A Study on Creativity Support System for Interactive Collaborative Work
ABSTRACT
This thesis summarizes the fruits of my research on systems that
support creativity of interactive collaboration works, which has been
done since June 1992 till March 1995 at ATR communication systems
research laboratories, and since April 1995 till April 1998 at ATR
media integration \& communications research laboratories.
Rapid changes in the structure of industry and the intensification of
global competition in recent years have resulted in a situation where
improvements in productivity alone are not adequate to develop
enterprises. Accordingly, knowldege creation has recently become an
essential task of enterprises. Furthermore, due to the drastically
increased complexity and scale of recent projects, there is strong
demand for tools that support group creative activity as well as
individual creative activity. In such trends, many research efforts
to enhance human creativity and to support effective knowledge
creation of groups by utilizing computer and communication
technologies which have drastically developed in recent years.
This research belongs to this research area.
Focusing on the potential creative aspect of an interactive collaboration
work, this research aims to establish basic technologies to
construct systems which effectively support human creative thinking
process, in particular human divergent thinking process, of
interactive collaboration works.
Discussions and conversations done by not only natural languages but
also non-verbal mode, e.g. music, are included in the interactive
collaboration works that are delt with in this research.
Systems to support human creativity can be classified into the
following three categories based on the supporting manner: the
secretarial level systems that provide electrical tools corresponding
to a black board, cards and so on, the framework paradigm level
systems that support structuring pieces of information input by users,
and the generative level systems provide seeds of new ideas. A system
of any level can effectively contirbute to human creative
thinking. However, from the perspective of utilizing the contemporary
computer environment, in particular the huge resource of the stored
data and information all over the world, it is expected to realize
systems of the generative level. The systems in this level can be
divided in systems that provide information based on semantic
relationships of words, and systems that provide information based on
structural similarities of information. Currently, the former systems
are more practical.
Therefore, many systems based on semantic relationships of words have
already been developed. However, such systems still have the following
problems: 1) How to effectively extract pieces of information which
not only keep relation with the subject and context of thinking but
also involve unexpected relations from different viewpoints. 2) How to
intervene to a people's collaborative work to effectively stimulate
their creativity. Many systems of the secretarial level support group
discussions. However, there are no systems of the generative level
which deal with group activity. 3) How to deal with the conversation
by a non-verbal mode. Interactive collaboration works are executed not
only by natural languages but also some non-verbal modes. Such works
can be found in artistic domain, in particular in a creative work of
music. However, there have not been any preceding researches to
support such works. This thesis provides solutions for these
problems.
This thesis is organized as follows.
In chapter 1, I clearly position this research and its purpose by
analyzing the current status of the creativity support technologies and
pointing out its problems in detail.
From chapter 2 to chapter 5, I discuss creativity support technologies
for conversation done by natural language.
In chapter 2, an information retrieval method which can extract
information to stimulate human divergent thinking is discussed. In a
brainstorming session, it is often observed that pieces of information
that are provided by an outsider whose knowledge domain is different
from the other participants of the session often have effects to make
a breakthrough in their fixed ideas. Hence, I model the process of
information retrieval of an outsider, and implement it by using an
associative memory technology. Moreover, from experiments with the
implemented prototype system, I show that the system has ability to
extract pieces of information which not only relate to the topic of
discussion but also involve some different relations introduced from
the outside knowledge.
In chapter 3, by applying a visualizing technology of structure of
thinking or conversation based on a statistic method, I propose a
method to extract information that involves some overlooked relations
which are potentially included in a person's thinking or in a group
conversation. Furthermore, by combining this method with the
information retrieval method proposed in chapter 2, I implemented
four kinds of information retrieval method to extract pieces of
information which have various degree of relation to the topic.
By applying the methods to experimental brainstorming sessions,
I evaluate how pieces of information having different relations
influence human divergent thinking. Additionally, it is also
discussed when such a piece of information should be provided into
a conversation to effectively influence.
In chapter 4, I discuss a non-delay topic-transition-detection method.
Topic-transition is an important factor to determine the timing to
provide a piece of information into a conversation. A conversation for
creative thinking is usually free-conversation, i.e. conversation
without any specific structures and evident goals, and its topics
expand over various domains. Therefore, I propose a segmentation
method for such conversations, which utilizes surface data obtained
from utterances and time transition data through the conversation, but
does not utilize any knowledge depending on specific domains nor any
knowledge on structure of discourse.
In chapter 5, by integrating the technologies introduced so far and
preparing multiple agents each of which supports a specific task of
creativity or communication, I show a supporting system for creative
aspects of conversations involving not only divergent thinking process
but also convergent thinking process. Additionally, I discuss the
effects to apply a multi-agent architecture for implelemting such
applications.
In chapter 6 and chapter 7, I discuss creativity support technologies
for conversation in music play.
In chapter 6, as a very basic support to communicate by music, I discuss
a method that allows people who are not familiar with musical theory
nor techniques for manipulating musical instruments to rather easily
express their ideas in music. Focusing on the emotional functions of
each note in music, I propose a new mapping method of notes onto
an interface of a musical instrument, where a specific function of
note is always assigned onto a specific position of the interface.
In chapter 7, focusing on the similarity between verbal communications
and music communications, I propose a supporting method for creativity
in music conversations by integrating the framework to support
creativity in verbal communications introduced from chapter 2 to
chapter 5 and the supporting method of music communication described in
chapter 6.
In chapter 8, I summarize the fruits obtained in this research, and
discuss the application areas and the future works.