AI Magazine - Spring 2018

Main Conference
Thirty-four full papers were presented in a single
track over three and a half days, as oral presentations,
or posters and short talks, depending on the nature
of the contribution. The papers were grouped by
theme. A foundations session opened the conference
with talks on application domains in CC, building a
CC system, and teaching CC. A language session fol-
lowed, looking at linguistic creativity in narrative
and poetry. State-of-the-art conceptual blending
techniques and applications were presented in the
session on combinatorial creativity. The music ses-
sion built on a colocated workshop on music and CC,
and presented talks on new techniques for the
automation of learning and cross-domain fertiliza-
tion in music generation. A succession of nine short
talks introduced work on a wide variety of domains,
elaborated in posters, including dance, music, and
narrative.

Cocreativity was a popular theme in the conference, with work in this theme considering human-machine interactions and benefits in both directions. Finally, the session on philosophical and psychological perspectives closed the conference, with deep work on philosophical themes such as intentionality and self-awareness.

The first talk kicked off with an analysis of the field, highlighting the lack of papers on mathematical and scientific creativity: underrepresented domains proved to be a recurring theme of the conference. Another theme threading through the talks was the need for widening participation in the CC community, to engage with related disciplines, with researchers from a wider variety of cultures and institutions, and with people working in industry. The social aspects of CC and the ways in which CC can be used to improve lives was another compelling theme, kick-started by organizers of the Workshop on Computational Creativity and Social Justice, held immediately prior to the conference and organized by Gillian Smith, Dan Brown, and Anne Sullivan. Discussions based on Tony Veale’s popular tagline for ICCC’ 12 — “Scoffing at mere generation for more than a decade” — questioned whether “mere generation” is really so terrible. In particular, it can be a way of broadening the appeal of and participation in CC events, and of furthering industry engagement.

The Keynote Speakers Milena Fisher, cofounder and president of The Creativity Post, gave a keynote that in some ways picked up the baton from the first speaker, emphasizing the need for collaboration with other fields and disciplines, paving the way for further discussion of the topic in the panel sessions.

Gil Weinberg from the School of Music Technolo-
gy at Georgia Tech held everyone spellbound with
his ventures through 20 years of truly inspiring work
in musical creativity, including robot dancers,
autonomous drummer collaborators, and musically
intelligent limbs for musicians with injured or miss-
ing limbs.

The Panels
Two panels were held, on Computational Creativity
and Design and on Computational Creativity and
Discovery. The Design panel stressed the importance
of design interaction and HCI for CC, offering a set
of practices and methodologies for crafting enjoyable
interactive experiences, where that interaction may
be with other people, with technology, or with
objects. With an emphasis on cocreativity rather
than autonomous machine creativity, these comple-
mentary disciplines will be ever more relevant. New
and recent models of human-computer cocreativity
were raised, extending previous models of computer
as nanny, pen pal, coach, assistant, and colleague.
The Discovery panel discussed philosophical aspects
of how exploration relates to discovery in terms of
navigating a search space, and related topics of
serendipity, intention, recognition, and generation.
The feeling was that discovery is a major part of the
creative process that is getting somewhat overlooked
and deserves more attention.