Mary Lou Maher, Ph.D., is the Chair of the Department of Software and Information Systems in the College of Computing and Informatics at UNCC and was Deputy Director of the Information and Intelligent Systems Division and a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2006-2010. Mary Lou’s research interests span a broad area of design and computing, specifically the study and development of novel interaction and communications technology, and models of design and creativity. Her research draws on and contributes to human-computer interaction, intelligent systems, computer-supported collaborative work, design science, and computational creativity.

Lecture abstract: With the increasing availability of large quantities of design data comes an opportunity to augment design practice with analytical models for recognizing creativity in new designs. In this lecture I derive three essential characteristics of a creative design: novelty, value and surprise. These characteristics form the basis of an analytical framework for computationally evaluating the creativity of a new design object. Each characteristic is associated with one or more computational processes that operate in a conceptual space of designs. The three characteristics are implemented as variations of conceptual clustering and predictive analytics. These processes are illustrated using a dataset of mobile devices. This analytical approach provides a computational model for both evaluating and enhancing creative design.

 

Sponsor: this seminar is related to the International Collaboration Innovation Team Project of Tsinghua University (清华大学重点学科高水平国际合作创新团队支持项目)

Contact:  Hou Yuemin, Tel: 62773470,