A Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems: Computational Creativity Evaluation Based on What it is to be Creative

Computational creativity is a flourishing research area, with a variety of creative systems being produced and developed. Creativity evaluation has not kept pace with system development with an evident lack of systematic evaluation of the creativity of these systems in the literature. This is partially due to difficulties in defining what it means for a computer to be creative; indeed, there is no consensus on this for human creativity, let alone its computational equivalent. This paper proposes a Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems (SPECS). SPECS is a three-step process: stating what it means for a particular computational system to be creative, deriving and performing tests based on these statements. To assist this process, the paper offers a collection of key components of creativity, identified empirically from discussions of human and computational creativity. Using this approach, the SPECS methodology is demonstrated through a comparative case study evaluating computational creativity systems that improvise music

Modelling creativity: identifying key components through a corpus-based approach

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of academic papers on the topic. Words are identified which appear significantly often in connection with discussions of the concept. Using a measure of lexical similarity to help cluster these words, a number of distinct themes emerge, which collectively contribute to a comprehensive and multi-perspective model of creativity. The components provide an ontology of creativity: a set of building blocks which can be used to model creative practice in a variety of domains. The components have been employed in two case studies to evaluate the creativity of computational systems and have proven useful in articulating achievements of this work and directions for further research

Medical students' perceptions of the educational environment at an Iranian Medical Sciences University

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Students' perceptions of their educational environment have a significant impact on their behavior and academic progress. The aim of this study was to assess the perceptions of medical students concerning their educational environment at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences in Iran.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this cross-sectional study, questionnaires were distributed to 210 medical students and 182 were analyzed (response rate = 86.6%); twenty-eight questionnaires were excluded because they were incomplete or unreturned for analysis. Data were collected using a DREEM questionnaire which comprised 50 items based on the Likert scale (scores could range from 0 to 200). There were five domains to the questionnaire including students' perceptions of learning, students' perceptions of teachers, students' academic self-perceptions, students' perceptions of atmosphere and students' social self-perceptions. Data were analyzed using SPSS16 software.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The mean age of the subjects was 21.7 years (SD = 2.7); 38.5% were male and 61.5% were female. Students' perceptions of learning, students' perceptions of teachers, students' academic self-perceptions, students' perceptions of atmosphere, students' social self-perceptions and total DREEM score were 21.2/48, 24.2/44, 15.8/32, 23.8/48, 14.5/28 and 99.6/200, respectively. There was no significant difference between male and female students in educational environment subscales, but there were significant differences between students enrolled on a basic sciences and pathophysiology course and those enrolled on a clinical course in terms of perceptions of learning, academic self-perceptions, perceptions of atmosphere and overall perceptions of educational environment (p < 0.05). The latter group rated each of the aforementioned aspects more highly than the students studying basic science and pathophysiology.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Overall, respondents assessed the educational environment as average. Therefore, improvements are required across all five domains of the educational environment.</p

«Prozessintelligenz» : Gegenstand und Ziele der Studie

«Intelligente Prozesse, «intelligentes Prozessmanagement», «iBPM» sind Schlagworte, die in erster Linie eingesetzt werden, um Technologien zu vermarkten. Die Begriffe lassen viel Raum für Interpretation und Assoziationen. Können Unternehmen den Hype ignorieren oder bietet «Prozessintelligenz» die Chance, das Prozessmanagement aus einem anderen Blickwinkel zu betrachten und weiterzuentwickeln? Doch was ist Prozessintelligenz? Welche Lösungsansätze, Erfahrungen und Erfolgsmuster gibt es bereits in Unternehmen? Welche Methoden und Werkzeuge kommen zum Einsatz, um Prozesse «intelligenter» zu machen? Diesen Fragen hat sich die Business-Process-Management-Studie 2015 gestellt, mit der das Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik der Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften School of Management and Law seit 2011 regelmässig Status quo und Best Practices im deutschsprachigen Raum erhebt

Becoming original: effects of strategy instruction

Visual arts education focuses on creating original visual art products. A means to improve originality is enhancement of divergent thinking, indicated by fluency, flexibility and originality of ideas. In regular arts lessons, divergent thinking is mostly promoted through brainstorming. In a previous study, we found positive effects of an explicit instruction of metacognition on fluency and flexibility in terms of the generation of ideas, but not on the originality of ideas. Therefore, we redesigned the instruction with a focus on building up knowledge about creative generation strategies by adding more complex types of association, and adding generation through combination and abstraction. In the present study, we examined the effects of this intervention by comparing it with regular brainstorming instruction. In a pretest-posttest control group design, secondary school students in the comparison condition received the brainstorm lesson and students in the experimental condition received the newly developed instruction lesson. To validate the effects, we replicated this study with a second cohort. The results showed that in both cohorts the strategy instruction of 50 min had positive effects on students' fluency, flexibility and originality. This study implies that instructional support in building up knowledge about creative generation strategies may improve students' creative processes in visual arts education

Nexos recíprocos entre desarrollo humano y crecimiento económico

En este artículo se presenta un análisis descriptivo, explicativo y reflexivo de la relación recíproca entre desarrollo humano y crecimiento económico. Por un lado el crecimiento económico promueve el desarrollo humano a medida que la base de recursos se amplía, en tanto que un mayor desarrollo humano genera más crecimiento económico en la medida que una población más sana y educada contribuye a mejorar el desempeño económico. El propósito de este estudio consiste en fundamentar teóricamente la relación de cadenas existentes entre desarrollo humano y crecimiento económico. La investigación, es documental, se centra en la revisión bibliográfica, y análisis teórico y conceptual de diferentes bibliografías relacionados al tema. Entre los principales resultados de la investigación figuran: el desarrollo humano es el objetivo central de la actividad humana y el crecimiento económico un medio que podría llegar a ser muy importante para promoverlo. La asignación de recursos al mejoramiento del desarrollo humano, es una función del gasto total del sector público; existen fuertes conexiones de dos vías entre el crecimiento económico (CE) y el desarrollo humano (DH) y finalmente los vínculos entre desarrollo humano y crecimiento económico pueden hacer que uno y otro se influencien recíprocamente