Amílcar Cardoso

Computational Creativity: from autonomous generation to co-creation

Computational Creativity (CC) is a field of research in Artificial Intelligence that focuses on the study and exploitation of the computers’ potential to act as autonomous creators and co-creators. The field is a confluence point for contributions from multiple disciplines, such as Artificial Intelligence, which provides most of its methodological framework, and also Cognitive Science, Psychology, Social Sciences and Philosophy, as well as creative domains like the Arts, Music, Design, Poetry, etc. In this talk, a historical perspective of the field will be presented, along with key concepts and abstract models to characterize some common modes of creativity, providing context for understanding how these concepts are being applied in the development of creative systems, particularly in co-creative contexts, in light of the latest advances in AI.

Biography: F. Amilcar Cardoso is Full Professor at the University of Coimbra, where he teaches Artificial Intelligence, Computational Creativity, Programming for Design, Sound Design and other topics to the BSc. and MSc. in Design and Multimedia and to the Doctoral Program in Design and Computational Media. He is Vice-President of Instituto Pedro Nunes, the knowledge transfer and incubation interface of University of Coimbra, since July 2017. He was co-chair of the IJCAI-2023 Special Track on AI, Arts & Creativity, hold in August 2023, Macau.

He developed pioneering work on Computational Creativity in the 90s, ever since assuming an active role in the establishment of a Computational Creativity community by co-founding the International Conference on Computational Creativity [2010-present], and by co-founding The Association for Computational Creativity. He was General Chair of two editions o ICCC, in 2016 in Paris, and in 2020 in Coimbra, Portugal (online). He is co-editor of the book “Computational Creativity – The Philosophy and Engineering of Autonomously Creative Systems”, published by Springer at 2019.

His research interests also extend to affective computing, especially in contexts of creative systems, automatic music composition, sound and music computing, sonification and interactive music. He serves in the Program Committees of IJCAI, ICCC, CogSci, EvoMusArt, ISEA and other conferences. He is a member of the Association for Computational Creativity (ACC), the Cognitive Science Society and the Portuguese Association for Artificial Inteligence (APPIA).