by Sergi Valverde

Abstract: When looking at the history of technology, we can see that all inventions are not of equal importance. Only of a few technologies have the potential to start a new branching series (specifically, by increasing diversity), have a lasting impact in human life and ultimately became turning points. Technological transitions correspond to times and places in the past when a large number of novel artefact forms or behaviours appeared together or in rapid succession. Why does that happen? Is technological innovation continuous and gradual or it occurs in sudden leaps and bounds? The evolution of information technology allows for a quantitative and theoretical approach to technological transitions. The value of information systems experiences sudden changes when when we learn how to use this technology, when we can accumulate large amounts of information and when communities of practice create and exchange information freely. The coexistence between gradual improvements and discontinuous technological change is a consequence of the asymmetric relationship between complexity and hardware and software. Using a cultural evolution approach, I suggest that sudden changes in the organization of information technologies depend on the high costs of maintaining and transmitting reliable information.

Vittorio Loreto is Full Professor of Physics of Complex Systems at Sapienza University of Rome and Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. He is presently Director of the SONY Computer Science Lab in Paris where he heads the team on “Innovation, Creativity and Artificial Intelligence”. His scientific activity is focused on the statistical physics of complex systems and its interdisciplinary applications. He coordinated several project at the EU level and he recently coordinated the KREYON project devoted to unfolding the dynamics of innovation and creativity. Has published over 180 papers in internationally refereed journals and conference proceedings and chaired several workshops and conferences.

Francesca Tria is a researcher at the Physics Department of Sapienza University of Rome. She got her degree in physics at Sapienza University of Rome and her PhD in physics at the University of Naples Federico II. She spent two years as a post-doc at the ICTP Institute in Trieste before moving at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Turin. Starting from a background in statistical physics and complex systems, she explored different research realms where this expertise could be successfully applied. In particular, her research activity includes complex systems approaches to biologically related problems, such as evolutionary dynamics and phylogeny reconstruction, to social phenomena, such as language evolution, learning and innovation dynamics. She was recently part of the EU project EveryAware, locally coordinating the activities of the group of ISI. She is currently coordinating the ISI team in the KREYON project.

by Ilan Chabay

Abstract: Education must be improved substantially in order to help all people learn to think both creatively and critically over the full span of education from early childhood to university to life-long learning. I will discuss approaches to developing a coherent learning experience that helps people become better and more engaged learners and is better attuned to helping people deal with the urgent and vital global issues in local contexts (e.g., food, water, energy, environmental degradation).

by Mirko Degli Esposti

Abstract: Like most human productions, language is the product of cultural evolution, and as such exhibits high levels of complexity. A natural representation of language is written text, the development of expressing language by letters or other marks. Developing of writing coincides with the developing of literature and both processes have been highly effected by the developing of technologies, up to the enormous proliferation (at least quantitatively) in our modern digital environment. In the talk we will address questions such as how to characterize originality in authors or texts, and how innovations originate amid universal features of language usage? Or again, how can we discriminate between artificially generated texts and human writings? We will do this while discussing two specific examples.
The first one regards the detection of computer generated papers in scientific literature, a problem of increasing practical importance.
The second one concern the Voynich Manuscript and we will present some recent results.

by Thomas Fink

Abstract: Creativity has been hailed as a key force behind the economic success of businesses and nations. While many recognise that creativity is a universal human capability, popular views reduce it to the confined domain of a talented few. Yet it remains unclear what drives creativity, or how to promote it. We propose that anonymous collaboration with constrained freedom makes possible emergent creativity: the spontaneous display of creativity amongst non-cooperating individuals, greater than any could achieve alone. We outline a theoretical framework for predicting emergent creativity, and propose platforms for demonstrating it. Emergent creativity may profoundly extend the creative boundaries of mankind.

by François Pachet

Abstract: Style is what makes an author (writer, composer, designer, etc.) recognizable. Can machines understand, model, predict and generate artefacts in a given style? In the Flow-Machines project, we address these questions for music and text. I will show several generative models of style able to capture characteristic traits of musical sequences, as well as polyphonies, both in the symbolic (score) and numeric (audio) domains. These models are based on the combination of combinatorial (so-called Markov constraints) and statistical perspectives on music. I will use various reorchestrations of “Ode to Joy”, the European anthem, to illustrate these various approaches. Along the way these increasingly sophisticated models in turn, raise more fundamental questions about nature of music and the mysterious mechanisms of taste and subjective appreciation.

by Andreas Roepstroff

Abstract: How is it that two persons may solve a task better than each of them may on their own? Using a set of simple experiments, I will examine how people when solving simple tasks in interaction couple to each other in several domains. It seems that the dynamics of these interaction are shaped not just by the task at hand, but very much by the rules of the game. This may have implications for how to design creative settings.

by Jacob Sherson

Abstract: The scienceathome.org project within the interdisciplinary Center for Community Driven Research at Aarhus University works on developing online citizen science games – enabling ordinary users of the internet to contribute to the solution of cutting edge research challenges. The first games within quantum physics and cognitive and social sciences have been played more than 500,000 times and clearly demonstrated the superiority of the human mind over computer algorithms for certain tasks. At the moment we study this individual and collective problem solving and attempt to combine solution strategies from humans and biological systems to make machine learning more intelligent.