Senja Pollak

Senja Pollak is a researcher at the Department of Knowledge Technologies, Jozef Stefan Institute.
After a BSc in Sociology of Culture and French Linguistics (Univ. of Ljubljana and Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris), she oriented her research into language technologies. She earned a MSc degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Antwerp and a PhD on the topic of definition extraction at the Dept. of Translation, Univ. of Ljubljana.
Her main interests are language technologies, corpus linguistics and computational creativity. She is involved in several EU and national projects, where she is currently performing research in translation management (project TermIolar), collocations in non-standard Slovene (project Janes), text mining for understanding the influence of unregulated corporate communications on capital markets (project Formica), conceptual blending (EU project ConCreTe), machine learning for fictional ideation (EU project WHIM), and knowledge discovery in life sciences (HinLife).

Computational Creativity: New Research Paradigm, Great Vision or an Illusion

While the field of artificial intelligence has provided solutions in a large variety of tasks requiring “intelligence”, from medicine, finance, to translation industry, a relatively new interdisciplinary field of computational creativity focusses on the question of how computers can perform creatively. In computational creativity, computer systems can be used for creative generation of new artefacts, for support to human creativity or for a better understanding of what humans evaluate as creative.
We will briefly discuss different fields of computational creativity, such as musical, visual, conceptual creativity, creativity in games. We will present in more details some examples of linguistic and scientific creativity. The questions that arise are: can computers produce jokes, poems and metaphors or help humans get new creative ideas; can computers generate new scientific hypotheses or help researchers get new ideas?
The talk will provide some examples from computational creativity research and more specifically from FP7 European projects WHIM, ConCreTe and ProSecco that will conclude just in autumn 2016.