So the necessary research topics include:

* How can novel combinations be generated?* How can they be judged (by us) as being valuable in

some way (inwhich ways?), orrelevant?* How can they be assessed as valuable by the computer?* How, in general, can structured conceptual spaces be

identified?* How can they be identified specifically? (E.g. the spaces

defining different musical or painting styles, or certainforms of mathematics or chemistry, or distinct styles ofdance?

* How can they be explored (enjoyed, tried, and tested)?* How can they be transformed?* What types of transformation are domain-general?

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* What types are domain-specific?* How can people (or an ICT system) be helped to

understand/accept a newly-transformed style?* To what extent are performing artists (painters, musicians,

dancers) consciously aware of stylistic structure duringimprovisation and/or in their reflections afterwards?

* How can neural networks (in computers or brains) represent,explore, and transform hierarchies?

* Can evolutionary processes aid any/all of the three typesof creativity?

N.B. The topics just listed mostly concern thecognitive aspects of creativity: that is, how newideas are genarated in the mind. Other salient questions include:

* how new ideas are communicated;* how they can be triggered by group-thinking;* how they are socially accepted/rejected;* how the values adopted in a particular domain, by a

particular group, can be identified--and expressedclearly enough to form part of an ICT-model;

* how values differ, and change, across distinct cultures(and sub-cultures);

* how creativity is driven by motivation;* how it tallies with birth-order;* how it relates to personality;* how the three types of creativity are affected by various

clinical syndromes;* how they can be encouraged--and discouraged--by various

educational methods (including distinct types of ICT).

3. With respect to creativity in ICT, there are two types of test: (a) does a certainprogram/interface help human beings to be creative--and if so, for which of the three types? (b)Can an ICT system, with or even without human intervention, generate creative (especially H-new) ideas?

It’s already clear that the answer to both of these questions is "Yes". But the persuasivemodels are at present rather few. That is, the current "state of the art" is largely undeveloped.

What still needs to be done is to assess the potential range and limits of ICT-creativity invarious domains. (For example, literary combinational creativity is especially difficult to model,because of the subtlety, richness, and idiosyncracy of human minds.)

4. [Listed as 5.] The answers to the preceding questions show that this is definitely an arearequiring long-term research and funding. It’s not "high-risk", if that means that it is quite likelyto fail. But it is highly challenging, and unlikely to offer quick or easy results.

There’s no single pre-established "road-map". There are a number of differing (largelycomplementary) research methods, drawn from various disciplines. But ICT-methods arerelatively recent, and still largely unexplored.

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5. [Listed as 6.] As is evident from my preceding answers, this topic addresses an exceptionallywide range of intellectual communities, across the sciences, arts, and humanities. It iscrucial forthis research programme that the "Chinese walls" between academic disciplines be breached.

References: These ideas are explored in two of my books: THE CREATIVE MIND: MYTHSAND MECHANISMS (Routledge: 2004); CREATIVITY AND ART: THREE ROADS TOSURPRISE (Oxford University Press, 2010). Parts of my MIND AS MACHINE: A HISTORYOF COGNITIVE SCIENCE (Oxford University Press, 2006) are also relevant: especially 8.iv;8.vi.d-e; 12.vii-ix; 13.iv; 13.vi.c; 15.vi.d; and 17.iii.

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Guiding Questions

Inputs to preparation of FET Work Programme 2013 Author(s): Dr. N. Bryan-Kinns 1. Challenge / Motivation Being creative is a key part of a healthy lifestyle, contributes to our wellbeing, and is an inherently social activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991). There are many definitions and understandings of creativity (see Sternerg, 1991, and Boden, 1994 for an overview) ranging from cognitive and computational models (e.g. Boden, 2003; Wiggins, 2006) which help us to understand the mechanics of human creativity through to practical approaches to increasing creativity (cf. De Bono, 1992). Similarly, there are many studies of creative practice (e.g. Candy and Edmonds, 2002), creative processes (e.g. Shneiderman, 2000), and collaborative creativity (e.g. Paulus and Nijstad, 2003) which help us to understand the social and inter-personal nature of creativity - collective creativity - creative acts by non-experts which rely on social interaction as a key form of mutually engaging everyday creativity (cf. Bryan-Kinns, 2009). Furthermore, our view of everyday creativity is that it involves amateurs in the domain, as opposed to workplace creativity involving experts such as designers, artists, musicians, logicians, and so on. We draw on the body of creativity research to characterize collective creativity as acts which are autotelic (an end in its self; Csikszentmihalyi, 1991), involve innovation of ideas with social value (cf. Boden, 2003) and social dissemination (cf. Shneiderman, 2000). Examples of collective creativity include: brainstorming, playground games, creating online photo collections with friends, family bake-offs, knitting circles, flash-mobs, and so on. Identifying and creating new ways to support everyday creativity is key to the development of a strong and dynamic innovation culture and economy. The growth of research into the role of technology in creative processes and practices has been reflected by Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research which has recently moved from studying office centric tasks of individuals to a focus on social and entertainment uses of computers (cf. Blythe et al., 2003). Similarly, research on the role of technology in collaboration has moved beyond the workplace in the last decade. For instance, Johnson and Hyde (2003) explored the collaborative work involved in solving jigsaw puzzles. Similarly, in a recent special issue of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) journal there were investigations of non-‘work’ oriented collaborative activities such as collaborative and mobile gaming (e.g. Crabtree et al., 2007; Sall and Grinter, 2007), social co-ordination (e.g. Schiano et al., 2007), and the playful use of entertainment technologies in social situations such as trips to the zoo (O’Hara et al. 2007). Research has also diversified into collaborative virtual environments (e.g. Benford et al., 1995) where emphasis was placed on the role of embodiment in online experiences, and supporting social interaction (Erickson and Kellogg, 2000). CSCW research has also been used to inform the design of systems to support the collaborative artistic process such as WebStorm (Costa et al., 2007) which allows users to connect concepts and imagery across the web. However, to date, CSCW research has not been used to systematically inform the design of collective creativity systems. Typically, CSCW research has focussed on workspace awareness as the ‘up-to-the-moment understanding of another person’s interaction with the shared workspace’ (Gutwin and Greenberg, 2002), including understanding who is in the shared workspace, what they are currently doing, what they have done in the past, and who they are interacting with, which intuitively are also likely to be key concerns for collective creativity.

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2. Suggested Approach / Specific Topics Contemporary research is embarking on exploration of what we refer to as Everyday Creativity - creativity beyond the confines of the lab, office, or gallery; creativity that embraces the everyday and helps us all realize our full creative potential. Critical to the success of this endeavour is an understanding of how groups of people mutually engage in Everyday Creativity. The emergence of new forms of digital social infrastructure including social networks such as FaceBooki (cf. Lampe et al. 2008) blogging tools (cf. Nardi et al., 2004) and micro-blogging such as Twitterii (cf. Zhao and Rosson, 2009) clearly illustrate the populist potential of digital technologies to provide increased opportunities for collective creativity where the emphasis is on the enjoyment of being creative together rather than focusing on completing work oriented tasks. Such systems widen our potential set of collaborators, reduce the logistical burdens in collaborating, and increase our sense of social connectedness. However, these approaches have predominantly focused on textual interaction between people and have not been driven any principled understanding of creativity or human centred design, typically emerging ad-hoc from specialist interest groups. Moreover, we have little understanding of how collective creativity emerges and is sustained over time. This lack of principled design and evaluation hinders the growth and development of more radical creativity support, relying instead on whimsical and incremental development of the genre. A timely opportunity has arisen to exploit the intellectual power of existing creativity research to inform the understanding, design, and evaluation of systems which create and sustain new forms of Everyday Creativity. 3. Target Outcome / Expected Impact Development of tools, models, and techniques to help us design for more engaging and creative collective experiences. Impact in 10 to 20 years would be the creation of new forms of collective creative expression through digital technologies. Indicators of success would be more members of the general public engaging in creative activities. 5. Suitability for ICT and FET / Long-term Vision Understanding Everyday Creativity and developing ways to design new technologies for it has the potential to create new paradigms of interaction, and establish a novel research field. The barriers to success are sufficient understanding of the nature of creativity in groups – FET funding would support multi-disciplinary explorations of creativity and technology. 6. Communities Builds on multi disciplinary combinations of HCI, Interaction Design, Design, and Psychology fields – multi disciplinary. As exemplified by the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference series, and DESIRE conferences. References Bastea-Forte, M., and Yen, C. (2007). Encouraging Contribution to Shared Sketches in Brainstorming Meetings. In Proceedings. CHI07 Extended Abstracts. New York: ACM Press, 2267-2272.

Benford, S., Bowers, J., Fahlen, L., Greenhalgh, C., and Snowdon, C. (1995). User Embodiment in Collaborative Virtual Environments. In Proceedings of CHI 1995, 242-249.

Blythe, M. A., Monk. A. F., Overbeeke, K., and Wright, P. C. (2003). Funology From Usability to Enjoyment. Kluwer Academic Publishers, London, UK.

Boden, M. (ed). (1994). Dimensions of Creativity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 119‐142.

Boden, M. (2003). The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

Bryan-Kinns, N. (2004). Daisyphone: The Design and Impact of a Novel Environment for Remote Group Music Improvisation. In Proceedings of DIS 2004, Boston, USA, 135-144.

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Bryan-Kinns, N., (2009). Everyday Creativity. In Proceedings of ACM Creativity and Cognition 2009, ACM Press, New York, iii-iv.

Bryan-Kinns, N., and Hamilton, F. (2009). Identifying Mutual Engagement. Behaviour & Information Technology.

Candy, L., and Edmonds, E. (2002). Explorations in Art and Technology. London: Springer-Verlag.

Clark, H.H. and Brennan, S.E. Grounding in Communication. In Resnick, L.B., Levine, J and Behrend, S.D. (Eds.) Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. APA, 1991.

Costa, P., Duarte, P., and Costa, C. J. (2007). WebStorm: Mixing Brainstorming with Art in the Web. In Proceedings of SIGDOC’07, 170-175.

Crabtree, A., Benford, S., Capra, M., Flintham, M., Drozd, A., Tandavanitj, N., Adams, M., and Farr, J. R. (2007). The Cooperative Work of Gaming: Orchestrating a Mobile SMS Game, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 16, 167–198.

Cornock, S., and Edmonds, E. (1973). The Creative Process where the Artist is Amplified or Superseded by the Computer. Leonardo, 6(1), 11-16.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1991). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

De Bono, E. (1992). Serious Creativity. New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins.

Edmonds, E., and Candy, L. (Eds.) (2005). International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 63(4-5), Special Issue on Computer Support for Creativity.

Erickson, T., Kellogg, W. A. (2000). Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 7, 1, 59-83.

Gutwin. C., and Greenberg, S. (2002). A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware. CSCW, 11(3), 411–446.

Hewett, T. (2005). Informing the Design of Computer - Based Environments to Support Creativity, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 63(4-5), Special Issue on Computer Support for Creativity, E. Edmonds, L. Candy (Eds.), 383 - 409.

Johnson, H. and Hyde, J. (2003): Towards Modeling Individual and Collaborative Construction of Jigsaws Using Task Knowledge Structures (TKS), ACM Transactions on CHI, 10(4), 339–387.

Lampe, C., Ellison, N. B., and Steinfield, C. (2008). Changes in use and perception of facebook. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 721-730

Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., and Gumbrecht, M. (2004). Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 06-10, 2004, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

O’Hara, K., Kindberg, T., Glancy, M., Baptista, L., Sukumaran, B., Kahana, G., and Rowbotham, J. (2007). Collecting and Sharing Location-based Content on Mobile Phones in a Zoo Visitor Experience, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 16, 11–44.

Pachet, F. and Addessi, A. R. (2004). When children reflect on their playing style: Experiments with the continuator and children. ACM Computers in Entertainment, 2(2).

Paulus, P. B., & Nijstad, B. A. (2003) (Eds.). Group creativity: Innovation through collaboration. New York: Oxford University Press.

Resnick, M. (2007). Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society. Learning and Leading with Technology, December 2007, 18-22.

Sall, A., and Grinter, R. E. (2007). Let’s Get Physical! In, Out and Around the Gaming Circle of Physical Gaming at Home, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 16, 199–229.

Schiano, D. J., Elliott A., and Bellotti, V. (2007). A Look at Tokyo Youth at Leisure: Towards the Design of New Media to Support Leisure Outings, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 16, 45–73.

Shneiderman, B. (2000). Creating Creativity: User Interfaces for Supporting Innovation. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7(1), March 2000, 114–138.

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Shneiderman, B. (2007). Creativity Support Tools - Accelerating Discovery and Innovation. Communications of the ACM. 50(12), 20 - 32.

Sternberg, R. (ed), (1999). Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, UK.

Wiggins, G. A. (2006). Searching for computational creativity. New Generation Computing, 24(3), 209–222.

Zhao, D. and Rosson, M. (2009). How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international Conference on Supporting Group Work, 243-252.

i http://www.facebook.com/ ii http://www.twitter.com/

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Embedding CreativityAmílcar Cardoso

University of Coimbra, Portugal

FP7 Expert Consultation Meeting, Brussels, 28.11.2011

Challenge:- To have computational creativity mechanisms embedded and being used in computer

applications of widespread use in areas with high economical and social impact.

The proposed mechanisms should improve the usefulness and effectiveness of the applications in two possible ways:• by providing support services to humans involved in creative tasks• by improving communication with humans, thus facilitating interaction

Providing support services

The idea is to explore the vision of the computer as a cognitive extension for humans, i.e., to develop new forms of intelligence that may complement and augment human intelligence. Within this framework, the computer could collaborate proactively with humans in creative tasks by assuming different ranges of responsabilities in the process, according to the situation needs. The exact responsabilities that would make sense the computer to assume are context dependent, but we envisage some services that could be provided:

• Data exploitation and filtering: Exploit the massive amounts of information and knowledge made available by current and future internet and, considering contextual information, select and provide parts acknowledged as having high potential to foster creativity (eg, those more amenable to induce surprise). Recur to user modeling at multiple levels, including personal habits, to perform data selection/filtering in a more informed and adequate way (eg, lifestyle awareness, cultural habits).

• Scenario (re)interpretation: Provide context characterisation at multiple levels — e.g., emotional, semantic, aesthetical, cultural — and integrate these levels to construct encompassing views. Offer reinterpretation of contexts, eg, by recurring to analogy, to provide divergent views and thus nurture creativity.

• Co-authoring: Play an active role in creative acts by providing ideas, for the whole or for the parts of the artifact, by critically reviewing human’s proposals, by performing assessment of relevant characteristics, by recognizing promizing paths in the creative process.

Improving interaction

The embedding of computational creativity mechanisms may also provide advanced features for communication and interaction, namely by allowing the computer to engage communication in a versatile way, with increased effectiveness.

• Expressive language: Human-computer communication should involve diversity, either by the use of a rich vocabulary, by the use of figures of speech like idiom, metaphor, simile and hyperbole, and by the invention/discovery of new concepts (eg, by conceptual blending).

• Narrative power: Humans use storytelling in daily communication to facilitate understanding. Computers should also be able to use narrations to describe data, to explain and teach, to make humor. Narrations should be handled using text, speech, visual language or combinations of them.

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Possible areas of application

Examples of areas with high economical and social impact where embedding computational creativity mechanisms could result in significant improvements are:

• Engineering design: CAD/CAE applications would gain from offering services like scenario interpretation (eg, to specify and/or critique) and reinterpretation (new views from the data, use of metaphors), as well as co-authoring of artifacts.

• Game and Entertainment industry: computer co-authoring, together with narrative power, has an extremely high potential to contribute to the birth and nurture of new generations of games, as well as other entertainment setups for music/art creation.

• Technology-enhanced learning: Including narrative power and enriching language in TELearning systems would improve their effectiveness.

• Turism guidance: The use of pervasive devices allows the selection and filtering of adaquate turistic information according to the context (time and place), ie, according to the environment constraints and the userʼs desires, motivations and mood. Real-time narrative capabilities would allow the generation of stories on-demand.

Suggested Approach / Specific Topics

Despite the developments in the area of Computational Creativity in the last two decades, there are important research challenges that should be tackled in the path to the successful development of systems with the proposed characteristics. This research needs to encompass either empirical and theoretical.There is the need to investigate and systematize criteria and procedures for comparing/benchmarking computer systems in what concerns to creativity power. This is very important for allowing an assessment of the contributions to the area and build a shared awareness about the effectiveness of different research strategies.There is also the need to investigate and propose new computer models for creativity, taking into account the growing knowlegde that other areas, like Psychology, Neuroscience, Linguistics and Social Sciences, are bringing about creativity. A large spectrum models may be envisioned, covering since particular facets of the process until more abstract ones, including creation in social setups.

Communities

This research is multidisciplinary: it requires the involvement of contributions from (at least) Psychology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Computer Science.

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Guiding Questions

Inputs to preparation of FET Work Programme 2013 Author(s): Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, http://nil.fdi.ucm.es 1. Challenge / Motivation The challenge would be to explore the concept of machine-empowered creativity. This would involve finding a way for humans and machines to work in tandem on creative processes, with machines not trying to emulate human creativity but supporting it and enhancing it by relying on the kind of operations for which machines are much better suited than humans. This would have applications in three major fields:

1. It may have economic impact by expanding the role of technology in creative industries, making them more competitive in a global market. These industries constitute a very powerful market in financial terms, and have already benefited greatly from information technologies. However in exploiting these technologies in some of the biggest money making industries (3D animation in film, videogames) Europe, which used to have a leading position in the market, has taken second place to other countries (US and Japan).

2. It may have large scale social impact by extending the range of possibilities open for small scale production enabled by technologies. This mode of production has an increasing importance, with the user progressively taking the role of producer as well as consumer of music, video or literature distributed over the Internet. Technology has made it possible to generate products of acceptable quality providing expertise formerly covered by the traditional production chain. There is a niche for applications providing similar assistance not just for production and formatting processes but for subtasks involved in the creative process.

3. The set of mechanisms or tools that may result from this kind of research could have widespread impact on problem solving or creation process in general, whether in terms of design, scientific discovery, or artistic endeavour.

2. Suggested Approach / Specific Topics Creativity is characterised by two properties that candidate results should exhibit: some degree of usefulness and some degree of innovation. Research on the development of computer programs that explore combination of these aspects should be encouraged. But partial progress may be made by researching on computer applications capable of cooperating with / assisting the user in achieving creative results. Helpful solutions may be deployed at several levels, but emphasis should be placed in those subtasks of the creative process for which machines are known to be better suited than humans. Suggested topics:

• Identifying novelty: Checking for novelty involves maintaining a (potentially very large) store of previous instantiations of the desired artefact and validating candidate solutions against them. Computational solutions to this problem should be explored.

• Quality metrics for artefacts: Where basic prerequisites of desired artefacts are susceptible of formalisation, computers can provide rapid appraisals by checking for fulfilment of such formal requirements.

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• Machine support for traditional inspirational techniques: Humans rely on a number of techniques to search for inspiration, generally not aimed at producing final products but at helping human creators reach starting points that they would not have considered without them. Some of these techniques involve random combination of a number of possible initial elements, in the hope of producing striking combinations. Computers excel at this type of operation.

• Machine support for the identification or establishment of analogies between problem statements: Many studies of creative processes identify analogy as a basic tool often exploited by human creators in their activity. Research on modelling and applying processes of analogy should be encouraged.

• Development of protocols or interaction schemata for applying such mechanisms in collaboration with real users: For any of these any research should be carried out in a context including the exploitation of the proposed research in a creative activity in close collaboration with human creators, with explicit protocols that describe how and when a human creator cooperates with the application in question.

3. Target Outcome / Expected Impact Experimental set up should include the means to determine the effect of computer participation, whether in terms of an increase in the number of possibilities explored, the amount of time invested, or improvement of some measurable property of the resulting artefact (more different from previous solutions, better fulfilling formal requirements, perceived as better by final consumers). 5. Suitability for ICT and FET / Long-term Vision The state of the art in the application of information technologies to the entertainment industries has focused largely in expanding the range of technical possibilities available to the human creator, but little effort has been made to explore the role of technology in the creative processes themselves. These creative processes are little documented, and they involve human intellectual skills which are fundamental in the value producing chain for these industries but about which little is known. Results along the lines of the vision proposed above are foreseeable in the long term, but it is not clear what specific form they may take in the near future. In this sense the proposed research is vision-driven and high-risk. FET funding would allow exploration of these options without having to wait for its economic potential and/or its feasibility to become obvious. 6. Communities The proposed research would require interdisciplinary efforts with contributions from ICT but also from psychology, cognitive science, creative disciplines and the entertainment industries themselves. Europe has been leading this field since the end of the 90s (Computational Creativity series of workshops and conferences), but the US has recently started to take notice, with specific funding programs by the NSF, and a number of scientific meetings organised on the topic in the US. We would like to distribute your short written contribution (1-2 pages) to the other participants before the meeting and we would like to publish it together with the final report of the meeting on our website (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fet-proactive/id-intro_en.html). If you have any objections against this, please tell us.

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Position paper for Creativity ConsultationDavid Moffat

November 2011, Brussels

Proposed theme: Research towards the development of software to support creative thinking,of individuals and groups, by means of meta-logical representations of scientific knowledge.

1 Challenge / Motivation(What are the characteristics of the challenge? What is the motivation behind it What is thecontribution to transforming ICT and ICT research in its relation to creativity? Will it profitfrom new insights gained through multidisciplinary perspectives?)

The mystery of creativity leads to popular notions of a solitary genius working alone to createa new artistic work or scientific theory. Few acts of creation are due to a “stroke of genius,”however; and this is fortunate for humanity because it means that everybody has the potentialto contribute to innovation in human progress, if they are only given the opportunity.

Individual creativity depends on deep knowledge in the relevant field, typically built up overmany years of study and work. Such personal research lays the groundwork for any sudden“flash of inspiration” which may result.

Groups of people can also collaborate in creative work, becoming more productive togetherthan any of them would be alone, or all of them would be separately. For such collaborativework, the size of the group can be critical.

Connecting greater masses of people together effectively would also stimulate more creativ-ity, both because part of the motivation is to satisfy human need, and because the needs can bemade more visible to everybody, making it easier to find suitable problems to solve. In addition,secondary research (of the “e-literature”) would be made much more efficient for all purposes,and avoid useless duplication of work (e.g. “reinventing the wheel”).

Because creativity is so intimately founded on human knowledge, it will be enriched bystronger technological support of knowledge processes.

This challenge is to expose knowledge and the human thought processes behind it, to enablecomputers to support better thinking, and to enable communication technologies to share itwith other people. The point is to externalise human knowledge so that it can be processed bycomputer to structure it, increase its value, and share it across the internet. The focus is moreon the ideas themselves, rather than limited to the individual people that create them.

2 Suggested approach / Specific topics(What are the foundational transformative research topics? What approaches can be sug-gested? List research topics that would be relevant and together bring ICT forward with respectto creativity.)

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Expose the relevant domain of human knowledge, including the justifications for all the facts,and the status of other assertions and queries in the domain. This can be tried for a smallscientific domain firstly, because a good document trail is already available for much of it, injournal articles, laboratory log books, experiment designs and rationales, data and results, andso on. Anticipated benefits of achieving any success in this activity should also make it moreattractive to undertake, in the medium term.

Build software systems that support scientists in some small domain to plan their researchprogrammes, identify problems to solve, formulate hypotheses, and design experiments to testthem. Such a system could serve as a scientific assistant, even if it is not strictly speaking anartificially intelligent agent that is able to use the domain knowledge itself. It could still be ahelpful thinking partner (electronic “sounding board”).

Allow the thinking partner to adapt to the scientist’s own thinking in the domain, capturingtentative thoughts and retaining them to supplement the human long-term memory, and stimu-lating creativity by identifying areas of uncertainty and other problems.

Develop intuitive visualisation and navigation techniques to allow the scientist to surfthrough the knowledge network, identify problems to solve, and add in new conclusions togrow the network.

Connect multiple such thinking partners together, so that their scientists can collaboratewith each other via the externalised thoughts that they share and agree upon. Areas of disagree-ment will naturally suggest points for further investigation. These points, and any other gapsin knowledge, thus readily identify problems for deeper analysis, and more creative problemsolving.

3 Target Outcome / Expected Impact(What would be the specific outcome of research supported in this area? What would be theexpected impact of a breakthrough in this area in a time frame of 10 to 20 years? What are thesuccess measures / indicators?)

Outcomes should include a better understanding of the scientific process, and of the nature ofknowledge; a deeper appreciation for creativity in scientific domains, and later in other domainstoo, such as music and the arts; software that is better able to adapt to people by understandingthe intimacy of their thought processes; and a scientifically quantifiable theory of human culture.

4 Suitability for ICT and FET / Long-term Vision(In what way and how far does it go beyond the state of the art? What makes this suitablefor ICT-FET as opposed to mainstream ICT? Is it vision-driven and high-risk, embryonic orfoundational? Is there already a (pre-) established research road map for this topic(s)? Whatwould be the added value of FET funding?)

This is clearly a grand challenge, and risky in the sense that we cannot guarantee its success;but it decomposes into various sub-problems which would be valuable goals in their own right,

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and can be pursued independently.There are relevant traditions of work in Artificial Intelligence, including knowledge-based

systems, automated reasoning systems, multi-agent systems, and more recently the semanticweb, and ontological knowledge bases. In Cognitive Science and other cognate disciplinesthere is relevant work on decision support systems, computer supported argumentation, and ongroup decision making. In e-Science there is relevant work on visualisation and the sharing ofexperiment designs and data.

All this relevant work continues elsewhere, but is not yet developed to the point where itcan be applied directly here. This grand challenge is suitable to FET because it would help tomotivate and direct the other research toward longer term goals.

Any progress that could partially demonstrate the value and validity of the challenge wouldthen help to drive future ICT research in later, mainstream research programmes.

5 Communities(Is this topic addressing an existing or new community? What areas of expertise are to be in-volved? Is it a multidisciplinary area, and if so is this a new or an existing mix of disciplines?What would be the critical mass of European researchers needed to carry out research in thisarea? What is the current situation?)

Several existing ICT communities are addressed by this challenge, as mentioned above. Inaddition, other disciplines could be helpfully involved, including psychology and philosophy,potentially to great mutual benefit. The fact that these disciplines do not work together veryeffectively these days, presents a further challenge, but also offers opportunity.

It is not easy to estimate the critical mass of researchers that would be needed to carry outthis challenge in about twenty years. Some of the related and component research areas aresmall, as they are still in an exploratory phase themselves.

At a conservative estimate, about a hundred researchers working together, but divided(twenty each) into the challenges in Section 2, could make enough progress to produce in-teresting and useful systems that would motivate further research and validate the programme.

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Expert consultation on creativity and ICT

Position paper

François Pachet, Sony CSL

There have long been convincing arguments to sustain the idea of studying creativity within

an academic context. What is lacking from my viewpoint are :

- Examplar works showing concretely how machines could outperform humans in creativity

tasks known to be difficult. Building system sis nowadays regarded as less rewarding than

building theories. However I think it is way to early to build theories given the lack of

concrete systems to study, analyze and discuss. Ressources should be devoted to a bottom-up

apraoch whereby creative systems are built, using real-world constraints, in any domain.

- Involvement of researchers who are able to exhibit creativity themselves. Creativity may be

a phenomenon that is intrinsically difficult to observe « from the outside », and there is risk of

having a field consisting only of scholarly and sometimes scholastic works only. Attempts to

« evaluate » creativity are justified, but this may turn out to be a deadend. I suggest that

insights come – also - from individuals who are recognized as being creative themselves, and

have them involved in research projects.

- Individual creativity has to do with a complex feedback process between production and

perception. So-called Reflexive Interaction (Pachet 2006 ; Jones et al. 2009) reify these

feedback loops. More work should be devoted to the study of these loops.

- Virtuosity is an hitherto poorly studied human phenomena whose study could benefit to

creativity studies since it involves concrete performances tasks that are most often

quantifiable and measurable (Pachet, 2011).

References

Jones, D, Bown, O., McCormack, J., Pachet, F., Young, M., Berry, R., Asaf, I. and Porter,

B. Stimulating creative flow through computational feedback. In Margaret Boden and Mark

D'Inverno and Jon McCormack, editor, Computational Creativity: An Interdisciplinary

Approach, Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings (no. 09291 ), 2009. Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-

Zentrum fuer Informatik, Germany

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Pachet, F. Creativity Studies and Musical Interaction. In Deliège, I. and Wiggins, G.,

editor, Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory And Practice, Psychology

Press.2006

Pachet, F. Bebop Virtuosity Explained. In McCormack, J and D'Inverno, M,

editor,Computers and Creativity, Springer. 2011

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Guiding Questions

“Comput l Content Enginnering” Inputs to preparation of FET Work Programme 2013

Author: Federico Peinado

f total media and entertainment spend. One of the actions included in the Digital Agenda for Europe is to

ainly ent economy.

m of Digital ty (CC) at the

core of this discipline. That is, shifting the focus from the manual development and he automatic variations or

authors.

echniques, both basic and complex ones as essential tools of the ‘engineers’

ed:

-Oriented Computer-Aided Tools for Content Designers / Developers. ks / Teaching me Content /

iness Models / etc.

earchers and s in Artificial

general, due to a mutual enrichment between disciplines that are not as far from each other as they would seem. Signs of success may be a more-than-linear growth in the quantity of digital contents available in the markets (at the same time their quality is preserved) or even a shift from static generation of content (created at the initiative of the authors) to on-the-fly generation of customized content (on direct demand by its consumers). A vision far beyond the state of the art, but with a high-risk road map for the CC community, as ICT-FET requires.

ational Creativity at the core of a new Digita

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain 1. Proposal According to PwC’ reports, by 2014 digital spending will account for one-third o

stimulate a European online content market, to compete against other markets (msupported by U.S. large companies) in the process of “phagocytizing” this emerg Europe’s position may benefit from a dramatic change in the current paradigContent Engineering, encouraging our researcher to put Computational Creativi

configuration of thousands of websites, apps, digital ads and games, etc. to tgeneration of these creative artefacts, especially when these are versions, combinations of others created by human This change should start by considering CC t(knowledge-intensive, procedural, on-the-fly, etc.), standard toolkit’ for creating new digital content. 2. List of topics Some of the multidisciplinary topics that can be suggest

• Software / Knowledge Engineering for Creative Systems. • Creativity• Procedural Generation of Web Content / (Fiction or Non-Fiction) e-Boo

Material / (Streaming or not) Music, Videos and Images / VideogaEmbedded Advertising / Personal Recommendations / etc.

• CC-based Marketing / Advertising / Networking / (Dynamic) Buss 3. Expected impact The proposed change, aiming to integrate CC as a key discipline for the respractitioners on Digital Content Engineering, will significantly promote advanceCreativity (especially via applied projects), as well as ITC in

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ICT and Creativity - Initial statements

Inputs to preparation of FET Work Programme 2013 Author(s): Oliviero Stock Creativity is a fundamental attribute of the human species. Yet the increase of computer capabilities is offering possibilities that are changing the uniqueness of that attribution. For instance already now chess grandmasters declare that the most striking property of a computer program like Junior, is its creativity. Margaret Boden has observed there are three ways in which creativity is realised: by combination, by exploration and by transformation. The first one produces unfamiliar combination of familiar ideas. An example is analogy. Eploratory creativity is based on some space of thinking, well defined, for instance through generative rules; the space is explored, both looking for previously unreached places and, in abstract, with an aim to understand the potential and limits of the space. Transformational creativity is when the space itself is transformed by altering some of its dimensions. So, ideas are generated that could not be generated before the transformation. What are the main factors that make computational creativity a realistic endeavour? Progress in artificial intelligence is one factor that favours the development of creative programs. Progress has been continuous, even if no extraordinary breakthrough has occurred or is likely to occur. Another very important factor is recent availability of great quantity of resources, such as texts, images, recordings, videos etc. and ways of fast processing of this material. Another factor is the acquisition of some better understanding of the relation between human creativity and the computer role. Specifically then, with the emergence of social computing (in various declinations), we have much better means for approaching creativity as a social process, involving humans and machines. At the same time cognitive science, and more indirectly cognitive neuroscience are offering incremental understanding of the creativity phenomena, and while the second one is yielding initial results it may possibly lead to significant breakthroughs in the next couple of decades. Creativity in computer systems has an enormous potential in these areas:

• Automatic discovery of abstract concepts • Automatic creation of concepts and artifacts • Semiautomatic collaborative human-computer creation • Automatic appreciation and evaluation of creative production

Of the many specific themes in which these areas can be realised, I would like here to emphasize two: a) Language creativity (including novel attractive evaluative expressions, humor, narratives, poetry) b) Socially based creativity (examples: group creative processes based on mental states of participants, common ground and exceptional novel step in the collective thinking)

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The most appealing prospect for me is related to the intervention on humans, be it by persuading (influencing creatively the adoption of beliefs, attitudes and behaviours), or by yielding through creativity an aesthetically relevant outcome. A fundamental concept is that in both cases this should be done by assessing the context, modelling the internal state of the target humans, and adapting the intervention. In addition, an assessment of the effect of the creative message can close the loop. From the applied point of view there is important potential for art, entertainment, and all forms of persuasive technologies. I think the overall impact on human potential, on releasing the capability of seeing things from novel points of view and for leading to more advanced human capabilities must be strongly emphasized from a strategic point of view. I believe there will be a strong impact on society on the overall ethical dimension (creativity leads to more creativity, critical thinking and social expression. But also important is the fact that ICT-based creativity will lead to robust developments of businesses based on automated creativity with targets at least the following: learning, society – both public and enterprise, entertainment and art, advertising. As for communities, only a small community identifies itself now with the subject of computer creativity, but several scientists are somehow at the border of the topic and may possibly be attracted by a substantial focused initiative.

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Guiding Answers

Inputs to preparation of FET Work Programme 2013 Author(s): Geraint A. Wiggins,

Professor of Computational Creativity, Queen Mary, University of London

1. Challenge / Motivation What are the characteristics of the challenge? What is the motivation behind it? What is the contribution to transforming ICT and ICT research in its relation to creativity? Will it profit from new insights gained through multidisciplinary perspectives? The broad challenge here covers a range of computational systems, from hybrid human/computer systems that are intended to support or assist human creativity, to autonomous computer systems that perform tasks that would be thought of as creative if performed by a human1. Specifically excluded are systems which serve as mere tools, and which do not actively engage in a creative process, such as Adobe PhotoShop2. It is important to emphasise that creativity is not restricted to artistic forms, but is exhibited by humans in all tasks, including, for example, in science and engineering, and to various degrees, including, for example, the design of bridges, the composition of opera, and the utterance of everyday sentences.

Another range, or spectrum, involved is that describing the intent and methods of research. Like its parent field, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computational Creativity encompasses two poles: engineering, where the aim is purely to build systems that create; and, cognitive science, where the aim is to understand the creative aspects of human and/or animal cognition. Much current work in the field contributes to both engineering and scientific aspects.

Computational Creativity constitutes a change in viewpoint from the classical AI perspective where the key paradigm is one of problem solving. In Computational Creativity, the paradigm is as much of problem seeking as of solving, and there is no assumption of a given “correct” answer. Necessarily, this raises questions of method, and formal methodology is now beginning to develop in the field. Computational Creativity is intensely multidisciplinary, partly because creativity cannot exist in the abstract, but needs a domain in which to take place, and partly because of the spectrum mentioned above, spanning engineering and cognitive science. In consequence, it is particularly important that appropriate evaluation mechanisms are developed, and, at least at the general level of evaluating creative success, need to be a combination of the trans-disciplinary and the domain-specific.

Computational Creativity, as a field, aims towards computer systems which are capable of human-like behaviour in creative contexts, at all levels. It constitutes a new, more open way to view intelligent behaviour, beyond the old problem-solving paradigm of AI, and ultimately leads the way to more human-like computer systems. 2. Suggested Approach / Specific Topics What are the foundational transformative research topics? What approaches can be suggested? List research topics that would be relevant and together bring ICT forward with respect to creativity. As noted above, this field is intensely multidisciplinary. To understand computational creativity, or the issues involved in other, less direct approaches to creativity in ICT, it is necessary to study psychology and human behaviour around ICT systems. It is necessary to study the domains in which creativity is to be exhibited from this particular perspective. Often, creativity consists in mapping concepts between domains. As such, it is difficult, and indeed undesirable, to specify boundaries between the various fields which must be covered: indeed, road-mapping would be appropriate

1 Moffat and Kelly (2006) have demonstrated bias against human judgement of computer creativity, and this definition is worded so as to avoid it. 2 This is to not denigrate PhotoShop: it is simply not designed to do these things.

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within FET projects. A particular issue concerned with domain knowledge is that of formulation: evidence suggests that formulation and reformulation of domain knowledge is fundamental to human creative reasoning, and this issue is strongly related with machine learning, a field which has much to offer computational creativity.

A viable approach, analogous to that taken in AI/Cognitive Science, is to centre research activity around computational creativity as such, where one necessarily has a balance between the study of creativity as an observed phenomenon and as a simulated phenomenon; however, this should not to be to the exclusion of approaches with other philosophies. At least part of any funded research activity should be focused on better epistemological and methodological understanding of the nature of human and computer creativity. 3. Target Outcome / Expected Impact What would be the specific outcome of research supported in this area? What would be the expected impact of a breakthrough in this area in a time frame of 10 to 20 years? What are the success measures / indicators? The key expected impact of computational creativity is likely to be in hybrid systems improving and expanding the creative behaviours of humans. The ultimate outcomes cannot be specifically predicted, since the aim is to enhance the creativity of humanity; however, it is to be expected that along the route to these more extreme outcomes, less ambitious artistic, technological and scientific systems will be developed, such as artificial mathematicians, artificial composers, etc.; indeed, some extant computationally creative systems have made contributions to referreed scientific encyclopaediae. These outcomes are likely to find early, direct applications within science, humanities, technology, entertainment, and education. 5. Suitability for ICT and FET / Long-term Vision In what way and how far does it go beyond the state of the art? What makes this suitable for ICT-FET as opposed to mainstream ICT? Is it vision-driven and high-risk, embryonic or foundational? Is there already a (pre-) established research road map for this topic(s)? What would be the added value of FET funding? There is no more suitable funding programme for computational creativity than FET. The field is very high risk (in the positive sense that there are great gains to be made, but making those gains is extremely challenging and speculative); the field has existed for only around 11 years; and it is fundamentally technological. There is as yet no established road map, and, as mentioned above, this would be an appropriate outcome of FET type projects. While it is the case that there is quite a lot of activity on the fringes of the area, a specific centre of activity is desirable: currently, focus on creativity can be regarded by reviewers as frippery, or distraction from “real science”, where, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. A clear indication from FP7 that the study of creativity in the context of ICT is desirable would encourage activity in this area to a large degree. 6. Communities Is this topic addressing an existing or new community? What areas of expertise are to be involved? Is it a multidisciplinary area, and if so is this a new or an existing mix of disciplines? What would be the critical mass of European researchers needed to carry out research in this area? What is the current situation? This is a demonstrably new research community. That community has developed over the past 10-12 years to have its own annual international conference, featured status in the magazine of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and its first international autumn school (in Porvoo, Finland, November 2011). UK EPSRC has opted to fund one major fellowship in Computational Creativity Theory. However, no funding agency has yet invested in a computational creativity programme, despite a substantial nucleus of relevant researchers in the EU. As stated above, while there are researchers on the fringes of the field who are studying creativity covertly, it is highly desirable that a clear signal be given by EU funding agencies that to do so is both useful and fundable.

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