This thesis researches the proposition that student creativity occurs as a function of misrecognition in the culturally situated context of art classrooms. Following Pierre Bourdieu??s socio-cognitive frameworks of the habitus, symbolic capital and misrecognition this study uses these concepts as a means of navigating teacher-student relationships at moments of creative origination. These concepts predict that exchanges between teachers and students are sites for transactions of symbolic capital where the teacher??s pedagogical role is objectively repressed through the mechanism of misrecognition. The study seeks evidence for creative autonomy as misrecognition as it takes place in classroom transactions and that differing levels of ??tact?? are employed in these exchanges. It emerges that the social reasoning that underscores these exchanges is inferentially sensitive to different contextual points of view, expressed in open secrets, repression, denial and euphemisation. The study finds that the artworks produced evidence degrees of originality that vary in character according to the subtlety of misrecognition that is transacted in these pedagogical exchanges. The case of an art teacher and an art class in the final year of schooling is examined in detail. The design employs an idiographic, qualitative methodology. Methods include observations and interviews which are augmented by digital records. Results are interpreted using a form of semantic analysis and triangulation. Four functions are distilled from the results. These functions govern the way in which misrecognition performs as a contradictory logic in the relationships between the teacher and students which works towards affirming the group??s belief in creative autonomy, while paradoxically, all members take advantage of the contextual inputs that are available. Creative autonomy is revealed as a fiction, nonetheless, a fiction worth nurturing for the successful realisation of creative ends. The study concludes that creativity cannot be strictly taught or learned. Nor is it innate and autonomous. Rather it encompasses a socially intelligent uptake in the culture of artmaking. What is possible is dependent on shared beliefs, desires and intentions which are transformed over time. Broader implications are suggested focusing on the significance of collaboration in creative education and the impact for educational systems, schools and undergraduate programs in art education.

We present a term rewriting procedure based on congruence closure that can be used with arbitrary equational theories. This procedure is motivated by the pragmatic need to prove equations in equational theories where confluence can not be achieved. The procedure uses context free grammars to represent equivalence classes of terms. The procedure rewrites grammars rather than terms and uses congruence closure to maintain certain congruence properties of the grammar. Grammars provide concise representations of large term sets. Infinite term sets can be represented with finite grammars and exponentially large term sets can be represented with linear sized grammars.

We describe a program called SketchIT capable of producing multiple families of designs from a single sketch. The program is given a rough sketch (drawn using line segments for part faces and icons for springs and kinematic joints) and a description of the desired behavior. The sketch is "rough" in the sense that taken literally, it may not work. From this single, perhaps flawed sketch and the behavior description, the program produces an entire family of working designs. The program also produces design variants, each of which is itself a family of designs. SketchIT represents each family of designs with a "behavior ensuring parametric model" (BEP-Model), a parametric model augmented with a set of constraints that ensure the geometry provides the desired behavior. The construction of the BEP-Model from the sketch and behavior description is the primary task and source of difficulty in this undertaking. SketchIT begins by abstracting the sketch to produce a qualitative configuration space (qc-space) which it then uses as its primary representation of behavior. SketchIT modifies this initial qc-space until qualitative simulation verifies that it produces the desired behavior. SketchIT's task is then to find geometries that implement this qc-space. It does this using a library of qc-space fragments. Each fragment is a piece of parametric geometry with a set of constraints that ensure the geometry implements a specific kind of boundary (qcs-curve) in qc-space. SketchIT assembles the fragments to produce the BEP-Model. SketchIT produces design variants by mapping the qc-space to multiple implementations, and by transforming rotating parts to translating parts and vice versa.

Objects move, collide, flow, bend, heat up, cool down, stretch, compress and boil. These and other things that cause changes in objects over time are intuitively characterized as processes. To understand common sense physical reasoning and make programs that interact with the physical world as well as people do we must understand qualitative reasoning about processes, when they will occur, their effects, and when they will stop. Qualitative Process theory defines a simple notion of physical process that appears useful as a language in which to write dynamical theories. Reasoning about processes also motivates a new qualitative representation for quantity in terms of inequalities, called quantity space. This report describes the basic concepts of Qualitative Process theory, several different kinds of reasoning that can be performed with them, and discusses its impact on other issues in common sense reasoning about the physical world, such as causal reasoning and measurement interpretation. Several extended examples illustrate the utility of the theory, including figuring out that a boiler can blow up, that an oscillator with friction will eventually stop, and how to say that you can pull with a string but not push with it. This report also describes GIZMO, an implemented computer program which uses Qualitative Process theory to make predictions and interpret simple measurements. The represnetations and algorithms used in GIZMO are described in detail, and illustrated using several examples.

Several decades of leadership research have failed to yield a personality measure that accurately predicts successful leaders (Bernus&Manis, 1985; Stogdill, 1974; Vroom&Yago, 2007; Yukl, 1989). A new implicit measure of personality, the Conditional Reasoning Test for Leadership (CRT-L), shows promise in this endeavor. This project investigated the construct and criterion-related validities of this measure. Previous research on implicit personality measures, and specifically conditional reasoning measures, has demonstrated that their relationship to their explicit measure counterparts tends to be modest or nonexistent. This was the case for the CRT-L, which had no relationship to the NEO Hostility Scale or the Motivation to Lead (MTL) Scale. As expected, the two explicit measures did have a significant and positive relationship (r = .42). The CRT-L was also effective at predicting leadership and power criteria. It had positive and significant relationships with Leadership Peer Nominations (r = .25) and Power Peer Nominations (r = .21) and was more successful in these predictions than either of the explicit measures. The results of this research provide evidence for the effectiveness of the CRT-L as a leadership measure and further validation work is encouraged.

Sketching is an important part of creativity process and is used in the design disciplines, concerned with making physical form: mechanical and civil engineering, graphic design, and architecture and physical planning. Almost all designers still begin the design process by sketching their ideas before transferring them to the computer. This helps designers to express nascent ideas fast and naturally and to speed up visual problem solving. Moreover, the importance of sketching in design has been recognized emphasizing that initial drawing allows creative freedom. The sketches represent a rough semblance and functionality of the system and can be essential to understanding the reasoning behind a design. Furthermore, sketching activity makes designers to interact with their sketches, examine all alternative possibilities and explore design solutions in their minds during drawing. This important part of design, which supports ambiguity, imprecision and incremental formalization of ideas as well as rapid exploration of alternatives, is still performed by engineers with the help of paper and pencil. Despite praxis and fondness of natural interface provided by paper, sketching on paper has its own limitations. The main disadvantage of sketching on paper is that you can easily draw the sketch, but editing and improving of design is more problematic. If designer wants to make changes in the sketch, usually he has to take another sheet of paper and basically redraw the sketch... [to full text]

These are the proceedings of the International Workshop on Reactive Concepts in Knowledge Representation (ReactKnow 2014), which took place on August 19th, 2014 in Prague, co-located with the 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2014).

Humans are experts at understanding what they see. Similarity and analogy play a significant role in making sense of the visual world by forming analogies to similar images encountered previously. Yet, while these acts of visual reasoning may be commonplace, the processes of visual analogy are not yet well understood. In this dissertation, I investigate the utility of representing visual information in a fractal manner for computing visual similarity and analogy. In particular, I develop a computational technique of fractal reasoning for addressing problems of visual similarity and novelty. I illustrate the effectiveness of fractal reasoning on problems of visual similarity and analogy on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices and Miller’s Analogies tests of intelligence, problems of visual novelty and oddity on the Odd One Out test of intelligence, and problems of visual similarity and oddity on the Dehaene test of core geometric reasoning. I show that the performance of my computational model on these various tests is comparable to human performance. Fractal reasoning provides a new method for computing answers to such problems. Specifically, I show that the choice of the level of abstraction of problem representation determines the degree to which an answer may be regarded as confident, and that that choice of abstraction may be controlled automatically by the algorithm as a means of seeking that confident answer. This emergence of ambiguity and its remedy via problem re-representation is afforded by the fractal representation. I also show how reasoning over sparse data (at coarse levels of abstraction) or homogeneous data (at finest levels of abstraction) could both drive the automatic exclusion of certain levels of abstraction, as well as provide a signal to shift the analogical reasoning from consideration of simple analogies (such as analogies between pairs of objects) to more complex analogies (such as analogies among triplets, or larger groups of objects). My dissertation also explores fractal reasoning in perception, including both biologically-inspired imprinting and bistable perception. In particular, it provides a computational explanation of bistable perception in the famous Necker cube problem that is directly tied to the process of determining a confident interpretation via re-representation. Thus, my research makes two primary contributions to AI theories of visual similarity and analogy. The first contribution is the Extended Analogy By Recall (ABR*) algorithm, the computational technique for visual reasoning that automatically adjusts fractal representations to an appropriate level of abstraction. The second contribution is the fractal representation itself, a knowledge representation that add the notion of self-similarity and re-representation to analogy making.

This thesis researches the proposition that student creativity occurs as a function of misrecognition in the culturally situated context of art classrooms. Following Pierre Bourdieu??s socio-cognitive frameworks of the habitus, symbolic capital and misrecognition this study uses these concepts as a means of navigating teacher-student relationships at moments of creative origination. These concepts predict that exchanges between teachers and students are sites for transactions of symbolic capital where the teacher??s pedagogical role is objectively repressed through the mechanism of misrecognition. The study seeks evidence for creative autonomy as misrecognition as it takes place in classroom transactions and that differing levels of ??tact?? are employed in these exchanges. It emerges that the social reasoning that underscores these exchanges is inferentially sensitive to different contextual points of view, expressed in open secrets, repression, denial and euphemisation. The study finds that the artworks produced evidence degrees of originality that vary in character according to the subtlety of misrecognition that is transacted in these pedagogical exchanges. The case of an art teacher and an art class in the final year of schooling is examined in detail. The design employs an idiographic, qualitative methodology. Methods include observations and interviews which are augmented by digital records. Results are interpreted using a form of semantic analysis and triangulation. Four functions are distilled from the results. These functions govern the way in which misrecognition performs as a contradictory logic in the relationships between the teacher and students which works towards affirming the group??s belief in creative autonomy, while paradoxically, all members take advantage of the contextual inputs that are available. Creative autonomy is revealed as a fiction, nonetheless, a fiction worth nurturing for the successful realisation of creative ends. The study concludes that creativity cannot be strictly taught or learned. Nor is it innate and autonomous. Rather it encompasses a socially intelligent uptake in the culture of artmaking. What is possible is dependent on shared beliefs, desires and intentions which are transformed over time. Broader implications are suggested focusing on the significance of collaboration in creative education and the impact for educational systems, schools and undergraduate programs in art education.

Univ. Diss--Kaiserslautern, 2002.