About Dr Rob Saunders
My research concerns the computational modelling of individual, social and cultural creativity to better understand the role of curiosity in the creative process.
Dr Rob Saunders is a researcher in computational creativity who combines his background in artificial intelligence and design studies to develop and study creative systems.
Creativity is one of the defining characteristics of human intelligence, the satisfaction that comes from the creative process is one of the most important motivations for individual, social and cultural achievement.
My research hypothesis is that through computational modelling we can gain new insights into the nature of creativity. I take the position, originally proposed by Colin Martindale, that curiosity is a significant motivation of what we generally term creative behaviour. My research is informed by studies of human creativity from neuroscience, psychology, sociology and anthropology as well as computational methods from machine learning, agent-based systems, artificial intelligence and artificial life. In particular, my computational models have been developed based on the ground-breaking work of D.E. Berlyne and the systems view of creativity proposed by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi.
My research achievements include the development of a new agent-based approach to modelling individual creativity using curious design agents, the development of computational models of social creativity that exhibit dynamics observed in human societies, and the application of models of curiosity to build proactive intelligent environments (partially funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant on Curious Places).
My research students come from various backgrounds including computer science, electrical engineering, product design, and architecture. They share an interest in computationally exploring the nature of creativity. Previous and current student research projects include the application of curious agents to the development of non-player characters in games, interactive fiction using models of social story-telling agents, and the computational modelling of analogy-making in design.
In addition to my computational modelling research I believe in maintaining an active engagement in the application of my research. Working with industry to apply curious design agents has brought new challenges in the form of practical issues of design quality. Artistic collaborations, as well as being of great intrinsic value, often provide interesting new insights into the nature of individual and team-based creative processes.
Selected publications
- Saunders, R. (2009) Supporting Creativity Using Curious Agents, Computational Creativity Support workshop, CHI 2009, 4 April, 2009, Boston, MA.
- Saunders, R., and Grace, K. (2008) Towards a computational model of creative cultures, AAAI Spring Symposium on Creative Intelligent Systems, 26-28 March 2008, Stanford University.
- Saunders, R.: (2007) Towards a computational model of creative societies using curious design agents, chapter in Engineering Societies in the Agents World VII, Vol. 4457 of LNAI, Springer, pp. 340-353.
- Saunders, R., Maher, M. L., and Merrick, K. (2007) Learning models for a curious place, Proceedings of CAADRIA 2007, Digitization and Globalization, 19-22 April 2007, Nanjing, China, pp. 179-184.
- Saunders, R., Merrick, K., and Maher, M. L. (2007) Curious Places: Curious, Proactive, Adaptive Built Environments, Proceedings of AISB'07 Symposium on Agent Societes for Ambient Intelligence, Newcastle, UK, 2-5 April 2007.
- Saunders, R. and Gero, J. S. (2004) Situated design simulations using curious agents, AIEDAM, Special Issue, May 2004, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 153-161.
- Saunders, R. and Gero, J. S. (2002) How to study artificial creativity, in T. Hewett and T. Kavanagh (eds.), Creativity and Cognition 2002, ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 80-87.