Stakeholder Groups in Computational Creativity Research and Practice - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 7

They are usually professional academics with the infrastructure of a university sup-
porting them. AI is itself a young field—originating in the 1950s—and, since initial
attempts to build general intelligence machines, has fragmented into many differ-
ent specialisations and subdisciplines: once established, these then form the internal
environment for any new area, in terms of providing ideas, methods and concepts,
and at times, competition. Academic measures of the health of such subdisciplines
include the amount of funding awarded, the number of lectureships or professorships
in the field, the existence of a journal and an international conference series, and other
scientifically respectable incentivisation schemes and recognition.
It was against this backdrop that AI researchers with an interest in creativity found
themselves in the late 1990s. Given their background, they were not only accustomed
to the idea that machines can be intelligent, but their very livelihood depended on
that premise. So it was not, perhaps, such a huge leap to the idea that machines
can be creative. However, since there was no infrastructure supporting research into
Computational Creativity, early researchers largely had to establish their reputation
in different (possibly related) areas of AI and build up the Computational Creativity
community almost on their own time, sometimes taking considerable career risks to
do so.
Latour's notion of translation can help us to understand how the community
formed. Problematisation occurred when a few core people identified the goal of
building creative software as a subdiscipline of AI. Between them, they had the
influence and organisational power to make Creativity in AI and Cognitive Science
the theme of the AISB'99 Convention (co-chaired by Geraint Wiggins, Helen Pain
andAndrewPatrizio). This featured a keynote address byMargaret Boden, a cognitive
scientist known for her popular writing on creativity in people and in machines [ 13 ,
14 ]. The initial symposiumwas followed up by four further events 1 held at AISB'00 -
AISB'03, and a series of workshops on creative systems at major AI conferences. We
present an extract from the editors' introduction to the Proceedings of the Symposium
on Creative and Cultural Aspects of AI and Cognitive Science , held at AISB in
2000 in Fig. 1.1 . This was the interessement phase. These were further consolidated
with the International Joint Workshops on Computational Creativity (IJWCC), held
2004-08, during which time the community grew from twenty, or so, to double that
( enrolment ). Finally, the community was considered healthy enough, strong enough
and large enough to launch the first International Conference on Computational
Creativity in 2010. For a history of the field up to this stage, see [ 15 ] in a special
issue of the AI magazine on Computational Creativity.
The community continues to evolve and grow, with the series having recently
held its Fifth Annual International Conference (2014), with around 90 delegates. In
order to organise and guide the international series, a Steering Committee was set up
consisting of anyone who had chaired an IJWCC event, and they formed the Associa-
tion for Computational Creativity (ACC) in 2010 and set out rules which enabled new
members to join and old members to leave the Association ( mobilisation ). Landmark
1 Creative and Cultural Aspects of AI and Cognitive Science (2000) and then simply AI and Creativity
in Arts and Science (2001-2003).