Measuring Kerne et al. Emergence in Information Discovery

International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2008

Although sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often use information resources in intellectual and creative tasks that can include comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information but also seeing relationships among collected information resources and developing new ideas. The hypothesis presented here is that how information is represented impacts the magnitude of human creativity in information discovery tasks. How can we measure this creative cognition? Studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creative discovery. A new experimental method is developed, which measures the emergence of new ideas in information discovery, to evaluate the efficacy of representations. The efficacy of the typical textual list representation for information collections is compared with an alternative representation, combinFormation's composition of image and text surrogates. Representing collections with such compositions increases emergence in information discovery.

Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition - C&C '07, 2007

While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often engage in intellectual and creative tasks, such as comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information, but also seeing relationships among collected information resources, and developing new ideas. Prior studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creativity. We develop new experimental methods to evaluate the efficacy of representational systems for information discovery by measuring the emergence of new ideas. We also measure the variety of web sites that participants visit when engaging in a creative task, and gather experience report data. We compare the efficacy of the typical format for collections, the textual list with a new format, the composition of image and text surrogates. We conduct an experiment that establishes that representing collections with composition of image and text surrogates promotes emergence in information discovery.

International Journal of Human-computer Interaction, 2016

In creative tasks, there is a need to explore the space of available information in order to come up with diverse views before converging to a solution. In such tasks, typical search engines that follow the direct search paradigm fail to inspire users. We hypothesize that contrary to typical engines, interactive exploratory search, which aims at revealing latent, alternative directions in the information space enabling user orientation and engagement is better suited to assist users in their quest for serendipitous discoveries and inspiration. In this study, we present an interactive exploratory search tool that combines diversification of content and sources with a user interface design that visualises clues from the social chattergenerated with micro-blogging services such as Twitter-and lets users interactively explore the available information space. A profiling service and recommendation module in charge of delivering personalized social content complements the setting. A pilot and two task-based user studies comparing our system to a query-based baseline indicate that our system A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t significantly improves inspirational discoveries by providing access to more interesting, and serendipitous information.

2004

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

Inspired by Weisberg's [20] argument that creativity exists in everyone and on the assumption that every information seeker is creative and undergoes a creative process in information seeking, this paper synthesizes a holistic "creativity" model and "information seeking" model to identify stages in a creative process for information seeking. A pilot study was conducted to verify these stages and also examine if present digital libraries and information retrieval environments provide "creative" features to support creative information seeking. We discussed these initial findings and made recommendations for further work to better support creative information seeking in digital libraries and information retrieval environments.

1999

In other words, creativity was defined in terms of the "creative" person. For this reason, research attempted to discover what innate personality characteristics produced this type of person (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996). Examples of people who fell into this "creative person" category (e.g., Einstein, Mozart, etc.) were very rare. Despite this, studies focusing on the characteristics that described these people were done to the exclusion of looking at the situations in which creativity happened or of looking at the creative process itself and the outcome of that process (Amabile, 1996). The result was an overall assumption that creativity did not apply to the average individual. Recently, a very different view of creativity has emerged. It is now widely accepted that creativity is distributed throughout the general population (Houtz, 1994; Treffinger, Isaksen, & Dorval, 1994). Guilford (1950) emphasized that extraordinary skills are not a requirement for creativity. It is possible for all people to be creative in any given situation (Runco & Chand, 1994). All people encounter novel situations that can, and sometimes even must be dealt with creatively (Amabile, 1997; Ward et al., 1995). Recent research, therefore, is being directed towards demonstrating that creativity can be recognized (Amabile, 1996) and can be taught (Frederiksen, 1984; Treffinger et al., 1994). The assumption that creative ability is found and utilized in the general population, along with the fact that it can be recognized and taught, has been fundamental to the recent study of creativity. By looking at the creative product and understanding the processes that lead to that product, along with the personality characteristics of the person producing that product, researchers are better able to understand and apply creativity in the general population. The complexity of the creativity construct is a second, albeit similar reason why creativity research has progressed slowly (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Mumford & Gustafson, 1988). This complexity limited initial attempts at measurement (Amabile, 1996) because each researcher selected his/her own individual aspect of creativity to operationalize and, consequently, ended up explaining only a small amount of the variability in creative ability. This resulted in the development of three different definitions of creativity: (a) those that addressed the creative person, (b) those that addressed the creative product, and (c) those that addressed the creative process (Amabile, 1996). Mumford and Gustafson (1988) responded by suggesting that research on creativity should not be avoided because of its complexity; it should be studied within that framework. They emphasized that researchers need to study creativity as a "syndrome." Sternberg and Lubart (1996) also found that if creativity is researched as a multifaceted construct, comprised of factors such as intellectual processes, knowledge, thinking style, personality, and motivation, a more complex but much more complete understanding takes form. Thus, the creative person, process, and product should not be looked at as exclusive ways of defining creativity. Each adds to the explanation of the creativity construct and, therefore, all need to be explored theoretically and empirically.

Knowledge-Based Systems, 2018

Human creativity generates novel ideas to solve real-world problems. This thereby grants us the power to transform the surrounding world and extend our human attributes beyond what is currently possible. Creative ideas are not just new and unexpected, but are also successful in providing solutions that are useful, efficient and valuable. Thus, creativity optimizes the use of available resources and increases wealth. The origin of human creativity, however, is poorly understood, and semantic measures that could predict the success of generated ideas are currently unknown. Here, we analyze a dataset of design problem-solving conversations in real-world settings by using 49 semantic measures based on WordNet 3.1 and demonstrate that a divergence of semantic similarity, an increased information content, and a decreased polysemy predict the success of generated ideas. The first feedback from clients also enhances information content and leads to a divergence of successful ideas in creative problem solving. These results advance cognitive science by identifying real-world processes in human problem solving that are relevant to the success of produced solutions and provide tools for real-time monitoring of problem solving , student training and skill acquisition. A selected subset of information content (IC Sánchez-Batet) and semantic similarity (Lin/Sánchez-Batet) measures, which are both statistically powerful and computation-ally fast, could support the development of technologies for computer-assisted enhancements of human creativity or for the implementation of creativity in machines endowed with general artificial intelligence .

Creativity Research Journal, 2024

In this invited paper, I briefly review my past, current, and future lines of research. The associative theory of creativity argues that higher creative individuals have a richer semantic memory structure that facilitates broader associative search processes, that leads to the combination of remote concepts into novel and appropriate ideas. Based on this theory, in my research I investigate the role of knowledge-or semantic memory-in high-level cognition, focusing on creativity, associative thinking, and memory search, in typical and clinical populations. To do so, I apply computational tools from network science, natural language processing, and machine learning, coupled with empirical cognitive and neural research. Such computational tools are enabling the representation and operationalization of the structure of semantic memory and the processes that operate over it. This is critical as it allows us to start quantifying issues that for a very long time were studied very subjectively in creativity research-remoteness of ideas, associative thinking, flexible/ richer semantic memory structure, etc. Such work is offering unique, quantitative, ways to directly study classic theories of creativity, propelling forward our understanding of its complexity.

Proceedings of the …, 2008

Creativity as the prerequisite for innovation is a core competitive factor in contemporary organizations. When creativity happens this involves creative persons who produce creative products in a process that cannot be fully anticipated and predescribed. We introduce the concept of pockets of creativity for those sections of a business process where creativity occurs. These sections are characterized by a high demand for flexibility and knowledge of the involved creative persons. In pockets of creativity previous knowledge is retrieved, transformed and combined into new procedures or artifacts -in short -innovations. Naturally, this raises the question of how pockets of creativity can be supported by information technology. Information retrieval is part of an organizations knowledge processes concerned with the representation, storage, organization, searching and finding of organizational knowledge. Informed by case studies we have conducted with organizations from the Creative Industries and drawing from existing theory, in this paper we introduce a conceptual framework for information retrieval that enables creative persons to access relevant information through a multi-perspective, hierarchical view. Such an approach both appropriately considers different ways of creative thinking and provides stimuli to a person's cognitive network fostering her creativity and thus the development of truly innovative products.