WORKSHOPS & TUTORIALS AT ICCC'17
Workshop registration in the TSRB Pre-function Area Times:
Monday 7:30am - 10:00am
Tuesday 7:30am - 10:00am
Workshops
MUSICAL METACREATION (MUME)
Dates: April 19th-20th
Location: TSRB Auditorium
Website:
http://musicalmetacreation.org/
Papers:
linked on the MuMe website
MUME brings together artists, practitioners and researchers interested in developing systems that autonomously (or interactively) recognize, learn, represent, compose, complete, accompany, or interpret music. As such, we welcome contributions to the theory or practice of generative music systems and their applications in new media, digital art, and entertainment at large. Join us at MUME 2017 and take part in the exciting spirit of this growing community!
COMPUTATIONAL CREATIVITY & GAMES WORKSHOP (CCGW)
Date: April 19th
Location: TSRB Banquet Hall (TSRB 132 + TSRB 133), co-located with CCW
Website: http://www.ccgworkshop.org/
Papers:
CICERO:
Computationally Intelligent Collaborative EnviROnment
for game and level design
Visual Procedural Content Generation with an Artificial Abstract Artist
Digital games are an ideal application area for the study of computational creativity: they combine many creative domains within a digital framework (visuals, audio, narrative, game and level design, gameplay). This makes games well-suited to a wide range of autonomous creative agents, experimental co-creative tools, and overviews of historical and potential creative applications in games. The 3rd workshop on Computational Creativity and Games focuses on and highlights research at the intersection of games and creativity.
COMPUTATIONAL CREATIVITY & SOCIAL JUSTICE (CCSJ)
Date: April 20th
Location: GVU Cafe
Website: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/conferences/ccsjw2017/
Papers:
Unpack that Tweet: A Traceable and Interpretable Cognitive Modeling
System
Leveraging Procedural Narrative and Gameplay to Address Controversial Topics
Computational Creativity and Social Justice:
Defining the Intellectual Landscape
Computational creativity intersects social justice in three major ways. First, artificial intelligence systems (many of them arguably computationally creative) play a role in all aspects of our lives: from curating and assessing the media we consume to policing our communities to enabling or rejecting our participation in economic society. Second, computational creativity models, generates and evaluates new forms of art, and art has a long history of cultural commentary and critique, both reflecting and influencing societal values. Third, our community reflects the institutionalized biases that are built into its constituent disciplines and backgrounds, such as discipline-specific rejection of creative work by people with marginalized identities, or reduced prevalence of many groups in computer science and technology.
CO-CREATION WORKSHOP
Date: April 19th
Location: TSRB Banquet Hall (TSRB 132 + TSRB 133)
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/cocreationworkshop/
Papers:
Defining Interactions for Co-Creative Task Transfer
Blackwork Embroidery Pattern Generation Using a Parametric Shape Grammar
A big applause for Cubus: A virtual sandbox to stimulate ideas in children
Towards Co-creative Intelligent Agents for Gesture-based Creativity in Elderly Populations
Co-Creating Dimensions and Examples Using Design Space Gaps
Computational Challenges of Co-Creation in Collaborative Music Live Coding: An Outline
Toward Mutual Theory of Mind as a Foundation for Co-Creation
A shared language for creative communities of artbots
Ownership in Making Puppets
VR Gods: A Split VR/Tangible Experience Designed to Encourage Collaborative Spectacle
Research Tool to Quantify Interaction Dynamics Through Time
Collaboration is a powerful way to inspire and support creativity. During creative improvisational collaboration, a new form of distributed creativity arises that can lead to emergent, dynamic, and unexpected meaning to support creativity in new ways. Subsequently, the field of computational creativity is beginning to explore how intelligent agents might collaborate with humans during their creative process in co-creative systems, i.e. systems that contribute content to a shared creative product with users in a process of co-creation.
Tutorials
Literary Creativity and Narrative Generation
Format: Half day, Morning of June 20th
Location: TSRB 222
Organizers: Pablo Gervás and Carlos Léon, Universidad Complutense de Madrid pgervas@ucm.es and cleon@ucm.es
Description:
The tutorial will intersperse short talks with hands-on sessions in which attendees will get to discuss problems and propose solutions about design of computational systems addressing Computational Creativity systems producing and processing narratives and related literary artifacts.
The attendees will get in touch with the most common technical approaches to story generation systems, along with the most representative examples. Each one of these techniques will be proposed as solutions for specific problems, which will be given to the audience in order for them to explore, apply, and discuss each option.
In particular, these are the relevant aspects that will be addressed:
* What are stories and why they are important to people
* How to come up with new stories computationally, and how to do it creatively
WHAT WILL THE ATTENDEES LEARN?
* The current state of the art in literary generation
* How to tackle the design and implementation of story generation systems
* Identify the best approaches for addressing specific narrative features (causality, temporality, locality)
* Processes that influence perceived creativity in story generation
Tweet Dreams Are Made Of This: Building Creative Twitterbots
Format: Half day, Morning of June 20th
Location: TSRB 125
Organizer: Tony Veale, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland. Tony.Veale@UCD.ie
Description:
A necessary but not sufficient condition for true machine creativity is that our generative systems give users far more useful and interesting content as outputs than a creator could ever build into them. Twitterbots – autonomous generative systems that operate on Twitter and confine themselves to 140-characters or less on diverse topics ranging from the whimsical to the pointedly political – are an ideal vehicle to explore the vexing questions of how much more is enough for creativity, and what constitutes outputs that are useful, interesting and original.
The tutorial will explore the construction of “creative” Twitterbots, that is, bots that transcend “mere generation” and embody the CC community’s philosophy of creativity. As so many Twitterbots are merely generative – and there are so very many bots on Twitter now, and other social media platforms to boot – the contrast between merely generative and creatively generative can be highlighted with great clarity.
But more importantly, Twitterbot construction is fun! It is a development task that captures all of the joy of computational creativity as a research endeavour. Bots allow us to quickly turn our clever ideas into working systems, where our ideas become open to real and immediate scrutiny by us and by countless others on Twitter. Every hit and every miss of our new bot will be preserved in the bot’s Twitter timeline. A creative Twitterbot is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, not least because the bot continues to deliver fresh new examples for our CC papers.
The tutorial will be a decidely hands-on affair. Participants will be given the code and the knowledge-base for a working Twitterbot, and we will collectively dissect the bot as though we were schoolkids dissecting live frogs. Unlike those poor frogs however, we will put our Twitterbots back together again, in new and interesting ways. Participants have two modes of participation to suit their own skill-level: they can do their own coding on their laptops, or they can contribute ideas and suggestions to the tutorial host, who will conduct a live coding session for much of the tutorial. As such, the tutorial will accommodate strong and weak coders, as well as those students who prefer to operate at the level of ideas only.
The tutorial is intended to be a practical exploration of the guiding philosophy of the CC community, whereby complex intangible ideas are given tangible form in the guise of real working systems and critiqued from both a philosophical and an engineering perspective. Depending on the available time, the tutorial can also focus on the empirical evaluation of creative Twitterbots, with examples of real evaluations conducted on crowd-sourcing platforms such as CrowdFlower and AMT.
Note that the knowledge-base given to students will be non-trivial in size and scope, and allow us to discuss the construction of CC systems from both a software-engineering and a knowledge-engineering perspective.
Cancelled: How to use the MEXICA Program
Format: Half day, Morning of June 20th
Organizer: Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana at Cuajimalpa. rperez@correo.cua.uam.mx
Description:
Twenty years ago I finished the first version of the MEXICA plot generator. Since then, I have improved the model and included new features to the system. To celebrate this anniversary I would like to release a version of the program where people can experiment with the ER-Model in the domain of narrative generation. So, I would like to propose a tutorial about how to use MEXICA in order to study computational creativity using the ER-Model.
The tutorial will be organised as follows:
- A general review of the ER-Model
- A detailed description of the MEXICA program (all attendees will receive a copy of the system).
- Lots of exercises using MEXICA
- A competition between the attendees to see who generates the best MEXICA story.
I will need to contact the attendees in advance to ask them to prepare some material. For example, it is necessary that they bring some examples of stories written in MEXICA style; we will use them in some of the exercises. If they are not familiar at all with the ER-Model I might recommend some readings. Thus, it is necessary to encourage all those people interested in joining the tutorial to do it as soon as possible. MEXICA only runs on Windows (sorry!). It is necessary that all attendees bring their own computer.
