The Creative Web: Computational Creativity as a Web-Service
(Computational Creativity meets Web Science)

An international symposium hosted by the Web Science & Technology Division* of KAIST,
the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

*funded by the Korean NRF World-Class-University program

Organizers: Tony Veale (KAIST and UCD) and Key-Sun Choi (KAIST)

Please send all queries and your intention to submit to: KaistCreativeWeb@gmail.com

The KAIST Web Science and Technology (WST) division, in cooperation with the Korean National Research Fund’s World Class University program, is proud to announce an international symposium that will explore the technological convergence of two exciting fields of Computer Science: Web Science and Computational Creativity. This two-day event will bring together a wealth of international research experience in the computational modeling of creative processes, and will establish a new direction for human and machine creativity in the Web era.


Schedule

Monday, December 3rd
9am Welcome, Opening Remarks by Prof. Kim, Shin-Ho, Superintendant of Education for the Daejeon Region
10am Tony Veale: Linguistic Creativity as an On-Demand Web Service
11am Coffee break
11:30am Oliviero Stock: Computational humor, from language creativity to automated persuasion
12:30pm Lunch break
2pm Simon Colton: Automatic Generation of Flowcharts of Web services for Creative Projects
3pm Coffee and posters
4pm Gerard de Melo: Tapping the Collective Intelligence of the Web
5pm General Discussion


Tuesday, December 4th
9am Hannu Toivonen: Creativity for affective data analysis in the web
10am Coffee and Posters
11am Pablo Gervás: Deconstructing Computer Poets: Process to Services
12noon Lunch break
2pm Dan Ventura: Why the Web Will Make Computational Creativity More Creative and Why It Won't
3pm Coffee break
3:30pm Carlo Strapparava: NLP for creative, affective & persuasive language
4:30pm General Discussion



Thematic Focus

Topics of discussion will include: visual creativity, painting and poetry; emotion and affective reasoning; world-knowledge and its acquisition from the web; computational models of humor; machine-learning for creativity; knowledge discovery in scientific domains; linguistic creativity; the web as a force magnifier for creativity research; industry-relevant uses of the Creative Web; the future of computational creativity; and related issues of Web architecture. Please see the bottom of this page for more detail on the vision of the Creative Web that will explored in the symposium.


Outputs

To technological vision of the Creative Web that emerges from the symposium will be published in a special issue of a leading academic journal. This special issue will provide a research manifesto for future work in the fusion of Computational Creativity and Web Science.

Schedule

Talks will be scheduled for December 3rd and 4th, 2012, at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Yuseong, Daejeon. A specific room/venue will be announced at a later date.



Call for Posters and Demos

In addition to the invited speakers, we plan to showcase the best of Korean research in Web science and creativity. Please consider submitting a poster or a demo proposal for the event. Contributions should be two-pages in length and sent to KaistCreativeWeb@gmail.com by November 30th at the latest.


Attendance and Registration

Attendance is free to academics, students and industry professionals. In fact, we encourage attendance from anyone with an interest in creativity or the future development of the Web. We aim to achieve a good mix of academics and industry professionals, to foster a productive discussion on the merits and applications of creativity on the Web.

Though attendance is free, registration is mandatory to allow for adequate planning of the event.

Please register your interest in this free event by emailing the organizers at KaistCreativeWeb@gmail.com

To secure your place at this free event, please email us before November 20, 2012.


Our Vision of The Creative Web

Creativity is an elusive phenomenon that organizations put significant effort and resources into fostering, rewarding, retaining, and reproducing on demand. But the systematic harnessing of creativity is complicated by the complex and definition-defying nature of the phenomenon, and the realization that it depends crucially on so many different social, cultural and contextual factors. For these reasons, organizations often out-source their creative needs to external agencies with a track record in creative exploration, idea composition, and in the optimal framing of creative outputs. Such agencies are not so much problem solvers as option providers, leaving the ultimate responsibility for choosing among this diversity of new options to the client. To out-source in this way is not to abdicate creative responsibility, but to broaden the range of choices one can choose from.

Complex software systems share many similarities with large organizations. Each must be well defined, operate in a predictable fashion, and facilitate an efficient and orderly flow of information. But like large organizations, software systems should continuously engage their users and react with grace and agility when faced with unexpected situations. Imagine if systems could out-source their creative needs to an external service with a track record in computational creativity. This service would not be a cadre of creative workers, but a suite of interoperable tools that provide, on demand, the processes and representations that are key to creative thinking. Software systems, like organizations, could thus maintain their well-tested structures and disciplined information-flows, while appealing to outside creative services whenever they need to diversify the range of possibilities (both in form and content) that are available to choose from.

Our vision of a creative web service imagines three kinds of sub-service: discovery services; composition services; and framing services. Each sub-service may rely on different sources of knowledge, but each will use inter-operable data structures and so can call on other sub-services during its operation. The overall architecture is theory-neutral, yet will provide a diversity of theory-informed sub-services that can be composed in any way that suits a client system’s needs.

Discovery services

Documents and domains are containers of knowledge, but this knowledge is more than a simple bag of true-or-false propositions. Rather, knowledge is textured, so that some elements are strongly foregrounded while many others remain implicit, latent or presumed, in the conceptual background. Knowledge that resides at the boundaries of two or more domains may only come to the fore – where it can appear surprising and insightful – when representations of these domains are studied in juxtaposition. Discovery services will mine text corpora for implicit knowledge, and provide bisociative tools for acquiring emergent insights from the crossroads of diverse document sets.

Composition services

Creativity often arises from frame conflict, when one concept is incongruously viewed through the lens of another very different idea. The key to the fruitful exploitation of frame conflict is two-fold: one must first choose which concepts to place into juxtaposition, and then formulate a resonant form for the resulting content. The proposed web architecture will provide services for suggesting, elaborating and comprehending conceptual metaphors, analogies and blends, as well as services for accessing the large store of common-sense world knowledge that these composition services will crucially rely upon.

Framing services

The conceptual conceit that underpins a creative act must be packaged for an audience in a concise, easily appreciable and memorable form, such as a linguistic metaphor, a simile, a joke, a name, a slogan, a short story, a poem, a picture, a piece of music, or a mixture of these forms. Each of these forms may frame the same underlying conceit in very different ways to achieve competing goals (e.g. catchiness, brevity, resonance, wit) for diverse audiences. The proposed web architecture will provide services for framing the outputs of the discovery and composition services in a variety of parameterized forms, from affective analogies to metaphors to poems to stories to pictures to music.

Summary

No architecture for providing creativity on the web can be exhaustively complete, yet any that aims to be credible must provide enough sub-services to be initially useful, while demonstrating the interoperability and extensibility of the infrastructure as a whole. The proposed architecture will leave considerable room for future growth, but will be significantly usable and useful in its initial form, with the provision of core ideation functions such as bisociation, metaphor and blending, and popular framing devices such as poetry, painting and music.