Portugal

We describe a method and a proof of concept which allow the generation of rich and engaging dialogues between virtual characters from a formalised plot description. The structure of the dialogue generated borrows from inferential pragmatics, following the Geneva Model of discourse analysis, in order to provide realistic interaction between characters in the narrative. At a higher level, this discourse is organised following heuristics borrowed from narratology theory in order to elicit emotions linked to dramatic tension and thus favour narrative engagement. Besides enriching narrative generation systems embedded within simulation applications, our work also has the potential to be adapted to support engaging interactive dialogues between users and virtual conversational agents in narrative systems.

ICCC&#39;20

A Pragmatics-based Model for Narrative Dialogue Generation

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalising what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.


ICCC'20

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.
Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviors that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalizing what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.



"An interactive evolutionary system to generate letterings is presented. The system allows the creation of a wide range of alternative designs that can be used as stimuli for inspiration or for the creation of visual identities with different variations. This work began as a parametric system that generated glyph designs by recombining
parts of skeletons extracted from existing typefaces which are then filled with custom shapes. In this paper, we employ a Genetic Algorithm to evolve the input parameters of this parametric system. The experimental results show that the presented evolutionary system enables users to interactively create unique letterings according to their aesthetic preferences."

Which type is your type?

The importance of reproducibility has been recognised as one of the crucial elements of research especially in life sciences, but also in other disciplines, e.g. medicine, social sciences, natural language processing who have acknowledged the reproducibility crisis. In this paper, we discuss the issue of reproducibility in the field of computational creativity. We present the findings from an indirect reproducibility study that assesses the transparency of available information to allow reproducibility. The analysis of articles published in ICCC proceedings has shown that most computational creativity (CC) publications provide very little information with regard to documentation and resources needed for reproducibility and replicability of the published results. By reviewing best practices from the broader scientific community and considering the particularities of CC recommendations are put forward that will hopefully inspire the creation of practices related to reproducibility and improve the reusability of CC research within the community and beyond.

A Study on Reproducibility in Computational Creativity Research

We consider two works in computational criticism, a little studied but important area for computational creativity (Stiny and Gips 1978) & (Fisher and Shin 2019). The analysis results in the development of a more general, novel, extended model of computational criticism. Along with the more general model, we also provide the first formal attempt to discuss and distinguish meaningful computational criticism. This theoretical synthesis should be useful to the study and development of computational critics and help to spark further dialogue in this area.

Extending the Philosophy of Computational Criticism

Order and Progress: a sonic segue across A Auriverde is an abstract audiovisual sojourn across the Flag of Brazil realised as a sonified and politicised astronomy show, evoking emotions and responses through the use of fantasy, mystery, exaggeration, distortion and parallelism. The astronomy represented on the flag depicts a specific moment in time: the exact minute that Brazil declared its independence. Scientific data from these stars is treated as both raw material, a virtual generated stone sculpted into musical existence through figurative sonification; and as mathematical forces that forge the sounds and cultures of Brazil, both past and present, into an audiovisual blend of history, science, politics and ethnology.

Order and Progress: a sonic segue across A Auriverde

As a first step towards studying the ability of human crowds and machines to effectively co-create, we explore several human-only collaborative co-creation scenarios. The goal in each scenario is to create a digital sketch using a simple web interface. We find that settings in which multiple humans iteratively add strokes and vote on the best additions result in sketches with the highest creativity (combination of value and novelty). Lack of collaboration leads to a higher variance in quality and lower novelty or surprise. Collaboration without voting leads to high novelty but low quality.

Exploring Crowd Co-creation Scenarios for Sketches

## Please click on the link to watch the explanation video: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cYjrolmlly



"Les Manifs - The Sound of Solidarity Is an audiovisual piece reflecting upon the artists’ experiences of the French ‘Gilets Jaunes’ protests in December 2018. 

Whilst living in the Occitanie region, the artists witnessed the rise of the protest movement sweeping the country. The grassroots group was sparked by rising fuel prices and the cost of living. The movement grew to encompass broader sentiments of domestic discontent and socioeconomic injustice. With wide support from many different demographics, weekly disruptive demonstrations expanded to almost every town in the country.

President Macron was quick to condemn the protests. He was categorical in his refusal to concede any of the movement’s demands. However the resolute tenacity of the Gilets Jaunes was underestimated. After 8 consecutive weeks of protests, Macron was forced to make concessions. Regardless, the protests continued unabated for 45 consecutive weeks in Paris, attracting over 300,000 demonstrators nationally at its height. 

As support for the movement grew, so too did the tension. Police clashed violently with rioters, known as the Ultra-Jaunes. Cities were heavily vandalised: rioters targeted banks, speed cameras, and parking meters. The Police response was equally controversial. Their aggressive tactics inflicted many (sometimes life changing) injuries to rioters and peaceful protestors alike.

The piece comprises binaural sound recordings and photographs of the 10th week of demonstrations in the city of Toulouse, where 10,000 protestors took to the streets. In gonzo-journalistic style, the photographer and recordist individually explored the protests through their mediums.

Both were drawn in with nightfall by the chaos and drama of the ultra-jaunes, where lawlessness reigns and revolution is romanticised.

The work portrays the story of a day of direct action with the Gilets Jaunes, following different groups and factions to a dangerous climax. Ultimately, the artists discover a place where for a fleeting moment, amidst barrages of tear gas, flash grenades and water cannons, some of the most disenfranchised members of society find their voices."



Les Manifs - The Sound of Solidarity

Light is one of the most enduring and resilient components of the Universe. The speed of light is a constant regardless of location. This video audio art work has been produced using two algorithmic regimes. 

The first regime involves scanning scientific experiment data visualisations, resulting in audio being generated from the visual data. The audio is then compiled into a soundtrack. The second regime involves putting the soundtrack into software that generates animated form. The production of the audio-video art work is cameraless. 

Light seen and unseen involved scanning scientific visualisations from various light wavelengths – at nonvisible (Gamma ray wavelength), UV, visible and infrared wavelengths. Visualisations used were of a photon shower from the Veritas atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope array in Arizona; a solar prominence eruption recorded on May 3rd 2013 at UV wavelengths; a Hubble image of the Serpens constellation of the Eagle Nebula giving birth to new stars, at visible light wavelengths; and an image of the nebula NCG2174 at infra-red wave-lengths.

Technical information
Light seen and unseen
Video mp4 encoding, 5 minutes 24 seconds
1920 x 1080 px, 29 frames per second
Stereo audio 48kHz 

Light seen and unseen

As a lay user creates an art piece using an interactive generative art tool, what, if anything, do the choices they make tell us about them and their preferences? Both within the generative art form, and otherwise? As a preliminary study, we collect preferences from 311 subjects, in a specific generative art form and in other walks of life. We train machine learning models to predict a subset of preferences from the rest. We find that preferences in the generative art form cannot predict preferences in other walks of life better than chance (and vice versa). However, preferences within the generative art form are reliably predictive of each other.

Predicting A Creator's Preferences In, and From, Interactive Generative Art

## Please watch the explanation video for this work here: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cYjro8mlws


"By April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had forced half of humanity to suspend their daily activities and spend most of their time at home. The abrupt interruption of human activities seemingly generated an unexpected noise-free soundscape. In this (temporary?) departure of humankind from the outside world, it seemed that nature was regaining its space, also, but not only, its acoustic space. 
The Sound Outside is a sound installation based on an international project run from the end of March 2020 and still ongoing. The project aims to gather sound designers and sound makers from all over the world to collectively document the changes in the urban soundscape recording “from their windows”, during lockdown. The goal is not only to foster a form of active resistance, an example of resiliency of the human inhabitants which re-appropriate of the collective urban space through active listening, but also the opportunity, as a community, for designers and creators of sounds to re-imagine the future of the urban soundscape. The installation uses both recorded soundscapes and the voices of the authors to create a sonic journey through the unprecedented events of the past few months, filtered by the – in some ways - privileged point of listening of sound practitioners."

The Sound Outside - Listening to the World at COVID-19 Time

In an attempt to teach my computer how to produce portraits, these eight animate reconstructions are produced by an autoencoding neural network that was trained on the faces of Chinese engineering students. This piece treats the neural network’s inherent “flaws” as a medium through which to filter depictions of the human body: by reappropriating the generative blurriness in the facial reconstructions it seeks to illustrate how novel AI technologies can be used as a self-fulfilling form of erasure.
In this case, the ghostly images that result reflect western society’s tendency to dehumanize people of Asian descent often in terms that focus on them as an aggregate, as autonomous laborers devoid of individual identity. In the age of worldwide pandemic where a renewed and heightened xenophobia permeates much of society, these quiet, voiceless animations capture the ways in which people of Asian descent are often silenced and subjugated along cultural lines. As an Asian American, I impose myself onto these representations by projecting video of my own Asian facial features on top of these images to create a computer-mediated cyborg composited from both the living body and the digitally-imagined. Field-recordings of the ambient sounds from manufacturing factories in Shenzhen, China accompany the videos.

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