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24 October 2018 @ 3:00 pm

Computational Creativity Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Computational Creativity is a subfield of AI research which explores how to hand over creative responsibilities to software in arts and science projects.

In the talk, Professor Simon Colton will introduce this field, drawing on projects where he has built and deployed creative software for cultural purposes, including; The Painting Fool automated painter, which aimed for software to be taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right, and the Wevva game creation app that has empowered children and adults alike to make their first videogames in game jams and exhibitions across the UK.

Simon will examine some of the philosophical issues that arise when considering truly creative software, and how the new wave of Creative AI systems coming from deep learning research could fit into this area of work. He will also introduce his latest research and, with luck, unveil a new artwork composed of images generated via code produced by HR3.

This forum took place on Wednesday 25 October 2018.

A recording of Simon's forum talk filming on 25 October 2018

Simon Colton is a Professor of Computational Creativity at Monash University and Queen Mary University of London. Until recently, he held an EPSRC leadership fellowship and a European Research Area Chair in Digital Games Technology.

Simon has authored or co-authored around 200 publications and his research has won national and international awards. He works across art and science projects in an interdisciplinary way, having held academic positions at both Imperial College and Goldsmiths College, known for science and arts respectively.

Through his research he has made contributions to the Computational Creativity field including the development and deployment of creative systems in pure mathematics, the visual arts, graphic design, videogame design, creative language and software engineering. He has also contributed frameworks for developing creative systems, philosophical discourses on the nature of creativity, and theoretical advances in the assessment of progress towards creativity in software.

Simon is active in public engagement, organising and taking part in around a dozen art exhibitions, numerous game jams, technology demos, public lectures and newspaper/magazine/TV/radio documentaries on Artificial Intelligence.