Calls

Short Papers

Computational Creativity (or CC) is a discipline with its roots in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Engineering, Design, Psychology and Philosophy that explores the potential for computers to be autonomous creators in their own right. ICCC is an annual conference that welcomes papers on different aspects of CC, on systems that exhibit varying degrees of creative autonomy, on systems that act as creative partners for humans, on frameworks that offer greater clarity or computational felicity for thinking about machine (and human) creativity, on methodologies for building or evaluating CC systems, on approaches to teaching CC in schools and universities or to promoting societal uptake of CC as a field and as a technology, and so on.

Important Dates

  • Deadline: May 2nd, 2023
  • Acceptance notification: May 19th, 2023
  • Camera-ready copies due: May 31st, 2023
  • Conference: June 19-23, 2023

The submission deadline for short papers is set after the long-paper notification, allowing authors to retool their long-paper submissions for this call.

Special topics

In addition to the topics listed in the subsequent section, this year we encourage submissions in the following areas. The aim is to explore overlaps between Computational Creativity and the following critical issues:

  • Climate Change: Climate change is an urgent issue that impacts all of us. What role can CC play in tackling this challenge? This year we would like to explore the overlap between Computational Creativity and the global climate crisis. We welcome submissions on systems that create, or engage in the creation of, creative artifacts (visual art, music, poetry, etc) that bring awareness to the climate change crisis. Other related research may include systems that propose creative solutions to the climate crisis, or any other valuable ideas that combine CC and the topic of climate change and environmental sustainability.
  • Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI): We welcome submissions that combine CC with issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. These are some of the questions behind this special topic:
    • How can Computational Creativity support DEI (e.g. increasing cultural diversity, reducing bias, etc.)?
    • How well do existing creative systems represent diversity?
    • What can we do to improve representation in creative machines and the artifacts that they are used to create?

Topics

Original research contributions are solicited in all areas related to Computational Creativity research and practice, including, but not limited to:

  • Application of Computational Creativity: Applications that address creativity in specific domains such as music, language, narrative, poetry, games, visual arts, graphic design, product design, architecture, entertainment, education, mathematical invention, scientific discovery, and programming.
  • Human-Machine Creativity: Applications and frameworks that allow for co-creativity between humans and machines, in which the machine acts as a meaningful creative partner.
  • Evaluation: Metrics, frameworks, formalisms and methodologies for the evaluation of creativity in computational systems, and for the evaluation of how systems are perceived in society.
  • Computational Models and Paradigms: Computational models of social aspects of creativity, including the relationship between individual and social creativity, diffusion of ideas, collaboration and creativity, formation of creative teams, and creativity in social settings. Computational paradigms for understanding creativity, including heuristic search, analogical and meta-level reasoning, and representation.
  • Interdisciplinary perspectives: Cognitive and psychological computational models of creativity, and their relation with existing cognitive architectures and psychological accounts; Perspectives on computational creativity which draw from philosophical and/or sociological studies in a context of creative intelligent systems.
  • Focus on data: Big data approaches to computational creativity; Resource development and data gathering/knowledge curation for creative systems, especially resources and data collections that are scalable, extensible and freely available as open-source materials.
  • Societal Impact: Ethical considerations in the design, deployment or testing of CC systems, as well as studies that explore the societal impact of CC systems.
  • Novel experiences & factors: Innovation, improvisation, virtuosity and related pursuits investigating the production of novel experiences and artifacts within a CC context. Computational accounts of factors that enhance creativity, including emotion, surprise (unexpectedness), reflection, conflict, diversity, motivation, knowledge, intuition, reward structures.
  • CC Provocations: Raising new issues that bring the foundations of the discipline into question or throw new light on seemingly settled ones.

New papers reflecting all computational approaches and perspectives on creativity are welcome, including e.g., symbolic approaches, neural and statistical approaches, hybrid approaches, big-data approaches, rule-based approaches, curated approaches, and so on. The onus is on authors to argue and/or explicitly demonstrate the relevance of their work to the topic of computational creativity. Manuscripts should be exclusively submitted to ICCC, and may only be under review for ICCC for the duration of the review process. All papers should be in-scope and comply with scientific norms. The program chairs reserve the right to fast review papers that do not abide by these requirements.

Difference between long and short papers

Short papers are intended to share new directions and ideas, spark debate, and enrich the conference and program, without the same evaluation and rigor requirements of long papers. They are not merely long papers with fewer pages. To this end, different review criteria will be applied to long and short papers.

Short Paper Types

Short papers offer concise treatments of work and ideas that are better suited to this concentrated format. We anticipate submissions in the short paper category along any or all of the following lines:

  • Debate Sparks: The short paper format is ideal for provocations that get the community talking. Is there some aspect of CC that you feel deserves more attention from the community?
  • System Demonstrations: Submissions for the show-and-tell session can be described in a short paper.
  • CC Translations: Researchers in other fields often do work that we in CC would see as related to our own. We invite those researchers to present such work at ICCC, via a Translations short paper. This is submitted as an extended abstract that summarizes your work in another field.
  • Nuggets and Gems: short papers on any topic of CC for which one might consider a long paper. In this case, the work will be succinct enough, or at an early enough stage, to warrant the short paper format.
  • Late Breaking Results: The results of your work (empirical or system-related) may not have been ready for a long-paper submission. Consider submitting that work now in a short-paper format.
  • CC Bridges: Research communities often retreat into silos and fail to reach out beyond their own borders. A bridging short paper explicitly seeks to create bridges to another field, to foster interdisciplinarity. Unlike a Translations paper, a Bridge is written by a CC researcher wishing to introduce new ideas from beyond our conventional horizons.
  • Pilot Studies: Have you conducted an initial foray into a research topic that deserves attention? Plant a flag for your research with a short paper.
  • Grand Challenges: Do you have a proposal for a task that can bring large parts of the community together in a productive collaborative effort?
  • Meta-Perspectives: Do your experience of the CC community (such as our conferences, workshops, reviewing processes, etc.) move you to write an analysis of how we might do things differently and better?
  • Field and event reports: Have you taken your CC research into the field, where practitioners and/or commercial partners have explored its uses first hand? Consider writing a short paper about your experiences.

    Have you organized a CC-flavored event – a workshop, a tutorial, a seminar series, a postgraduate course, a public debate, an exhibition of CC outputs, or related outreach activity? Consider writing a short paper on your experience and that of your audience.

Submission, Paper and Presentation Format

  • All short papers have the same length restriction (4 pages not including references), and may focus on any of the same themes or topics as long papers.
  • Papers should be anonymized and submitted as a PDF document formatted according to ICCC style (which is similar to AAAI and IJCAI formats). You can download the updated ICCC’22 template [here].
  • Submissions must be done before the deadline through the EasyChair platform: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=iccc23.
  • To be included in the proceedings, each paper must be presented at the conference by one of the authors. This means that at least one author will have to register and participate in the session in which their paper is presented, including the designated question-and-answer period.
  • In order to ensure the highest level of quality, all submissions will be peer-reviewed and evaluated in terms of their scientific, technical, artistic and/or cultural contribution, and therefore there will be only one format for submission. However, the program committee will decide, for each submission, the most appropriate format for presentation: talk, poster, or system demonstration.

All authors of accepted papers can opt to also show a demo of their system or prototype during the conference. You will be asked if you are interested in this option during the submission process.