Serendipity Science

Serendipity is fundamental to science. This quirky and intriguing phenomenon permeates across scientific disciplines, including the medical sciences, psychological sciences, management and organizational sciences, innovation science, philosophy and library and information sciences. Why is it so ubiquitous? Because of what it facilitates and catalyzes: scientific discoveries from velcro to Viagra, innovation of all forms, unexpected encounters of useful information, novel and important ideas, and deep reflection on how we, as individuals, organizations, communities and societies can take leaps forwards by seizing unexpected opportunities and ‘making our own luck.

Conceptual Representations for Computational Concept Creation

Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized as creative. The creation of new concepts is a central challenge for any creative system. In this article, we outline different approaches to computational concept creation and then review conceptual representations relevant to concept creation, and therefore to computational creativity. The conceptual representations are organized in accordance with two important perspectives on the distinctions between them. One distinction is between symbolic, spatial and connectionist representations. The other is between descriptive and procedural representations. Additionally, conceptual representations used in particular creative domains, such as language, music, image and emotion, are reviewed separately. For every representation reviewed, we cover the inference it affords, the computational means of building it, and its application in concept creation.Peer reviewe

Computational creativity: an interdisciplinary approach to sequential learning and creative generations

Creativity seems mysterious; when we experience a creative spark, it is difficult to explain how we got that idea, and we often recall notions like ``inspiration" and ``intuition" when we try to explain the phenomenon. The fact that we are clueless about how a creative idea manifests itself does not necessarily imply that a scientific explanation cannot exist. We are unaware of how we perform certain tasks, such as biking or language understanding, but we have more and more computational techniques that can replicate and hopefully explain such activities. We should understand that every creative act is a fruit of experience, society, and culture. Nothing comes from nothing. Novel ideas are never utterly new; they stem from representations that are already in mind. Creativity involves establishing new relations between pieces of information we had already: then, the greater the knowledge, the greater the possibility of finding uncommon connections, and the more the potential to be creative. In this vein, a beneficial approach to a better understanding of creativity must include computational or mechanistic accounts of such inner procedures and the formation of the knowledge that enables such connections. That is the aim of Computational Creativity: to develop computational systems for emulating and studying creativity. Hence, this dissertation focuses on these two related research areas: discussing computational mechanisms to generate creative artifacts and describing some implicit cognitive processes that can form the basis for creative thoughts

In Search of a Common Thread: Enhancing the LBD Workflow with a view to its Widespread Applicability

Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) research focuses on discovering implicit knowledge linkages in existing scientific literature to provide impetus to innovation and research productivity. Despite significant advancements in LBD research, previous studies contain several open problems and shortcomings that are hindering its progress. The overarching goal of this thesis is to address these issues, not only to enhance the discovery component of LBD, but also to shed light on new directions that can further strengthen the existing understanding of the LBD work ow. In accordance with this goal, the thesis aims to enhance the LBD work ow with a view to ensuring its widespread applicability. The goal of widespread applicability is twofold. Firstly, it relates to the adaptability of the proposed solutions to a diverse range of problem settings. These problem settings are not necessarily application areas that are closely related to the LBD context, but could include a wide range of problems beyond the typical scope of LBD, which has traditionally been applied to scientific literature. Adapting the LBD work ow to problems outside the typical scope of LBD is a worthwhile goal, since the intrinsic objective of LBD research, which is discovering novel linkages in text corpora is valid across a vast range of problem settings. Secondly, the idea of widespread applicability also denotes the capability of the proposed solutions to be executed in new environments. These `new environments' are various academic disciplines (i.e., cross-domain knowledge discovery) and publication languages (i.e., cross-lingual knowledge discovery). The application of LBD models to new environments is timely, since the massive growth of the scientific literature has engendered huge challenges to academics, irrespective of their domain. This thesis is divided into five main research objectives that address the following topics: literature synthesis, the input component, the discovery component, reusability, and portability. The objective of the literature synthesis is to address the gaps in existing LBD reviews by conducting the rst systematic literature review. The input component section aims to provide generalised insights on the suitability of various input types in the LBD work ow, focusing on their role and potential impact on the information retrieval cycle of LBD. The discovery component section aims to intermingle two research directions that have been under-investigated in the LBD literature, `modern word embedding techniques' and `temporal dimension' by proposing diachronic semantic inferences. Their potential positive in uence in knowledge discovery is veri ed through both direct and indirect uses. The reusability section aims to present a new, distinct viewpoint on these LBD models by verifying their reusability in a timely application area using a methodical reuse plan. The last section, portability, proposes an interdisciplinary LBD framework that can be applied to new environments. While highly cost-e cient and easily pluggable, this framework also gives rise to a new perspective on knowledge discovery through its generalisable capabilities. Succinctly, this thesis presents novel and distinct viewpoints to accomplish five main research objectives, enhancing the existing understanding of the LBD work ow. The thesis offers new insights which future LBD research could further explore and expand to create more eficient, widely applicable LBD models to enable broader community benefits.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 202

Word Associations as a Language Model for Generative and Creative Tasks

In order to analyse natural language and gain a better understanding of documents, a common approach is to produce a language model which creates a structured representation of language which could then be used further for analysis or generation. This thesis will focus on a fairly simple language model which looks at word associations which appear together in the same sentence. We will revisit a classic idea of analysing word co-occurrences statistically and propose a simple parameter-free method for extracting common word associations, i.e. associations between words that are often used in the same context (e.g., Batman and Robin). Additionally we propose a method for extracting associations which are specific to a document or a set of documents. The idea behind the method is to take into account the common word associations and highlight such word associations which co-occur in the document unexpectedly often. We will empirically show that these models can be used in practice at least for three tasks: generation of creative combinations of related words, document summarization, and creating poetry. First the common word association language model is used for solving tests of creativity -- the Remote Associates test. Then observations of the properties of the model are used further to generate creative combinations of words -- sets of words which are mutually not related, but do share a common related concept. Document summarization is a task where a system has to produce a short summary of the text with a limited number of words. In this thesis, we will propose a method which will utilise the document-specific associations and basic graph algorithms to produce summaries which give competitive performance on various languages. Also, the document-specific associations are used in order to produce poetry which is related to a certain document or a set of documents. The idea is to use documents as inspiration for generating poems which could potentially be used as commentary to news stories. Empirical results indicate that both, the common and the document-specific associations, can be used effectively for different applications. This provides us with a simple language model which could be used for different languages.Kielimalleja käytetään usein luonnollisten kielten ja dokumenttien ymmärtämiseen. Kielimalli on kielen rakenteellinen esitysmuoto, jota voidaan käyttää kielen analyysiin tai sen tuottamiseen. Tässä työssä esitetään yksinkertainen kielimalli, joka perustuu assosiaatioihin sanojen välillä, jotka esiintyvät samassa lausessa. Ensin tutustumme klassiseen menetelmään analysoida sanojen yhteisesiintymiä tilastollisesti, jonka perusteella esittelemme parametri-vapaan menetelmän tuottaa yleisiä sana-assosiaatioita. Nämä sana-assosiaatiot ovat yhteyksiä sellaisten sanojen välillä, jotka esiintyvät samoissa asiayhteyksissä, kuten esimerkiksi Batman ja Robin. Lisäksi esittelemme menetelmän, joka tuottaa näitä assosiaatioita tietylle dokumentille tai joukolle dokumentteja. Menetelmä perustuu niiden sana-assosiaatioiden huomioimiseen, jotka ovat lähde-dokumenteissa erityisen yleisiä. Näytämme empiirisesti, että kielimallejamme voidaan käyttää ainakin kolmeen tarkoitukseen: luovien sanayhdistelmien tuottamiseen, dokumenttien referointiin ja runojen tuottamiseen. Ratkomme ensin yleisiin sana-assosiaatioihin perustuvalla mallillamme luovuutta testaavia Remote Associates -kokeita. Sen jälkeen tuotamme mallista tehtyjen havaintojen perusteella luovia sanayhdistelmiä. Nämä yhdistelmät sisältävät sanoja, jotka eivät välttämättä ole keskenään toisiinsa liittyviä, mutta ne jakavat joitakin yhdistäviä käsitteitä. Dokumentin referointi viittaa tehtävään, jossa pitää tuottaa rajoitetun pituinen lyhennelmä pidemmästä dokumentista. Esitämme menetelmän joka tuottaa eri kielillä tasoltaan kilpailukykyisiä referaatteja, käyttäen dokumenttikohtaisia sana-assosiaatioita sekä yksinkertaisia graafi-algoritmeja. Assosiaatioiden avulla voidaan tuottaa myös dokementtikohtaisia runoja. Dokumenttien inspiroimia runoja voitaisiin käyttää esimerkiksi uutisartikkeleiden kommentointiin. Tuloksemme niin yleisiin kuin dokumenttikohtaisiin assosiaatioihin perustuvista malleista osoittavat, että näitä malleja voidaan käyttää tehokkaasti eri käyttötarkoituksiin. Tuloksena on yksinkertainen kielimalli, jota voidaan käyttää useiden eri kielten kanssa

The Aha! Experience of Spatial Reorientation

The experience of spatial re-orientation is investigated as an instance of the wellknown phenomenon of the Aha! moment. The research question is: What are the visuospatial conditions that are most likely to trigger the spatial Aha! experience? The literature suggests that spatial re-orientation relies mainly on the geometry of the environment and a visibility graph analysis is used to quantify the visuospatial information. Theories from environmental psychology point towards two hypotheses. The Aha! experience may be triggered by a change in the amount of visual information, described by the isovist properties of area and revelation, or by a change in the complexity of the visual information associated with the isovist properties of clustering coefficient and visual control. Data from participants’ exploratory behaviour and EEG recordings are collected during wayfinding in virtual reality urban environments. Two types of events are of interest here: (a) sudden changes of the visuospatial information preceding subjects' response to investigate changes in EEG power; and (b) participants brain dynamics (Aha! effect) just before the response to examine differences in isovist values at this location. Research on insights, time-frequency analysis of the P3 component and findings from navigation and orientation studies suggest that the spatial Aha! experience may be reflected by: a parietal alpha power decrease associated with the switch of the representation and a frontocentral theta increase indexing spatial processing during decision-making. Single-trial time-frequency analysis is used to classify trials into two conditions based on the alpha/theta power differences between a 3s time-period before participants’ response and a time-period of equal duration before that. Behavioural results show that participants are more likely to respond at locations with low values of clustering coefficient and high values of visual control. The EEG analysis suggests that the alpha decrease/theta increase condition occurs at locations with significantly lower values of clustering coefficient and higher values of visual control. Small and large decreases in clustering coefficient, just before the response, are associated with significant differences in delta/theta power. The values of area and revelation do not show significant differences. Both behavioural and EEG results suggest that the Aha! experience of re-orientation is more likely to be triggered by a change in the complexity of the visual-spatial environment rather than a change in the amount, as measured by the relevant isovist properties

Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2

This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research. Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis. This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies