Today I defined creativity... Here's the definition

Here are the results of some work that I have been doing to capture in words a definition of creativity, as we understand and use the word 'creativity'.


[Ok so the timing in the title of this blog post is perhaps a little misleading... Rome wasn't built in a day and I didn't do this work all in one day... ]

The idea behind this work is that when we talk about what creativity is, certain words keep on cropping up as they are strongly associated with creativity. If we can capture those words, then they will collectively form a definition of creativity.

What I have done is to analyse discussions of creativity, to find what words appear significantly more often in such discussions (compared to discussions on unrelated topics). This gave me a list of 374 words. I've condensed this list by grouping words together that mean similar things and analysing the results, identifying 20 themes in the words.

Here are my results: 20 aspects of creativity. I propose that the combination of these 20 aspects collectively form a definition of creativity.

What do you think?

MY DEFINITION OF CREATIVITY

As an aside - for those who like to see the nuts and bolts of research:
The main word clusters identified during this
work, that assisted my work along the way

2nd International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC'11)

The call for papers is out for the 2nd international conference in computational creativity, to be held in Mexico in April 2011.

I'm planning to submit a paper containing my thesis work in a 'nutshell' (well, the work up to December 2010, when the submission deadline is).

Should be pretty good practice for summarising the key points of my thesis - plus if it gets accepted it will be a great way to promote what my thesis is going to be about, and get some feedback before submitting, with the people who are the target audience for my PhD. So far, people I've spoken to in this research community have been quite interested in what I'm doing, so hopefully there will be a good level of interest in my work at this conference.

Creativity and Cognition conference 2009, Berkeley, California

Here's my 1-page summary of my research, which I am presenting in California in October. The work I'm presenting is starting to develop again nicely, with some case studies which I'll probably blog about in the next few posts.

back on track...

Its been a strange month or so, trying to reassess where I am and whats happening with my phd.

In good news, my submission to the graduate symposium for the Creativity and Cognition Conference got accepted, along with some fairly substantial funding to go to California in October.

I'm rescaling what I am doing slightly, examining a particular domain as a test case for assessing creativity, then using this practical work to consider creativity more widely (although this consideration may not be practically realised in this PhD work).

One of my major problems with the assessment criteria suggested by Graeme Ritchie (2007, 2001) is that while it appears to be a methodology for assessing creativity, in practice it is too unspecified to produce meaningful results. As Ritchie is proposing a framework for anything creative, by definition he has to keep the framework generic and cannot define particular parts of the framework (such as: various measurements of the level of novelty in this program's output must be above the threshold of {theta} in order to satisfy certain criteria - so what is {theta}?)

My work suffered from the same criticism: by being very generalisable, it ended up saying almost nothing? It needed more surrounding context to ground it.

So now I'm concentrating on musical creativity again, specifically in jazz improvisation as its an area that interests me within music and there are a number of jazz generation systems of interest, which I am looking up:

• Philip Johnson Laird's work
• GenJam by Al Biles
• Paul Hodgson's various jazz generation systems (described in his 2006 DPhil thesis)
  
• Jeff Pressing
• etc: I'm sure I'm missing lots out...
  

At the same time, I'm going to continue thinking about what is important for something to be considered creative.

Rather than looking for an over-arching and complete classification system for creativity though, I am looking for the important themes that are incorporated in creativity. With a few different practical projects on how to find these themes, added to my own intuitions on what is important, I'll identify a small set, test that set to see how it matches to human assessments of creativity, then re-juggle the set as necessary.

Graeme Ritchie's assessment methodology will be a starting point for me, although I think that what I end up with will be quite different from his suggestions.

I have to bear in mind that what turns out to be important for judging jazz generation systems may well be less important for other domains of creativity (in fact this is almost certainly going to be the case). But I shall cross that bridge when I come to it, rather than worrying about it too much in advance.

References
G. Ritchie. Assessing creativity. In Proceedings of AISB Symposium on AI and Creativity in Arts and Science, 2001.
G. Ritchie. Some empirical criteria for attributing creativity to a computer program. Minds and Machines, 17:67–99, 2007.

2nd year review

Well...

Having been on the receiving end of almost continuous criticism of my work, in my annual review yesterday, I am now at a bit of a loss as to what to do next.

Although I was expecting a bit of a grilling, I hadn't realised quite how much my proposals would get attacked. Although some of the comments were based upon my having not explained certain things properly (for example stressing that the factors I break creativity down into must be more clearly defined than creativity itself, otherwise how do you measure those factors and what benefit is there for that factor being included?), other comments were far more fundamental, questioning my entire approach.

I've gone from having a very clear idea of what I'm doing and why, and a real focus and motivation, to feeling quite lost again. Now I want to arrange a meeting with my supervisors sooner rather than later, as at this stage I wanted to be really getting on with practical work rather than still questioning what exactly I'm doing.

I guess watch this space?

Time plan for work for the next 18 months...

This timeplan looks super organised but was actually the result of a long train journey, the back of an envelope, a desire to stop reading papers and a slight panic about whether it was even possible to finish my PhD in three years. Time will tell - but now I have some real motivation to stick to this plan - it shows it may even be possible! Here's hoping I stick to it...

workshop - writing up your DPhil or PhD thesis

My officemate persuaded me to go to this workshop, as we are both starting to think about the reality of the looming PhD thesis write up. This was the experiences of a post-doc researcher, on her writing up stage of her doctoral research.
Well worth going to this, even though we are both in our second year - I think that is the ideal time to go to a workshop like this as there is enough time to plan and consider, with the luxury of time still. Here's a summary of what was mentioned in the workshop, along with extra thoughts I had during the workshop.

General observations / motivation

• Keep the end goal in mind
• Whole process of writing up can maybe take 3 or 4 months or more, but if you do little bits as you go then it gets easier, and you can break it down a bit.
• Enjoy the process of becoming an expert in your field!
• Track progress to keep motivated, remember the bigger picture. Zoe suggested keeping a chart of progress on your desk as a visual representation of progress.
  

Planning and Organising the write-up

• Always keep in mind the thread of your thesis, what story are you telling? Keep this prominent throughout.
• Keep on looking for gaps in the story and aim for continuity
• Keep records of what you do so you don't have to redo that work later
• A useful software for graphs might be CollidaGraph (for mac) or Prism (for PC) (although Matlab seems pretty ok for my stuff so far)
• Make a timetable, especially by working backwards from a deadline to make the time left seem more real. Factor in LOTS of extra time like printing time, admin, time for supervisors to give feedback, plus 'timeout' time in between reviews
• For my two supervisors, is it worth giving them a chapter at a time or the thesis all in one go - closer to the time, double check what they prefer
• Regular meetings with supervisors help to keep you on track, especially if you give them a piece of work each time and ask them to return the last piece of work at the same time?
• Examiners - who do I want (I have some ideas for external examiners, not a clue for internal examiners)

Writing

• Introduction chapter should be an introduction to this thesis, rather than a literature review, for example. Say what you're writing about, what's the story you're telling, your motivation for this study and summarise what's in the thesis.
• Latex/Bibtex looks to be likely to save a LOT of hassle with formatting etc, especially if I can find a template for Sussex DPhil theses, which someone said might exist... (I've just spent a bit of time sorting out papers I've saved on my computer, and sorting out/updating a references bibtex page for these - at the time it felt like procrastination but actually now I think I'll find papers a lot easier)
  
• Get started with whatever chapter seems easiest. Break everything down into chunks
• The thesis isn't a descriptive account of the last three years' work, its a coherent description of a fully mature research project
• Save each chapter separately with an annotation of date for that version and probably the filename its stored under as well - as a footer for each page, perhaps?
• Check university formatting rules (so that template for latex would be amazing, if it exists?)
• Before the first draft, make a VERY detailed chapter plan. Break it down into chunks that are clearly defined in scope. Max 3 levels of subheadings was recommended.
  
• Concentrate the initial effort on thesis structure rather than on the detail in the text of the first draft - as the text is likely to be revised considerably in later drafts. Just write a draft and get it onto paper
• Writing style: Keep It Simple Stupid! Be concise and don't talk a load of circular woffle. Don't try to sound clever... Active voice is often better than passive voice.
  
• For a bit of variety in the writing, vary the length of the sentences (particularly if this tends to be quite uniform).
  
• How can I use pictures/graphs/tables/other visuals most effectively? The whole 'picture paints a thousand words' thing comes into mind here...
• Pay attention to little details - it suggests the work being described has been approached in a similar vein
• Lengthwise - about 200 pages is a ballpark figure. Decent chunk of words (maybe 10,000) for the introduction, similar for the discussion (maybe 7000)
• Make sure each part fits together as a story, refer between sections as necessary (without making the reader flit back and forth constantly

Submission

• Worth talking to previous DPhil students about the process - not well documented
• At least 2 months before submission, hand an 'intention to submit' form in with an abstract (to allow the university to contact potential examiners and sort out any difficulties)
• Useful contact at Sussex House: Penny King
• Initially hand in 3 soft bound copies and make a further copy for yourself for the viva.
• Then if the viva is successful, after corrections, hard bound copies get done.
  

To do list for the rest of this week

PhD related:

• Read through the sections on algorithmic composition again in the Roads book, to follow up on the work I've been doing
• Go back to the Graeme Ritchie paper on evaluating creativity using quantitative methods (+ related papers such as the one by Pease et al from an earlier conference)
  
• Do a search on papers discussing evaluation in creativity
• Do a brain storm on what the boundaries of my PhD are
• Read relevant sections in the following books, then RETURN them: Computers and Creativity, Tree of Knowledge
• Go through Nick's chapter(s) again and actually make some notes this time
  
• Do a brain storm on the story-telling project and what has come out of it
• Read one cheeky little sound synthesis article, just to keep this fresh in my mind as I seem to be making progress here :)
  

Funding related:

• Fill out and send off Hilda Martindale fund form
• Print out forms for Richard Stapley Fund and FfWG
• Get BFWG form and any other app forms I still need to get
  
• Update blog with current applications list
  

Non-PhD related:

• MARKING :( logic programming, advanced tech communications, careers development courses
  
• Fill out presentation marks for program design
  
• RC work
• Arrange flute lesson for potential new pupil - DONE while I'm writing this! :)

Times they are a changin...

It's been a busy few days or so in the land of Anna's PhD.

I've been really worrying about how I'm half way through my study in terms of time and seem to have done barely nothing towards a thesis. After a meeting with my supervisor yesterday which pretty much highlighted that, at first I came away very disheartened with everything and locked myself in the library for a bit. But today after a good gig last night and seeing friends, I feel so much more positive.

I've done some major clearing up things since then:

• Cleared my shelf of most of the library books which I 'perhaps maybe' might get round to reading... what's the point in holding onto books when I don't feel like I've got enough time or brain cells to get through the essential reading?
  
• Called a halt to one of the projects I'm working on, one which relates GOFAI story generation to music generation - I am hitting so many obstacles with it and it's not central enough to my PhD to warrant any more attention. I am going to write up the work I've done and the conclusions I've drawn from doing this work, both as an exercise in academic writing and to document my work so it's not wasted. If there were no dead ends in research then I guess it wouldn't be as much fun?
• Been very honest about exactly what I do and don't want to achieve in my PhD research (why cram a whole lifetime's worth of research into one degree and eventually fail because of the enormity of it all?)
  
• Done some serious thinking about what I want my thesis to contribute - gonna do a bit more brainstorming on this and open my mind up but I want to focus it much more on the thorny problem of evaluating the presence and amount of creativity being demonstrated by a selection of 'creative' computational systems.

Obviously it's really time to get some serious work done now, so I'll finish writing this and clear some things off my to do list. Speaking of which...

How real life invades the best laid plans...

Of course I didn't do everything on my list of things-to-do (from my previous posts). That is what such overly ambitious lists are designed for.

Perhaps this is why I constantly feel like I'm falling behind with my work, because I plan to do too much and then never accomplish it? Or, maybe that's not the case - I just wrote that last sentence and disagreed with it in my head almost straightaway. I know that I plan ridiculous amounts of work, but I guess I see that as more of a way to prompt myself to do more with my time - there is never an end to the to-do list (if there was then how boring would life become!)

What I need to focus on is less procrastination time, more actual work. I really hope this blog isn't linked to procrastination time - currently it isn't but I guess it's another potential distraction.

The most effective thing for me is to plan my time hour by hour, I find - that way I don't drift into no-man's land timewise.

This week is a bit crazy (as always - I love my life!) I'm doing a musical all week. So we're meeting at 5pm in town. With my bus going once an hour, that means I need to leave campus at 4pm. so between 11.40 and 3.40, that gives me 4 hours of work. And I need to:

• sort out funding deadlines.
• read Nick's chapters (got really into one of them then forgot it all)
• read Seda's chapter for her English - this is my housemate who is doing a PhD in theatre studies, she wants a native speaker to look over her language use. I can't possibly imagine doing a PhD in another language other than my native language, I'm in awe of her for this.
• Have a skim read of a linguistics book, to get a bit of background on some topics there.
• Work out a basic application text for the seminar series in interdisciplinary music research that we want to set up in Brighton

I'll print this out, and assign times for it. Then stick to it!!! (possibly)

The rest of this week's work

PhD related:

• Fix the bug I've got in my EmergingVoices music program
• Read one more paper (or just abstracts) and BibTex it
• Apply for workshop with AHRC for applying for a student led initiative fund
• Go through all sources of funding and find out deadlines, update my blog posts with deadlines
  

Non-PhD related

• Marking for the logic course
• Learn charts for a gig on Saturday night
• work for rc
• Give Leon a flute lesson :)
  

Follow up on the week's plan of work I posted a week and a half ago...

Lets see... as of a week and a half later:

* Revive the emergence Java program I wrote at the end of last term - YES
* Add the results of my Music Spin survey into my LISP program and get some music out of it? (probably that won't happen this week...) - NOPE - GOT STUCK
* Do a little reading into cognitive linguistics-type content - particularly to skim through the rest of the Fauconnier and Turner book and to learn about Image schemas - ISH - WENT BACK TO BASICS A BIT ON THIS
* Clear 5 papers from my to-read pile (prob just reading abstracts and updating my Bibtex notes for future) - HAHA NO! JUST 2 PAPERS
* Have a quick read through the chapter of the book my supervisor is writing, see what I think - HAVE STARTED THIS BUT NOT DONE MUCH
* Read Chris's paper (Chris is who I share an office with) - probably too late now to give him feedback on what he's written before the deadline but still would be good to read it - NOPE SORRY CHRIS
* Read 2 articles from the Synth Secrets series - READ ONE LAST WEEK, JUST FINISHED READING ONE NOW
* A bit of Cope reading? - NOPE

Also, non-DPhil related:

* Talk with Chris about the seminars we want to set up - YES - THIS COULD BE QUITE EXCITING... WORKING ON THIS IDEA NOW
* approach more people about setting up communication across departments (that reminds me, should reply to Stefan's email!) - NOT REALLY - ALTHOUGH WE AS A RESEARCH GROUP ARE NOW LISTED ON THE DEPARTMENTAL WEBSITE. HAVE HAD SOME GOOD CORRESPONDENCE WITH STEFAN KOELSCH AND STAV (ONE OF STEFAN'S PHD STUDENTS IN PSYCHOLOGY) BUT NOT YET APPROACHED ANYONE ELSE
* CDEC marking - DONE (PHEW)
* work for rc - DONE LAST WEEKS BUT NOT THIS WEEKS
* Go through and get deadlines for the funding opportunities I've identified (or send off for application forms if necessary) - DAMN REALLY SHOULD DO THIS SOON. RIGHT. GONNA DO IT TOMORROW AFTER I FINISH THE MARKING I'VE GOT TO DO FOR THE LOGIC COURSE

random wanderings in research

I'm not sure I still agree with the point I made in the last post, about how following up random leads is probably just a waste of time.

If research always followed a directed, carefully planned route without any deviations (or wild goose chases) then it could almost be automated - and then what would the point be in having researchers in the first place?

For example, with Owen Holland's talk yesterday, the vast majority of actual implementation seems to have been done by his phd students and research assistants (that was the impression I got from how he presents it, anyway) But without his original ideas and visions, the whole project wouldn't ever have happened.

Perhaps my problem really is that I never seem to follow a directed, carefully planned route in my work, and that I'm struggling to knuckle down to the real implementation work once I've finished devising what I'm going to do (but don't have anyone employed to do that work for me!)

So I'll make sure I make time for the random deviations... but make it the minority of time rather than the majority it seems to take at present.

busy day or not busy day; that is the question

So today I:

• taught for an hour;
  
• did some non-phd related work (prep and rc) (yes I know that means nothing to anyone except me);
  
• faffed for a bit and procrastinated; tried and failed to understand what conceptual blending is (although Sandra might yet again be able to come to my aid with some slides she's done to help her understand it herself);
• swopped my conceptual blending book for a much lighter and easier-to-read introduction to cognitive linguistics (although I haven't opened it yet)
  
• went to a COGS seminar given by Owen Holland (Essex) about conscious robots with internal models that are behaviour-based (not convinced, despite Owen Holland's very entertaining presentation style - seems like he and his team have pretty much just managed to match what he was criticising - a lot of cognising for very little actual result. But I'm quite sympathetic to the concept of using abstractions as he was talking about - I don't _need_to see robots knocking over barriers and he did come up with some fascinating ideas about different levels of abstraction working together and that being some indicator of consciousness)
• printed out (but didn't read) one of the sound synthesis articles

I do seem to have this real problem of either procrastinating, or getting diverted from the real work in hand by some little side idea of mine. Even though I've got two serious programs I'm working on, all I managed to do on those today was to open the Lisp IDE that I use to write one of the programs in. That's fairly pathetic!

As an example, the cognitive linguistics reading I was doing today was following up on a vague theory I've got: taking principles used in cognitive linguistics and making them more abstract so they apply to music, and in theory, a more general level of human creativity (given my very limited knowledge of cognitive linguistics and an interest in the shared processes between language and music creation).

Really I'm stumbling around in the dark a little with this. Instead I should be concentrating on the programs I've been looking forward to writing, or reading some of the more relevant literature surrounding the work that I'm supposed to be focussing on. But I can't let this little niggling interest go just yet.

What I am going to do though, is to skim read the intro-to-cognitive-linguistics book as quickly as I can (literally I don't want to take more than a few hours), then I plan to go to the lectures given on Cognitive Linguistics, so that I can get my overview from there rather than struggling through all the reading in something that might just be a wild goose chase.

There, so at least I'm being honest with what I'm doing in a day and facing up to what I need to do differently... this blog is turning out to be pretty useful for me in getting me more focussed and efficient in my work. Pretty tedious as blogs go, but I don't care - it's my blog and I'll use it best as I can.

But now my head hurts from thinking about robots that are conscious, modelling the world at multiple levels, ignoring the 'binding problem' (how do we go from the eye receiving lightwaves to seeing objects, with properties, that match concepts in our head), acknowledging ambiguity in human systems as we try to model them... enough for one day. Hopefully my brain cells will be more productively engaged tomorrow.

Plans for this week's work

After the unexpected but exciting 'snow day' off yesterday, I now have 4 days ahead officially (and 2 unofficially) to plan work for. If I actually put this plan somewhere public rather than hiding it on the whiteboard behind my desk I might actually stick to it...! So this week I want to:

• Revive the emergence Java program I wrote at the end of last term
• Add the results of my Music Spin survey into my LISP program and get some music out of it? (probably that won't happen this week...)
• Do a little reading into cognitive linguistics-type content - particularly to skim through the rest of the Fauconnier and Turner book and to learn about Image schemas
• Clear 5 papers from my to-read pile (prob just reading abstracts and updating my Bibtex notes for future)
• Have a quick read through the chapter of the book my supervisor is writing, see what I think
• Read Chris's paper (Chris is who I share an office with) - probably too late now to give him feedback on what he's written before the deadline but still would be good to read it
• Read 2 articles from the Synth Secrets series
  
• A bit of Cope reading?

Also, non-DPhil related:

• Talk with Chris about the seminars we want to set up
• approach more people about setting up communication across departments (that reminds me, should reply to Stefan's email!)
• CDEC marking
• work for rc
• Go through and get deadlines for the funding opportunities I've identified (or send off for application forms if necessary)

Phew that should keep me busy. Lets see if putting this online helps me achieve more. I'll print this post off now and stick it up by my desk.