CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
 
4th INTERNATIONAL JOINT WORKSHOP ON COMPUTATIONAL CREATIVITY

Goldsmiths' College, University of London
London, UK, 17-19 June 2007

---> Early (cut price) registration deadline: 6th June

See http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/isms/CC07/ for details and on-line
registration.

The Program Committee of the 4th International Joint Workshop on
Computational Creativity invites submissions of technical and
position papers.  The workshop will be held at Goldsmiths,
University of London, UK, on 17-19 June 2007.

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Workshop Objectives
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The aim of the workshop is to facilitate the exchange of ideas on
the topic of computational creativity. We aim to bring together
people from AI, Cognitive Science and related areas such as
Psychology, Philosophy and the Arts who research questions related
to the notion of creativity with respect to computers. The workshop
will address issues such as how we assess creativity in computers,
how computers can be used to enhance human creativity, and how we
can write creative software. We aim for papers on various frameworks
for computational creativity to be presented at the workshop, and
for the applications of computational creativity to the sciences,
creative industries and arts to be showcased. The workshop will
provide a forum for identifying trends and opportunities for research
on creativity and promising practices concerning the development of
creative systems. In addition, we will organise a "show and tell"
session, which will be devoted to demonstrations of systems exhibiting
behaviour which would be deemed creative in humans.

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Topics
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Original contributions will be presented in areas related to Creative
Systems, including:
 - Computational models of creativity
 - Cognitive models of creativity
 - Metrics, frameworks and formalizations for the evaluation of
	creativity in computational systems
 - Computational tools for supporting creativity
 - Specific applications to music, language and the arts, to
	architecture and design, to scientific discovery, to education
	and to entertainment
 - Philosophical discussions of computational creativity
 - Detailed system descriptions of creative systems, including
	engineering difficulties faced, example sessions and artefacts
	produced, and applications of the system

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Keynote Speaker
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Dr Bernard Bel
University of Aix-Marseilles

Text representation of music: from word processing to rule-based composition/improvisation

The Bol Processor project originated in 1980 as a word processor facilitating the transcription of quasi-onomatopoeic syllables used as an oral notation system for Indian drumming. It grew up as an expert system (BP1) mimicking the ability to compose variations on a musical theme or assess their acceptability. Pattern grammars (a subset of type-2 formal grammars) proved appropriate for modelling the musical system under study. A stochastic learning device was implemented to infer weights from sets of examples accepted by the grammar, with the effect of enhancing the aesthetic quality of productions. None the less, field work revealed limitations inherent to the expert system approach when it comes to modelling sophisticated human improvisation skills.

In 1989 a numeric-symbolic learning device (QAVAID) was implemented in Prolog II for inferring grammars from examples. However, it has never been used in fieldwork because of its slow operation on portable computers of that time.

The next implementation of Bol Processor (BP2) addressed the issue of music composition and improvisation in the MIDI and Csound environments of electronic music. A new challenge was to deal with superimposed sequences of events (polyphony) within the framework of text-oriented rewriting systems. This was achieved by means of polymetric representation. Minimal descriptions of polyphonic/polyrhythmic structures may be "expanded" by the system to produce arbitrarily complex musical scores. This representation makes it possible to produce sophisticated time-patterns from information comprehensively imbedded in compositional rules, thereby maintaining the consistency of interpretation. This is a major discovery for computer music, as "human-like" phrasing is no longer achieved by randomness nor "interpretation rules".

Producing the actual performance requires additional information which the Bol Processor encapsulates in metrical/topological properties of "sound-object prototypes". A time-setting algorithm modifies sound-objects taking into account physical timing and their adjacent sound-objects, much in a similar way human speakers modify the articulatory properties of speech sounds with respect to the speaking rate and influence of adjacent segments (coarticulation).

Many composers and music teachers support the Bol Processor approach because of its underlying paradigm of text representation, i.e. "composing with pen and paper". It found its way long before the invention of markup languages, at a time only graphic interfaces were expected to capture the sophistication of compositional processes.

BP2 is currently implemented for MacOS 9 and MacOS X. The project has been open-sourced by Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bolprocessor/ with the help of Anthony Kozar.

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Panel Speakers
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Prof. Margaret Boden
Paul Brown
Prof. Jon McCormack

See http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/isms/CC07/ for details and on-line
registration.

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Important Dates
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June 6th, 2007   Deadline for early registration

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Previous events
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This workshop is the first completely autonomous edition of the series
of International Joint Workshops on Computational Creativity that were
held in association with other major events:

IJWCC 2004, Madrid, Spain, ECCBR'2004
IJWCC 2005, Edinburgh, UK, IJCAI'2005
IJWCC 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy, ECAI'2006
 
This joint series results from two previous streams of events that
have, since 1997, solidified and added rigour to the computational
treatment of creative processes. These events have been symposia and
workshops associated with AISB 99, AISB 00, ICCBR 01, AISB 01, ECAI 02,
AISB 02, IJCAI 03, AISB 03 and LREC 04.

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Workshop Chairs
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Amilcar Cardoso
Center for Informatics and Systems (CISUC)
University of Coimbra, Portugal
http://www.dei.uc.pt/~amilcar

Geraint A. Wiggins
Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture
Goldsmiths' College, University of London, UK
http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas02gw/
 
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Local Organising Committee
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Oliver Bown
Geraint A. Wiggins

Intelligent Sound and Music Systems Group
Centre for Cognition, Computation & Culture
Department of Computing
Goldsmiths' College, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW, United Kingdom

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Program Committee (to be extended)
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John Barnden (University of Birmingham, UK)
Oliver Bown (Goldsmiths College, London, UK)
David Brown (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA)
Simon Colton (Imperial College London, UK)
John Collomosse (University of Bath, UK)
Pablo Gervás (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)
Paulo Gomes (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
Robert Keller (Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California, USA)
João Leite (New University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Jesús López (University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
Penousal Machado (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
Lorenzo Magnani (University of Pavia, Italy)
Diarmuid O'Donoghue (National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland)
Marcus Pearce (Goldsmiths College, London, UK)
Alison Pease (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Francisco C. Pereira (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
Sarah Rauchas (Goldsmiths College, London, UK)
Graeme Ritchie(University of Aberdeen, UK)
Rob Saunders (University of Sydney, Australia)
Oliviero Stock (Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, Trento, Italy)
Tony Veale (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Gerhard Widmer (University of Linz, Austria)