Creativity is a way in which we examine a problem with an open mind and fresh eyes
to explore new possibilities outside the established approaches through the use of
our imagination based on knowledge. New technologies, in particular artificial
intelligence, are drastically changing the nature of creative processes. Dr
Inventor is built upon the vision that technologies have a great potential to
enhance scientific creativity. Currently, scientific innovation is still largely
reliant on human brains. Modern technologies, such as information extraction,
document summarization, semantic web and visual analytics have a great prospective
in supplementing human ingenuity by overcoming the limitations that people suffer
in their efforts towards creativity, such as limited knowledge and inherent
thinking barriers. The project commits to generating a web-based system that
supports real world applications for scientific innovations in a specific domain
(i.e. computer graphics & animation). By doing so, we seek insights of the
potential and limitations of the technologies in scientific creative processes
under real world settings, leading to a blueprint of future technologies in
computational creativity.
Dr Inventor targets an original system that offers tangible inspiration to the
scientific innovations of researchers. By utilising the rich research resource
available on the Internet, Dr Inventor will become researchers’ personal research
assistant by offering:
Reporting, which informs the researchers of a wide variety of relevant concepts and
approaches through machine-empowered search and visualization, taking full
advantage of the presence of the rich web resources far beyond the memory capacity
of humans. This will enable the researchers to approach related ideas from a very
broad angle, equipping them with new perspectives to re-envision their problem with
new interpretations that bring new solutions to light.
Assessment, which assesses the novelty of an input research document through
comparison with recognized research approaches and established quality metrics.
This leads to potential applications in peer reviews for research papers, grant
proposals and patents.
·Inspiration, which suggests new research ideas to the users in an autonomous
manner. This replicates human creativity in a certain degree by taking advantage of
computing power and the Internet to combine the widely accessible resources to
generate new concepts with unexpected features. The new concepts may come from
radical transformations from other semantically distant but analogically similar
concepts.
Dr Inventor will be the first web-based system that supports the exploration of
scientific creativity via a computational approach, which will overcome a lot of
human limitations: People have difficulty in seeing past the current problem
description; they often fail to notice useful analogies even when they are present;
they tend to rate distant analogies as less useful even if they produce better
results, and they suffer from working memory limitations, false memories, selective
thinking, perception limitations, biases, emotional hindrances etc. Within this
context, Dr Inventor has a great potential in inspiring scientific novelty through
fostering of a broader openness to creativity and through overcoming problem
fixation, through retention of potentially useful comparisons between relevant
works due to a broader awareness of the state of the art. It will feature
interesting functionalities that provide computer-generated research concepts and
workflows that would be thought as creative if performed by a human.