Retiring the 'someone please fund my phd' label

Got two years funding for my phd :) from my department at Sussex. 

The news came totally out of the blue, just as I was preparing to start the round of funding applications again. Wonderful news!

Word frequencies: some fun

Having just written a paper on how the frequency of a word in a document can give us an idea of the semantics of that document, I thought it would be fun to run my paper through word cloud software, to summarise it by frequency... here is the result (courtesy of http://www.wordle.net)

Definitions of creativity: common words used

This word cloud is the result of an analysis of definitions of creativity. It highlights the words used most commonly by people when defining what creativity is, in short dictionary-style definitions.

I took 23 online definitions of creativity (retrieved via a Google search, either in the form of a dictionary entry or as a brief definition of creativity). These definitions were merged together in one text file and fed through the online analysis tool at www.wordle.net, resulting in the word cloud pictured.

Besides the obvious appearance of words such as 'creativity', words which appear prominently include new, originality, ability, imaginative, process, produce, ideas and so on. The results show which words we commonly use to describe what creativity is. This gives us a good idea of what factors to examine further when deciding whether something is creative or not.

This work was based on brief definitions of creativity of one or a few sentences long, maximum one paragraph.

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?

Journals

Went to a fairly non-eventful research training session today, on scientific writing. Beyond this quite useful wikiversity link on how to write in a scientific way, the only real benefit I got from this (apart from a break from marking!) was to think about what journals I want to be aiming for, for publication.

As my research focus has shifted away from music and towards creativity and evaluation this year, many of the journals I have been used to looking at have become less relevant. So now I've set up some content alerts for some new journals and need to get used to looking at different journals (ideally I want to set aside some time for this each week to browse some journal content).

Here's a list of the journals that are quite relevant for me (along with some journals on music/AI that I prob will still find interesting but not necessarily useful for my current work):

• Creativity Research Journal (impact factor 0.57)
• Lecture notes in AI
• Lecture notes in CS (probably not so relevant anymore really)
  
• Leonardo (and related journals)
  
• Digital Creativity
  
• Cognitive Science (impact factor 2.179)
  
• Topics in Cognitive Science (impact factor 9.389)
  
• Cognitive Science: A multidisciplinary journal
  
• Minds and Machines
  
• Journal of Creative Behaviour (0.429) (we don't get it)
  
• Creativity
  
• Creative Review (not peer reviewed, doesn't look that relevant)
  
• Psychology of aesthetics, creativity and the arts
  
• Evaluation
  
• Evaluation review
  
• Research evaluation
  
  
• AISB quarterly (not really a journal..!)

Music-related journals:

• Journal of New Music Research
  
• Computer Music Journal
  
• Psychology of Music
  
• Music Perception
  
• Musicae Scientae
  
• Journal of interdisciplinary music studies
  
• Journal of music and meaning
• Contemporary music review