Current Teaching
The units of study that I teach are influenced by my background and my research: my background is in computer science and artificial intelligence; my research is in computational modelling creativity and curiosity.
Design Programming (DECO1012)
The aim of this unit of study is to introduce students to computer programming, both as a tool for design computing and as a medium of expression in digital media. This unit of study will focus on the practical application of computer programming as a way to expand the students' abilities to use computers in creative design and research tasks.
Web page: DECO1012
Installation Studio (IDEA9101 & IDEA9102)
The aim of this Unit of Study is to explore interaction, using the form of installation as the interface. This investigates the relationship between our environments, bodies and technologies in a practice-led fashion. It evolves a discourse on the next generation of mixed-media installations, involving their history, their evolution, and their cultural context.
Course outline: IDEA9101 & IDEA9102
Guest Lectures
Understanding Design and Cognition (DECO1006)
This guest lecture introduces some fundamental concepts involved in the design of games, and explores the role of the game designer in the game development process.
Slides: Game Designers
Digital Architecture Research Studio (MARC4003)
This guest lecture introduces some fundamental aspects of creative computation, and explores some of the things about computational creativity and creative computing that fascinate me. I finish this lecture with a little "live coding" to try to demonstrate how code can be thought of as a medium of expression.
Slides: Computational Creativity and Creative Computing
Introduction to Game Design (SOMA3266 & SOMA9210)
As part of a special arrangement with the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales, I am currently teaching
Current Research
My primary research interest is the development of computational models of creativity. The development of computational models of creative processes provides opportunities for developing a better understanding human creativity, producing tools that support human creativity and possibly creating autonomous systems capable of creative activity. My approach to developing computational models of creativity is to develop curious agents and to use these curious agents to simulate creative systems.
Curious Agents
Curious agents are computational models of self-motivated learning based on an interest in novelty. Curiosity is a fundamental driving force behind much creative activity, although it may only provide a weak motivation in any particular project it is one of the few constants in all creative endeavours. Computationally modelling curiosity provides a platform for developing a wide range of creative systems.
Curious Design Agents
Curious design agents are autonomous agents that are capable of exploring complex design spaces in search of interesting designs. Curious design agents have been developed for a range of design domains including simple geometric sketching, spirograph designs, doorways for crowds, and evolved artworks.
Curious Design Assistants
Curious design assistants are interface agents that have been developed to support creativity by filtering and exploring design spaces. Curious design assistants have been developed to assist with the interactive evolution of two-dimensional forms. Potential applications of curious design assistants include mass customisation.
Curious Places
Curious places are intelligent environments that are interested in the activities that happen within them and may in turn be interesting to its inhabitants. Curious places have been developed in physical and virtual environments and have included information displays, virtual learning spaces and distributed sensor networks.
Creative Systems
Creative systems are computational models of individual and social creativity. Computational models of individual creativity involve an agent and some environment that the agent can change; design is fundamentally about how an agent changes their environment. Computational models of social creativity provide useful frameworks for investigating the nature of creativity without the additional complexities inherent in human societies.
The Digital Clockwork Muse
The Digital Clockwork Muse is a project that attempts to use curious agents to model emergent social dynamics of creative societies as a multi-agent system. It is based on the Domain Individual Field Interaction (DIFI) model proposed by Csikszentmihalyi et al.
Creative Cultures
The creative cultures project extends the computational modelling of social dynamics in creative societies by including a model of the evolution of language. The aim of this project is to model important aspects of cultural production and transmission.
Research Supervision
I am supervisor and associate supervisor for a number of research students, from Undergraduate Honours to PhD Candidates. My research students are conducting their research in a wide variety of domains.
Kazjon Grace (PhD Candidate) is developing a computational model of situated analogy making based on the transformation of conceptual spaces.
Nick Kelly (PhD Candidate) is developing a computational model of situated interpretation and concept formation in design.
A. Baki Kocacelli (PhD Candidate) is developing a framework for developing seamful interactions between wearable computing devices and intelligent environments.
Morteza Pourmohammadi (PhD Candidate) is exploring the nature of designerly ways of customising, i.e., the nature of design in mass customisation systems.
Dan Bourke (Masters Honours) is developing computational models of the emergence of fashion cycles in creative societies.
Adrian Lombard (Masters Honours) is exploring the acoustic properties that make sounds interesting to facilitate the development of curious agents.
James Hiscock (Honours) is developing a on-line development environment for Processing that can be embedded in tutorials, forums and portfolios.