Call for Papers: International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC'20), Coimbra, Portugal

Computational Creativity (or CC) is a discipline with its roots in Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Engineering, Design, Psychology and Philosophy that explores the potential for computers to be autonomous creators in their own right. ICCC is an annual conference that welcomes papers on different aspects of CC, on systems that exhibit varying degrees of creative autonomy, on frameworks that offer greater clarity or computational felicity for thinking about machine (and human) creativity, on methodologies for building or evaluating CC systems, on approaches to teaching CC in schools and universities or to promoting societal uptake of CC as a field and as a technology, and so on.

This issue of the call for papers is for full regular papers, the possible types of which are described below. A subsequent call will solicit shorter papers in a number of categories, such as, for example, work-in-progress papers, system demonstration papers, artefact description papers, and field-bridging papers that translate and reframe existing work from other disciplines in a CC context.

Original research contributions are solicited in all areas related to Computational Creativity research and practice, including, but not limited to:

• Applications that address creativity in specific domains such as music, language, narrative, poetry, games, visual arts, graphic design, product design, architecture, entertainment, education, mathematical invention, scientific discovery, and programming.

• Applications and frameworks that allow for co-creativity between humans and machines, in which the machine is more than a mere tool and takes on significant creative responsibility for itself.

• Metrics, frameworks, formalisms and methodologies for the evaluation of creativity in computational systems, and for the evaluation of how systems are perceived in society.

• Syntheses of AI/CC treatments of very different genres or domains of creativity (e.g. art and science, humour and mathematics, language and image, etc.)

• Computational paradigms for understanding creativity, including heuristic search, analogical and meta-level reasoning, and representation.

• Resource development and data gathering/knowledge curation for creative systems, especially resources and data collections that are scalable, extensible and freely available as open-source materials.

• Ethical considerations in the design, deployment or testing of CC systems, as well as studies that explore the societal impact of CC systems.

• Cognitive and psychological computational models of creativity, and their relation with existing cognitive architectures and psychological accounts

• Innovation, improvisation, virtuosity and related pursuits investigating the production of novel experiences and artefacts within a CC context.

• Computational accounts of factors that enhance creativity, including emotion, surprise(unexpectedness), reflection, conflict, diversity, motivation, knowledge, intuition, reward structures.

• Computational models of social aspects of creativity, including the relationship between individual and social creativity, diffusion of ideas, collaboration and creativity, formation of creative teams, and creativity in social settings.

• Perspectives on computational creativity which draw from philosophical and/or sociological studies in a context of creative intelligent systems.

• Computational creativity in the cloud, including how web services can be used to foster unexpected creative behaviour in computational systems.

• Big data approaches to computational creativity.

• Debate papers that raise new issues or reopen seemingly settled ones. Provocations that question the foundations of the discipline or throw new light on old work are also welcome.

The following categories are intended to give you some guidance on different types of papers which we welcome for submission to ICCC. Please indicate in your submission which category (or categories) your paper broadly fits into:

Technical papers

These are papers posing and addressing hypotheses about aspects of creative behaviour in computational systems. The emphasis here is on using solid experimentation / computational models / formal proof / argumentation that clearly demonstrates an advancement in the state of the art or current thinking in Computational Creativity research. Strong evaluation of approaches through comparative, statistical, social or other means is essential.

System or Resource description papers

These are papers describing the building and deployment of a creative system or resource to produce artefacts of potential cultural value in one or more domains. The emphasis here is on presenting engineering achievement, technical difficulties encountered and overcome, techniques employed, reusable resources built, and general findings about how to get computational systems to produce valuable results. Presentation of results from the system or resource is expected. While full evaluation of the approaches employed is not essential if the technical achievement is very high, some evaluation is expected to show the contribution of this work to computational creativity.

Study papers

These are papers which draw on allied fields such as psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, mathematics, humanities, the arts, and so on; or which appeal to broader areas of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science in general; or which appeal to studies of the field of Computational Creativity as a whole. The emphasis here is on presenting enlightening novel perspectives related to the building, assessment or deployment of systems ranging from autonomously creative systems to creativity support tools. Such perspectives can be presented through a variety of approaches including ethnographic studies, thought experiments, comparisons with studies of human creativity and surveys. The contribution of the paper to computational creativity should be made clear in every case.

Cultural application papers

These are papers presenting the usage of creative software in a cultural setting, e.g., art exhibitions/books; concerts/recordings/scores; poetry or story readings/anthologies; cookery nights/books; results for scientific journals or scientific practice; released games/game jam entries. The emphasis here is on a clear description of the role of the system in the given context, the results of the system in the setting, technical details of inclusion of the system, and evaluative feedback from the experience garnered from public audiences, critics, experts, stakeholders and other interested parties.

Position papers

These are papers presenting an opinion on some aspect of the culture of Computational Creativity research, including discussions of future directions, past triumphs or mistakes and issues of the day. The emphasis here is on carefully arguing a position; highlighting and exposing previously hidden or misunderstood issues or ideas; and generally providing thought leadership about the field in general, or in specific contexts. While opinions don’t need to be substantiated through formalisation or experimentation, justification of points of view will need to draw on thorough knowledge of the field of Computational Creativity and overlapping areas, and provide convincing motivations and arguments related to the relevance of the points being addressed and their importance. All submissions will be reviewed in terms of quality, impact and relevance to the area of Computational Creativity.

Presentation

In order to ensure the highest level of quality, all submissions will be evaluated in terms of their scientific, technical, artistic or cultural contribution, and therefore there will be only one format for submission. However, the program committee will decide, for each submission, the most appropriate format for presentation: talk, poster, or system demonstration.

Submission instructions

• Papers should be no more than 8 page sides in length.

• You are required to make your papers anonymous to allow for double-blind review. You may feel that your work is so distinctive as to make anonymity unrealistic, but you must still write your paper to allow for double-blind review (e.g. refer to your past work in the third person). Please take this requirement seriously: the reviewers certainly will.

• To be considered, papers must be submitted as a PDF document formatted according to ICCC style (which is similar to AAAI and IJCAI formats). You can download the ICCC template here.

• Papers must be submitted through the EasyChair platform.

• Double Submissions Policy: The work submitted to ICCC should not be under review in another scientific conference or journal at the time of submission.

• To be included in the proceedings, each paper must be presented in the conference by one of the authors.