Assistive Technology for the Aesthetically Impaired

John Hart, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

We now have software for creating, editing and sharing media with very powerful features, but most of us have no idea how to use these features to make our media communicate and look better. I am a computer graphics researcher interested in finding ways of codifying applied art and design principles and analyzing media to determine when and how an artistic technique can be appropriately applied or suggested.

Visions for Euclase: Ideas for Supporting Creativity through Better Prototyping of Behaviors

Stephen Oney, Brad Myers, and John Zimmerman
Carnegie Mellon University

This paper outlines features of a development environment that would allow designers to be more creative when prototyping interactive applications. The first two authors are focused on making programming languages and environments easier to learn, more effective, and less error prone. The third author is focused on interactive design, identity through product interaction, research-through-design, and mixed-initiative interface design.

Enhancing Musicality In Computer Music Interfaces With Reality-Based Interaction Techniques

Chris kiefer, University of Sussex

I’m a musician and second year DPhil student from Brighton, UK, studying at the University of Sussex. I’m particularly interested in the nature of interaction between musicians and digital music tools, and in how to these tools can be designed to enable more fluid interaction between musician and machine. My submission is a computer vision and machine learning system that allows control of music software with hand movements.

Transforming Human Interaction with Virtual Worlds

Mary Pietrowicz, Robert McGrath, Ben Smith, and Guy Garnett
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

We are exploring novel human machine interfaces using a music performance paradigm as an interface with virtual worlds. The refined and highly practiced skills of these creative performers can help us understand, develop and design new transformative interfaces-perhaps entirely new approaches-to control the complex software systems associated with virtual worlds. In the hands of a musician, an extended virtual world becomes an extension of the performer, the instrument, the music, and the performance itself.

RiTa: Creativity Support for Computational Literature

Daniel Howe, Brown University

Daniel C. Howe is a digital artist and researcher at NYU's Media Research Lab. His talk at CHI2009 will present RiTa, a software toolkit designed to support creativity in the context of computational literature. He currently serves as Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.

Computational Support for Creativity via Capture and Access

Matthew Flagg, Christopher Skeels, and James Rehg
Georgia Institute of Technology

In this position paper, we argue that capture and access technology can provide a key form of computational support for the creative process. We will illustrate this claim using several examples from our previous work on projector-guided painting and sculpture systems. We also discuss our vision of the art studio of the future and how capture and access will play a central role in leading to its success in empowering creativity.

Freesound Radio: Supporting Music Creation by Exploration of a Sound Database

Gerard Roma, Perfecto Herrera, and Xavier Serra
Universitat Pompeu Fabra

We are interested in how social creativity emerges from sharing and remixing media on the web. We describe Freesound Radio, an experimental environment for collective music creation based on an interface that allows you to create and share sound compositions using sounds from Freesound.org

Creative 3D Form-Making in Visual Art and Visual Design for Science

Daniel Keefe, University of Minnesota

I am interested in combining the rich 3D input that we can capture from movement of our hands in space with interaction techniques and computation that allow us to interpret this input in useful ways. One example application I have been investigating is 3D modeling, both for art and for scientific visualization. In both contexts, direct 3D input from our hands seems to offer something new, allowing us to create exciting new styles of 3D form. We wonder as we move forward, how can computational tools help interpret the rich, free-form movements we can provide as input to the computer via our hands? How will the resulting techniques be utilized in creative visual design processes?

Computer as Audience: A Strategy for Artificial Intelligence Support of Human Creativity

Mark Riedl and Brian O’Neill
Georgia Institute of Technology

Mark Riedl and Brian O’Neill are interested in the intersection between AI and storytelling. Narrative is a cognitive tool used by humans for communication, sensemaking, entertainment, education, and training. Our goal is to develop intelligent computer systems that reason about narrative in order to be better communicators, entertainers, and educators. Our paper discusses initial thoughts on an intelligent system that supports human creativity during story authoring tasks via a novel interaction metaphor we call “computer-as-audience.”

Supporting Creativity Using Curious Agents

Rob Saunders, University of Sydney

This paper briefly examines the evidence for a link between creativity and curiosity and argues that one way to better support creative processes is to develop computational systems that incorporate models of curiosity. A scenario is presented for supporting creativity where a curious agent models a user's preference for novelty. The research presented sits within a broader project to computationally model curious behaviour to better understand its effects on individual and social creativity.

Supporting Compositional Creativity Using Automatic Style-Specific Accompaniment

Ching-Hua Chuan, Barry University

We describe an automatic style-specific accompaniment system and an interactive user interface for supporting creative music composition. The system provides users with an easy start by suggesting a refined accompaniment based on the examples given by users. Users can further explore the suggested composition via the manipulation of graphic interface. Besides style-specific accompaniment generation, Chuan's research interests include automated analysis and synthesis of music compositions and performances, interactive composition, and applications in music information retrieval.

Laptop Orchestras and Machine Learning in Real-time Music Performance

Rebecca Fiebrink¹, Perry Cook¹, Scott Smallwood¹, Dan Trueman¹, and Ge Wang²
Princeton University¹ and Stanford University²

We are researchers and musicians who investigate issues of interface design, programming languages, composition, and human-computer interaction in the context of the laptop orchestra. A particular current interest is the application of real-time, on-the-fly machine learning, which introduces new possibilities for computer music performance, composition, and instrument creation, and we are excited by the ways that real-time, expressive interactions with computers challenge us to apply an HCI perspective to the analysis and understanding of algorithms.

Creativity, Computation, and Interaction

Mary Lou Maher
University of Sydney and National Science Foundation

Computational creativity can be considered from two perspectives: the development of creative computational systems that simulate or mimic human creativity; and the development of interaction techniques and styles that enhance human creativity. Starting with a working definition of creativity, these two possibilities are explored with a curious agent that exhibits creative behavior followed by a study of a tangible workbench that enhances human creativity. I supervised these projects at the University of Sydney, prior to joining NSF in 2006 as a Program Director of the CreativeIT program.

Creating Visual Art Using Interactive Evolutionary Computation

Jimmy Secretan, University of Central Florida (Organizer)

In collaboration with the Evolutionary Complexity Lab at the University of Central Florida, Jimmy recently created picbreeder.org, an online service that allows users to collaboratively evolve images, supported by an Interactive Evolutionary Computation process. Picbreeder encourages users with diverse abilities in visual media creation to contribute to the collaborative construction of visual art by selecting variations on existing images. This work was presented at CHI 2008, and exemplifies Jimmy's interest in using machine learning tools to enable creativity support tools.