Characteristics of Pro-c Analogies and Blends between Research Publications

Dr Inventor is a tool that aims to enhance the professional (Pro-c) creativity of researchers by suggesting novel hypotheses, arising from analogies between publications. Dr Inventor processes original research documents using a combination of lexical analysis and cognitive computation to identify novel comparisons that suggest new research hypotheses, with the objective of supporting a novel research publication. Research on analogical reasoning strongly suggests that the value of analogy-based comparisons depends primarily on the strength of the mapping (or counterpart projection) between the two analogs. An evaluation study of a number of computer generated comparisons attracted creativity ratings from a group of practising researchers. This paper explores a variety of theoretically motivated metrics operating on different conceptual spaces, identifying some weak associations with user's creativity ratings. Surprisingly, our results show that metrics focused on the mapping appear to have less relevance to creativity than metrics assessing the inferences (blended space). This paper includes a brief description of a research project currently exploring the best research hypothesis generated during this evaluation. Finally, we explore PCA as a means of specifying a combined multiple metrics from several blending spaces as a basis for detecting comparisons to enhance researchers’ creativity

Dr. Inventor, Promoting Scientific Creativity by Utilising Web-based Research Objects, FP7

Scientific creativity and innovation represent the beating heart of European growth at a time of rapid technological change. Dr Inventor is built on the vision that technologies have great potential to supplement human ingenuity in science by overcoming the limitations that people suffer in pursuing scientific discovery. It presents an original system that will provide inspiration for scientific creativity by utilising the rich presence of web-based research resources. Dr Inventor will act as a personal research assistant, utilising machine-empowered search and computation to bring researchers extended perspectives for scientific innovation by informing them of a broad spectrum of relevant research concepts and approaches, by assessing the novelty of research ideas, and by offering suggestions of new concepts and workflows with unexpected features for new scientific discovery. Dr Inventor is an attempt to understand the potential of technology in the scientific creative process within current technology limitations. It represents a sound balance between scientific insight into individual scientific creative processes and technical implementation using innovative technologies in information extraction, document summarization, semantics and visual analytics. The outcomes will be integrated into a web-based system that will allow evaluation in a selected research area under real-world settings with carefully designed metrics, benchmarks and baseline for creative performance, leading to tangible measurements on the performance of the technologies in enhancing human creativity and a blueprint for future technologies in computational creativity. Dr Inventor has huge implications for scientific innovation in Europe, as it has the potential to change the way in which scientific research is undertaken. The acceptance of the system by general research communities will open opportunities for many industrial sectors, leading to reinforced leadership of European industry