An oft-touted mantra for creativity is: think like a child. We focus on one particular aspect of ... more An oft-touted mantra for creativity is: think like a child. We focus on one particular aspect of child-like thinking here, namely surface similarities. Developmental psychology has convincingly demonstrated, time and again, that younger children use surface similarities for categorization and related tasks; only as they grow older they start to consider functional and structural similarities. We consider examples of puzzles, research on creative problem solving, and two of our recent empirical studies to demonstrate how surface similarities can stimulate creative thinking. Based on this discussion, we propose an interactionist framework of cognition that distinguishes among the levels of experience, understanding and explanation, and posits top-down and bottom-up interaction mechanisms between adjacent levels. In this framework, we argue that to stimulate creativity, one needs to block the top-down mechanisms and facilitate bottom-up mechanisms so that alternative ways of understanding and explanation can be generated. In other words, we need to restore the primacy of experience. This also leads to the creation of a metaphorical connection between two conceptually different objects or situations (namely, the source and the target).
This paper begins with a rigorous critique of David Stove's recent bookThe Rationali... more This paper begins with a rigorous critique of David Stove's recent bookThe Rationality of Induction. In it, Stove produced four different proofs to refute Hume's sceptical thesis about induction. I show that Stove's attempts to vindicate induction are unsuccessful. Three of his ...
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 20... more The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 2013 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 25-27, 2013. The titles of the eight symposia were Analyzing Microtext, Creativity and (Early) Cognitive Development, Data Driven Wellness: From Self-Tracking to Behavior Change, Designing Intelligent Robots: Reintegrating AI II, Lifelong Machine Learning, Shikakeology: Designing Triggers for Behavior Change, Trust and Autonomous Systems, and Weakly Supervised Learning from Multimedia. This report contains summaries of the symposia, written, in most cases, by the cochairs of the symposium.
Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal—Annual Review, 2009
Our work aims to apply the research over semantic interference effects between words (text) and i... more Our work aims to apply the research over semantic interference effects between words (text) and images in the field of web presentation. There is a lot of effort put into constructing web pages for articles such as stories and news pages. The way they are presented has a ...
... Thus, the problem is to somehow allow creative changes of ontology, but to rule out arbitrary... more ... Thus, the problem is to somehow allow creative changes of ontology, but to rule out arbitrary changes of ontology; or, at least, to constrain which inferences are rationally acceptable from the changed ontology. (Palmer, 1992, pp. ...
The most prevalent sense of analogy in cognitive science and AI literature, which I refer to as p... more The most prevalent sense of analogy in cognitive science and AI literature, which I refer to as predictive analogy, is the process of inferring further similarities between two given situations based on some existing similarities. Though attempts to validate predictive ...
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS14) - WIMS '14, 2014
ABSTRACT Reducing cognitive overhead is one way to ensure fast and easy web-navigation for users.... more ABSTRACT Reducing cognitive overhead is one way to ensure fast and easy web-navigation for users. We present here an automated navigation-support tool for websites. Whenever a user visits a website for searching some information, the tool will suggest relevant links to click, where they can find desired information on that website. The tool is based on a new cognitive model CoLiDeS++Pic, which combines two related models, CoLiDeS+ and CoLiDeS+Pic. The model computes semantic similarity between the user goal and the website information using latent semantic analysis technique. It also takes into account the path adequacy, performs appropriate backtracking if required, and uses semantic information from pictures. In the current implementation, the tool is not fully automated because the semantic features of pictures have to be obtained manually. To evaluate the effectiveness of the tool, we conducted an experiment with tool support and multi-tasking as independent variables. Statistical analysis showed a significant positive impact of the tool support for time needed to perform search tasks, disorientation in navigation and task-accuracy. The navigation performance in time and disorientation of the users and answering questions are improved when provided with the tool support. Multi-tasking had no effect on time needed or answering questions, but we observed an unexpected positive effect on disorientation, suggesting that perhaps the participants were more motivated to perform primary task due to the assigned secondary task (monitoring a video at the same time), which resulted in less disorientation.
2013 Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2013
ABSTRACT Improperly designed error and exception dialogs can be confusing to the user, and can se... more ABSTRACT Improperly designed error and exception dialogs can be confusing to the user, and can severely degrade productivity. Existing work on designing error dialogs largely focuses on providing guidelines for general design and documentation. We designed and implemented an Error Dialog Toolbox (EDT) to transform these guidelines into practical use, and to standardize the error dialogs to help developers create error messages quickly and effectively. EDT gathers answers to a set of pre-designed questions, helps the developer write more helpful error messages, and gives them a template for error dialogs that can be used in any application. The current version focuses on error and exception categories of dialog boxes. We present an evaluation study of EDT to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Singers of Hindustani Classical Music (HCM) are known to teach and sing with elaborate hand gestu... more Singers of Hindustani Classical Music (HCM) are known to teach and sing with elaborate hand gestures displaying melodic contours, rhythmic stresses and other features [6] [2]. These gestures embody a mapping of musical phrases to space, motion and movement. Although the associations between these hand gestures and mental imagery are documented in various ancient and modern treatises [3] [7], the mapping between the gesture types and their musical content has not been explicitly studied. We explore the chhota-khyal musical form by analysing gestural language in each of its temporal phases. A chhota-khyal is a set of two couplets (sthyayi, antara) involving a fixed set of musical and poetic rules. It can be composed and sung within any raga. We conducted a study of three professional singers of HCM, each performing 5-8 minute khyals in four selected ragas. The rendition of khyal involves three phases: elaborating the raga by singing on vowels (alaap); tala-bound composition (ciz, bolalap), improvised with theme and variations; and a fast section spanning the whole range of raga (taan, layakari) [9]. The transition between different phases of khyal is gradual, and is marked by fixed musical events that a singer must include during the performance. Each musical event in khyal was analysed for all renditions to observe the gestural commonalities pertaining to these events. We analysed the music accompanying gestures in two ways: 1) computer-based motion detection and pitch data extraction, and 2) observational study of palm shapes and their association with motion- metaphors for imaginary sound objects. By analysing pivotal points in khyal across different performers, we propose a typology of gestures used for specific ornamentations in khyal singing. We notated palm shapes and identified gestures in the typology using the schemes described in [1] [5]. We interviewed the singers regarding their gesturing of musical contours to understand the cognitive construction and awareness-level of these gestures. We observed that semantic content of khyal texts plays a critical role in guiding the mental imagery of the performers. We did a tripartite analysis of these gestures by comparing these results with insights from other controlled experiments on a) prosodic content and gestural stresses in spoken khyal texts; b) abstract presenting gestures in speech; and c) granularity of spatial representations of purely musical melodic contours in listeners. We compared the spatial coordinates of hand movements with the pitch data for each musical event in khyal. As each phrase is a unique gesture unit [4], the gesticulation continues throughout the duration of the musical phrase, displaying different components of a gesture phrase [8]. The body only comes to rest once the musical phrase is complete. This neutral position suggests phrase level information in the music, illustrating grouping mechanisms for melodies in HCM to be understood via gestural phrases. Despite the differences in gestural languages of gharanas, performers and individual rendi- tions, we have illustrated the features of motion metaphors of melody in HCM. The results of this study can be used to generate clearer mappings of intuitive gesture-sound relationships in Hindustani Classical singing, which can be applied to improve pedagogical methods.
An oft-touted mantra for creativity is: think like a child. We focus on one particular aspect of ... more An oft-touted mantra for creativity is: think like a child. We focus on one particular aspect of child-like thinking here, namely surface similarities. Developmental psychology has convincingly demonstrated, time and again, that younger children use surface similarities for categorization and related tasks; only as they grow older they start to consider functional and structural similarities. We consider examples of puzzles, research on creative problem solving, and two of our recent empirical studies to demonstrate how surface similarities can stimulate creative thinking. Based on this discussion, we propose an interactionist framework of cognition that distinguishes among the levels of experience, understanding and explanation, and posits top-down and bottom-up interaction mechanisms between adjacent levels. In this framework, we argue that to stimulate creativity, one needs to block the top-down mechanisms and facilitate bottom-up mechanisms so that alternative ways of understanding and explanation can be generated. In other words, we need to restore the primacy of experience. This also leads to the creation of a metaphorical connection between two conceptually different objects or situations (namely, the source and the target).
This paper begins with a rigorous critique of David Stove's recent bookThe Rationali... more This paper begins with a rigorous critique of David Stove's recent bookThe Rationality of Induction. In it, Stove produced four different proofs to refute Hume's sceptical thesis about induction. I show that Stove's attempts to vindicate induction are unsuccessful. Three of his ...
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 20... more The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the AAAI 2013 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 25-27, 2013. The titles of the eight symposia were Analyzing Microtext, Creativity and (Early) Cognitive Development, Data Driven Wellness: From Self-Tracking to Behavior Change, Designing Intelligent Robots: Reintegrating AI II, Lifelong Machine Learning, Shikakeology: Designing Triggers for Behavior Change, Trust and Autonomous Systems, and Weakly Supervised Learning from Multimedia. This report contains summaries of the symposia, written, in most cases, by the cochairs of the symposium.
Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal—Annual Review, 2009
Our work aims to apply the research over semantic interference effects between words (text) and i... more Our work aims to apply the research over semantic interference effects between words (text) and images in the field of web presentation. There is a lot of effort put into constructing web pages for articles such as stories and news pages. The way they are presented has a ...
... Thus, the problem is to somehow allow creative changes of ontology, but to rule out arbitrary... more ... Thus, the problem is to somehow allow creative changes of ontology, but to rule out arbitrary changes of ontology; or, at least, to constrain which inferences are rationally acceptable from the changed ontology. (Palmer, 1992, pp. ...
The most prevalent sense of analogy in cognitive science and AI literature, which I refer to as p... more The most prevalent sense of analogy in cognitive science and AI literature, which I refer to as predictive analogy, is the process of inferring further similarities between two given situations based on some existing similarities. Though attempts to validate predictive ...
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS14) - WIMS '14, 2014
ABSTRACT Reducing cognitive overhead is one way to ensure fast and easy web-navigation for users.... more ABSTRACT Reducing cognitive overhead is one way to ensure fast and easy web-navigation for users. We present here an automated navigation-support tool for websites. Whenever a user visits a website for searching some information, the tool will suggest relevant links to click, where they can find desired information on that website. The tool is based on a new cognitive model CoLiDeS++Pic, which combines two related models, CoLiDeS+ and CoLiDeS+Pic. The model computes semantic similarity between the user goal and the website information using latent semantic analysis technique. It also takes into account the path adequacy, performs appropriate backtracking if required, and uses semantic information from pictures. In the current implementation, the tool is not fully automated because the semantic features of pictures have to be obtained manually. To evaluate the effectiveness of the tool, we conducted an experiment with tool support and multi-tasking as independent variables. Statistical analysis showed a significant positive impact of the tool support for time needed to perform search tasks, disorientation in navigation and task-accuracy. The navigation performance in time and disorientation of the users and answering questions are improved when provided with the tool support. Multi-tasking had no effect on time needed or answering questions, but we observed an unexpected positive effect on disorientation, suggesting that perhaps the participants were more motivated to perform primary task due to the assigned secondary task (monitoring a video at the same time), which resulted in less disorientation.
2013 Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2013
ABSTRACT Improperly designed error and exception dialogs can be confusing to the user, and can se... more ABSTRACT Improperly designed error and exception dialogs can be confusing to the user, and can severely degrade productivity. Existing work on designing error dialogs largely focuses on providing guidelines for general design and documentation. We designed and implemented an Error Dialog Toolbox (EDT) to transform these guidelines into practical use, and to standardize the error dialogs to help developers create error messages quickly and effectively. EDT gathers answers to a set of pre-designed questions, helps the developer write more helpful error messages, and gives them a template for error dialogs that can be used in any application. The current version focuses on error and exception categories of dialog boxes. We present an evaluation study of EDT to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Singers of Hindustani Classical Music (HCM) are known to teach and sing with elaborate hand gestu... more Singers of Hindustani Classical Music (HCM) are known to teach and sing with elaborate hand gestures displaying melodic contours, rhythmic stresses and other features [6] [2]. These gestures embody a mapping of musical phrases to space, motion and movement. Although the associations between these hand gestures and mental imagery are documented in various ancient and modern treatises [3] [7], the mapping between the gesture types and their musical content has not been explicitly studied. We explore the chhota-khyal musical form by analysing gestural language in each of its temporal phases. A chhota-khyal is a set of two couplets (sthyayi, antara) involving a fixed set of musical and poetic rules. It can be composed and sung within any raga. We conducted a study of three professional singers of HCM, each performing 5-8 minute khyals in four selected ragas. The rendition of khyal involves three phases: elaborating the raga by singing on vowels (alaap); tala-bound composition (ciz, bolalap), improvised with theme and variations; and a fast section spanning the whole range of raga (taan, layakari) [9]. The transition between different phases of khyal is gradual, and is marked by fixed musical events that a singer must include during the performance. Each musical event in khyal was analysed for all renditions to observe the gestural commonalities pertaining to these events. We analysed the music accompanying gestures in two ways: 1) computer-based motion detection and pitch data extraction, and 2) observational study of palm shapes and their association with motion- metaphors for imaginary sound objects. By analysing pivotal points in khyal across different performers, we propose a typology of gestures used for specific ornamentations in khyal singing. We notated palm shapes and identified gestures in the typology using the schemes described in [1] [5]. We interviewed the singers regarding their gesturing of musical contours to understand the cognitive construction and awareness-level of these gestures. We observed that semantic content of khyal texts plays a critical role in guiding the mental imagery of the performers. We did a tripartite analysis of these gestures by comparing these results with insights from other controlled experiments on a) prosodic content and gestural stresses in spoken khyal texts; b) abstract presenting gestures in speech; and c) granularity of spatial representations of purely musical melodic contours in listeners. We compared the spatial coordinates of hand movements with the pitch data for each musical event in khyal. As each phrase is a unique gesture unit [4], the gesticulation continues throughout the duration of the musical phrase, displaying different components of a gesture phrase [8]. The body only comes to rest once the musical phrase is complete. This neutral position suggests phrase level information in the music, illustrating grouping mechanisms for melodies in HCM to be understood via gestural phrases. Despite the differences in gestural languages of gharanas, performers and individual rendi- tions, we have illustrated the features of motion metaphors of melody in HCM. The results of this study can be used to generate clearer mappings of intuitive gesture-sound relationships in Hindustani Classical singing, which can be applied to improve pedagogical methods.
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Papers by B. Indurkhya