Domain-specific research idea creation

Jing, D (2016) Domain-specific research idea creation. PhD thesis, Bath Spa University.

Abstract

The research presented in this thesis is aimed at providing an idea creation method through the support of Creative Computing and other related techniques from software engineering. On one hand, it is always a controversial topic on whether autonomous idea creation is possible due to different perspectives; on the other hand, idea creation becomes extremely important in our life nowadays. Hence, this study is strived to contribute on automatic ideation, in which computers, instead of human beings, generate creative ideas. A creative idea is an idea that is not only useful but also novel and surprising. To achieve this goal, it concentrates on creativity in ideas, which is lacking of efforts in both research and industrial communities. Therefore, this thesis proposes a novel idea creation approach with three phases: Knowledge Extraction/Reuse, Idea Elements Generation and Evolving into Creative Ideas. In particular, this thesis provides four original contributions. The first contribution is a novel approach to create ideas for specific domains, based on simulated human and machine ideation processes and Creative Computing. The second one is a set of rules for extracting knowledge, based on abstraction techniques and ontology techniques, for extracting useful/reusable domain knowledge from relevant text data. The third one consists of reasoning rules, based on identified atomic reasoning operations, where ontology, description logics, inference techniques, creativity principles and the atomic operations are employed. The fourth one is a developed inference engine that can be used in multiple applications for different domains, where the main component of Idea Elements Generation phase and the reasoning rules are implemented. Combining with the designed creativity evaluation metrics with identified creativity elements, sub-elements and corresponding algorithms, the proposed idea creation approach provides core techniques to support for every phases of creating new ideas. Therefore, one prototype system with three applications is developed following the proposed approach proving the concept of the contributions of the study.

Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
Note:

Thesis supervised by Hongji Yang.

Keywords: Creative Computing, idea creation, software engineering, automatic ideation, computers, creativity, knowledge extraction, atomic reasoning operations, inference engine,
Divisions: Bath School of Design
Date Deposited: 23 Mar 2017 12:20
Last Modified: 07 Jan 2022 19:46
URI / Page ID: https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/9455
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