Artificial imagination is a narrow subcomponent of artificial general intelligence which generates, simulates, and facilitates [1] real or possible fiction models to create predictions, inventions, [2] or conscious experiences.
The term artificial imagination is also used to describe a property of machines or programs. Some of the traits that researchers hope to simulate include creativity, vision, digital art, humor, and satire. [3]
Practitioners in the field are researching various aspects of Artificial imagination, such as Artificial (visual) imagination, [4] Artificial (aural) Imagination, [5] modeling/filtering content based on human emotions and Interactive Search. Some articles on the topic speculate on how artificial imagination may evolve to create an artificial world "people may be comfortable enough to escape from the real world". [6]
Some researchers such as G. Schleis and M. Rizki have focused on using artificial neural networks to simulate artificial imagination. [7]
Another important project is being led by Hiroharu Kato and Tatsuya Harada at the University of Tokyo in Japan. They have developed a computer capable of translating a description of an object into an image, which could be the easiest way to define what imagination is. Their idea is based on the concept of an image as a series of pixels divided into short sequences that correspond to a specific part of an image. The scientists call this sequences “visual words” and those can be interpreted by the machine using statistical distribution to read an create an image of an object the machine has not encountered.
The topic of artificial imagination has garnered interest from scholars outside the computer science domain, such as noted communications scholar Ernest Bormann, who came up with the Symbolic Convergence Theory and worked on a project to develop artificial imagination in computer systems. [8] An interdisciplinary research seminar organized by the artist Grégory Chatonsky on artificial imagination and postdigital art has taken place since 2017 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. [9]
The typical application of artificial imagination is for an interactive search. Interactive searching has been developed since the mid-1990s, accompanied by the World Wide Web's development and the optimization of search engines. Based on the first query and feedback from a user, the databases to be searched are reorganized to improve the searching results.
Artificial imagination allows us to synthesize images and to develop a new image, whether it is in the database, regardless its existence in the real world. For example, the computer shows results that are based on the answer from the initial query. The user selects several relevant images, and then the technology analyzes these selections and reorganizes the images' ranks to fit the query. In this process, artificial imagination is used to synthesize the selected images and to improve the searching result with additional relevant synthesized images. This technique is based on several algorithms, including the Rocchio algorithm and the evolutionary algorithm. The Rocchio algorithm, [10] locating a query point near relevant examples and far away from irrelevant examples, is simple and works well in a small system where the databases are arranged in certain ranks. The evolutionary synthesis is composed of two steps: a standard algorithm and an enhancement of the standard algorithm. [11] [12] Through feedback from the user, there would be additional images synthesized so as to be suited to what the user is looking for.
Artificial imagination has a more general definition and wide applications. The traditional fields of artificial imagination include visual imagination and aural imagination. More generally, all the actions to form ideas, images and concepts can be linked to imagination. Thus, artificial imagination means more than only generating graphs. For example, moral imagination is an important research subfield of artificial imagination, although classification of artificial imagination is difficult.
Morals are an important part to human beings' logic, while artificial morals are important in artificial imagination and artificial intelligence. A common criticism of artificial intelligence is whether human beings should take responsibility for machines‘ mistakes or decisions and how to develop well-behaved machines. [13] [14] As nobody can give a clear description of the best moral rules, it is impossible to create machines with commonly accepted moral rules. [15] However, recent research about artificial morals circumvent the definition of moral. Instead, machine learning methods are applied to train machines to imitate human morals. [16] [17] As the data about moral decisions from thousands of different people are considered, the trained moral model can reflect widely accepted rules. [17]
Memory is another major field of artificial imagination. Researchers such as Aude Oliva have performed extensive work on artificial memory, especially visual memory. [18] Compared to visual imagination, the visual memory focuses more on how machine understand, analyse and store pictures in a human way. In addition, characters like spatial features are also considered. As this field is based on the brains' biological structures, extensive research on neuroscience has also been performed, which makes it a large intersection between biology and computer science.
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.
Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. One well known subject classification system for computer science is the ACM Computing Classification System devised by the Association for Computing Machinery.
The SMART Information Retrieval System is an information retrieval system developed at Cornell University in the 1960s. Many important concepts in information retrieval were developed as part of research on the SMART system, including the vector space model, relevance feedback, and Rocchio classification.
A recommender system, or a recommendation system, is a subclass of information filtering system that provides suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular user. Recommender systems are particularly useful when an individual needs to choose an item from a potentially overwhelming number of items that a service may offer.
Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the image retrieval problem, that is, the problem of searching for digital images in large databases. Content-based image retrieval is opposed to traditional concept-based approaches.
Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.
Thomas Shi-Tao Huang was a Chinese-born American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and writer. He was a researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Huang was one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition and human computer interaction.
Algorithmic art or algorithm art is art, mostly visual art, in which the design is generated by an algorithm. Algorithmic artists are sometimes called algorists.
Relevance feedback is a feature of some information retrieval systems. The idea behind relevance feedback is to take the results that are initially returned from a given query, to gather user feedback, and to use information about whether or not those results are relevant to perform a new query. We can usefully distinguish between three types of feedback: explicit feedback, implicit feedback, and blind or "pseudo" feedback.
Human–computer information retrieval (HCIR) is the study and engineering of information retrieval techniques that bring human intelligence into the search process. It combines the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and information retrieval (IR) and creates systems that improve search by taking into account the human context, or through a multi-step search process that provides the opportunity for human feedback.
Computational creativity is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and the arts.
Informatics is the study of computational systems. According to the ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe, informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which the central notion is transformation of information. In some cases, the term "informatics" may also be used with different meanings, e.g. in the context of social computing, or in context of library science.
Louis Hodes was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and cancer researcher.
Active learning is a special case of machine learning in which a learning algorithm can interactively query a human user, to label new data points with the desired outputs. The human user must possess knowledge/expertise in the problem domain, including the ability to consult/research authoritative sources when necessary. In statistics literature, it is sometimes also called optimal experimental design. The information source is also called teacher or oracle.
Machine ethics is a part of the ethics of artificial intelligence concerned with adding or ensuring moral behaviors of man-made machines that use artificial intelligence, otherwise known as artificial intelligent agents. Machine ethics differs from other ethical fields related to engineering and technology. It should not be confused with computer ethics, which focuses on human use of computers. It should also be distinguished from the philosophy of technology, which concerns itself with technology's grander social effects.
This glossary of artificial intelligence is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of artificial intelligence, its sub-disciplines, and related fields. Related glossaries include Glossary of computer science, Glossary of robotics, and Glossary of machine vision.
Argument technology is a sub-field of collective intelligence and artificial intelligence that focuses on applying computational techniques to the creation, identification, analysis, navigation, evaluation and visualisation of arguments and debates.
Edward Y. Chang is a computer scientist, academic, and author. He is an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Visiting Chair Professor of Bioinformatics and Medical Engineering at Asia University, since 2019.
Jarek Gryz is a computer scientist, data analyst, author, and academic. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Cognitive Science Program in the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada.