A Big Data Approach to Computational Creativity

Abstract—Computational creativity is an emerging branch of artificial intelligence that places computers in the center of the creative process. Broadly, creativity involves a generative step to produce many ideas and a selective step to determine the ones that are the best. Many previous attempts at computational creativity, however, have not been able to achieve a valid selective step. This work shows how bringing data sources from the creative domain and from hedonic psychophysics together with big data analytics techniques can overcome this short- coming to yield a system that can produce novel and high-quality creative artifacts. Our data-driven approach is demonstrated through a computational creativity system for culinary recipes and menus we developed and deployed, which can operate either autonomously or semi-autonomously with human interaction. We also comment on the volume, velocity, variety, and veracity of data in computational creativity.

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This work is based in part on a paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics and Cognitive Computing, New York, July 2013 [1], an abstract presented at the Workshop on Information in Networks, New York, October 2013, and an abstract that has been submitted to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Toronto, April 2014.