Workshop on Synergies Between

Creativity and Information Technology, Science, Engineering, and Design:

Defining a Research Emphasis

November 2 and 3, 2006

Hilton Arlington Towers Hotel, Virginia


Mary Lou Maher, Program Director, IIS, CISE

mmaher@nsf.gov


The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is exploring an emphasis on the synergies between creativity and information technology, science, engineering, and design research. Information technology is playing an increasing role in extending the capability of human creative thinking and problem solving. Design, as a reflective process, develops new products in the context of a perceived need or problem. In design the reflection on problem finding becomes as important as problem solving knowing that designers often redefine the problem to be solved as they explore design solutions within a specific context. The combination of creativity and design thinking in information technology, science, and engineering has the potential to not only define new areas but to lead to increased successful innovation. Considering the synergy of creativity with research in design can have outcomes such as new models of creative cognitive and computational processes, new approaches to education for IT and non-IT students that encourage creativity, new modes of research that include creative professionals, and new tools to support human creativity. Placing this emphasis in Computer and Information Science and Engineering focuses the research on advances in computer science and information technologies with digital arts, design computing and cognition, and various areas of science and engineering.
The purpose of this workshop is to bring together a broadly defined community from research and industry to develop research directions and issues for funding projects in this area. Specifically, the participants will discuss how NSF can:

Steering Committee
Bill Mitchell
             Design Lab, MIT
Gerhard Fischer
             Computer Science, University of Colorado
Larry Leifer
             Mechanical Engineering,
             Stanford Center for Design Research (CDR) and
             Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school)
Roger Dannenberg
             Computer Science and College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon

Workshop Program:
November 1
8pm                  Informal social at the Hilton Arlington Towers Hotel for all participants
November 2
8am                  Refreshments
8:30                 Opening and introductions
9:00-10.00           Brief presentations of examples, guidelines, initiatives, synergies, and objectives of multidisciplinary research that focuses on creativity
10.00                Break
10.30-12:00          Discussion on areas of research for CreativeIT
12:00-1:30           Lunch
1:30-3:00            Presentations of Benefits/Outcomes: Models, Methods, Modes and Tools in both research and education
3:00-5:00            Break + Discussion on the role of NSF in funding creativity in information technology, science, and engineering
6:00                 Dinner
November 3
8:00                 Refreshments
8:30-10:30           Small group development of workshop recommendations on research issues, areas, guidelines, methods, exploratory research
10:30                Break
11:00-12:00          Report to larger group and final recommendations
Presentations:

Collaboration Leads to Innovation
Dana Plautz

Abstract: Why is it important to develop a common language and provide a new common ground between art, technology and science? This new common ground can catalyze the next generation of breakthroughs, and provide new pathways to innovation, if it is supported by a culture of collaboration. But what makes collaborations work? Why do corporations nurture art-sci collaborations, and why are these collaborations essential to the high-tech industry? This will be explored with key examples showing successful collaborations and guidelines that can help collaborators across multiple disciplines speak the same language.

Dana Plautz spent 10 years in the Entertainment field in Hollywood and 13 years in high tech specializing in the area of new media. She conceived and chaired the Intel Research Council grant program on Art and Entertainment. In her tenure at Intel she funded some of the most influential new media artist, such as Danny Rozin, Rebecca Allen, Bill Seaman and Ken Goldberg. She specialized in bringing about collaborations from various disciplines to bring new ideas to fruition. She is a frequent lecturer and conference speaker and an active member of the new media/creative community serving on numerous boards. She is a founding board of directors of Eyebeam, a non-profit cultural and educational organization dedicated to digital art in N.Y. Plautz also serves on the Cal Arts Integrated Media Advisory Board, the advisory board of UC Berkeley's Art, Technology colloquium, The Design Studies/Design Management advisory board for the Portland Arts Institute, and is a member of the editorial board of the ACM Computer in Entertainment. She also held a government appointment for 6 years chairing the Oregon State Film and Video office. Her writing on the field of art and entertainment has been published in the Leonardo Journal and the ACM Computers in Entertainment Magazine to name a few. She is a graduate of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR.

Mathematical Theory of Understandability
Michael Leyton

Abstract: Creative advances proceed by the generation of increased levels of understanding. Therefore, one cannot understand creativity, unless one understands understanding. In one of my books, A Generative Theory of Shape (Springer-Verlag, 550 pages), I elaborate a mathematical theory of understanding – what it is, and how it can be produced. The central problem handled in the book is what I call the conversion of complexity into understandability. This leads to an extensive reformulation of computer-aided design, human and machine vision, the structure of software, robotics, and the laws of physics. There is no more important problem, for modern industry, than the conversion of complexity into understandability, as can be seen in all phases of the product life-cycle. The reason is that the modern world is dependent on large-scale engineering-systems integration. An example of one of the major obstacles to integration is the interoperability problem. Current studies estimate that the costs to industry of inadequate interoperability are enormous – in the billions of dollars. The interoperability problem, like all problems of integration, is, in fact, a crisis in understanding. Whether one deals with upgrading large legacy systems of software, or the transfer of a CAD model from one design program to another along the manufacturing supply chain, or the multi-disciplinary nature of engineering systems in an aerospace mission, one is dealing with the problem of understandability. And it is exactly the failure to handle this through the only solution possible – a rigorous theory of understandability – that is destroying industry's capacity to fulfill its goals. It is to solve this crisis, that I developed a mathematical theory of understandability. In this talk, I will give a very brief introduction to how this approach works, and is able to solve problems.

Michael Leyton's mathematical work on shape has been used by scientists in over 40 disciplines from chemical engineering to meteorology. His scientific contributions have received major prizes, such as a presidential award and a medal for scientific achievement. His new foundations to geometry are elaborated in his books in Springer-Verlag and MIT Press. Besides his scientific and mathematical work, he is also a highly exhibited painter and sculptor, and his architecture designs have been published by Birkhauser-Architectural. Also he is the composer of published string quartets. He is president of the International Society for Mathematical and Computational Aesthetics, and is on the faculty of the Psychology Department and the DIMACS Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers.

CELL - an interdisciplinary investigation into adult stem cell behaviour
Mark d'Inverno

Abstract. The CELL project was an interdisciplinary collaboration over 4 years that included an artist, a stem cell researcher, a curator, an ALife programmer and a mathematician. It employed a range of approaches to investigate stem cell behaviour. This included agent-based models; simulations and visualisations to model stem cell organisation in silico as well as art installations, which reflected on how different disciplines use representations and data visualisation.

The impact on all members of the team was very significant and it motivated Mark d’Inverno along with the artist Jan Prophet to set up an interdisciplinary research cluster (funded jointly by both the science council and the arts council in the UK) to further investigate the potential of interdisciplinary collaborative research in general. (Please see interdisciplinary.co.uk)

In this talk I will reflect on my experience of the process of interdisciplinary collaboration and attempt to lay down some ideas of the minimal conditions that need to be in place for it to flourish as well as enumerate some of the major obstacles.

Mark d'Inverno gained an MA in Mathematics in 1986 and an MSc in Computation in 1988 both from Oxford University. In 1998 he was awarded a PhD from University College London. He joined the University of Westminster in 1992 and was appointed professor of computer science in 2001. In 2006 he took up a Chair at Goldsmiths College, University of London, principally to continue his investigations into interdisciplinary work.

He has been interested in formal, principled approaches to modelling both natural and artificial systems in a computational setting. The main strand to this research focuses on the application of formal methods in providing models of intelligent agent and multi-agent systems. This work encompasses many aspects of agent cognition and agent society including action, perception, deliberation, communication, negotiation and social norms. In recent years, ideas from both formal modelling and agent-based design, have been applied in a more practical and interdisciplinary settings such as biological modelling, computer-generated music, art and design. He has published 2 books and over 80 papers in the last 10 years in these areas.

He is also a critically acclaimed musician and is Chairman of the charity Safe Ground which uses a range of different techniques (movement, drama, poetry, narration, improvisation and role-playing as well as the written word) to develop courses in family relationships with and for prisoners, which are now being run in over 50 UK prisons.

Communities of Creative Practice
William J. Mitchell

Abstract. Wherever creativity is, it isn’t in the head. It is a function of communities of creative practice, supported by appropriate environments and tools. In this presentation I shall describe strategies for the development and management of creative design communities, at various scales, both in practice and in design education. I shall pay particular attention to mixed environments that simultaneously support both co-located and geographically distributed, and synchronous and asynchronous work. The discussion will be illustrated with examples of processes and outcomes of recent design projects.

William J. Mitchell is Alexander Dreyfoos Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and director of the MIT Design Laboratory. He previously served as dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT and Architectural Advisor to the President of MIT. His most recent books are Placing Words (MIT Press, 2005) and Imagining MIT: Designing a Campus for the 21st Century (forthcoming, MIT Press, Spring 2007). In 2002-2003 he chaired the National Academies of Science and Engineering panel that produced the report Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity.


Beyond Binary Choices:

Understanding and Exploiting Trade-Offs to Enhance Creativity
Gerhard Fischer


Abstract: Many research approaches are conceptualized as binary choices, representing endpoints of a spectrum (each of them providing important perspectives within their own discourses). Design and creativity are often conceptualized as being focused on one of these binary choices, thereby overlooking other possibilities. My presentation will briefly discuss the following trade-offs:


Gerhard Fischer (http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/) is a Professor of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research is focused on new conceptual frameworks and new media for learning, working, and collaboration; human-computer interaction; cognitive science; distributed intelligence; social creativity; design; meta-design; domain-oriented design environments; and universal design (assistive technologies).. Over the last twenty years, he has directed research projects and has published extensively in these areas. More information about the L3D Center can be found at: http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/.


Surprise and Delight:


Design-Thinking In Creative Practice And Theory

Larry Leifer

Abstract: Surprise and delight, how to take Information Technology, Science, Engineering, Design and Well-Being to the next level? Innovation is the engine. What is it? How does it work? Can we deliver precision innovation? We define innovation as the constellation of processes that discover ideas and transform them into successful services that create financial, intellectual, and social capital. The focus is on IT in organizational "triple-loop-learning."
                         
This presentation shares 3 short stories in which design thinking research and tool development have accelerated predictive product realization. Our work comes together in a bold new initiative, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. You will learn where we come from, how we think, and where you can expect to see impact.

Larry Leifer is Professor of Mechanical Engineering Design and founding Director of the Center for Design Research (CDR) at Stanford University. A member of the Stanford faculty since 1976, he teaches a master's course in "Team-Based Product Design Innovation with Corporate Partners," a thesis seminar, "Design Theory and Methodology Forum," and a freshman seminar "Designing the Human Experience." Design thinking research projects include: 1) creating collaborative design engineering environments for globally distributed product innovation teams; 2) instrumentation of that environment for design knowledge capture, indexing, reuse and performance assessment; and 3), design-for-wellbeing as socially responsible design-thinking. Sustaining attention to the Stanford Design Institute (d.school) is his top priority this year.

Music and Computer Science: Motivation, Analogies, and Experience
Roger B. Dannenberg

Abstract. Music was once strongly connected to the study of science and mathematics. Just as Geometry represented the intersection of Mathematics and Space, Music represented the intersection of Mathematics and Time. In fact, musicians invented and defined the modern notion of time centuries before scientists made use of it. In modern times, we find that control constructs found in computer programs, such as sequences, loops, conditional execution, and subroutines, have analogues in music notation and performance. I would like to show how these analogies have been used to introduce young musicians to computer programming and to help them "visualize" program behavior. I will also share some experiences using music to teach computer science to undergraduates, for whom music and music processing is highly motivating.

Dr. Roger B. Dannenberg is an Associate Research Professor in the School of Computer Science and School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1982. He is internationally known for his research in the field of computer music. His current work includes research on computer accompaniment of live musicians, content-based music retrieval, interactive media, and high-level languages for sound synthesis. Music students around the world use products based on his computer accompaniment research. Dr. Dannenberg is also an active trumpet player and composer, and he has performed in concert halls ranging from the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem to the modern Espace de Projection at IRCAM in Paris. His most recent musical efforts involve real-time computer graphics and computer music systems that interact with live musicians. Dannenberg also performs in Pittsburgh with the Roger Humphries Big Band and the Capgun Quartet.

       
Participant Biographies

Dr. Steven M. Smith is a Professor of Psychology at Texas A&M University, and he is a founding member of the Creative Cognition Research Group that was first established there in the 1980s. He is currently the Director of Research for the Institute for Applied Creativity, an interdisciplinary group at Texas A&M University. Dr. Smith has conducted many experimental studies examining aspects of creative thinking, focusing especially on the ways that mental impasses can be caused and how those impasses can be resolved. Dr. Smith and his colleagues have published numerous research articles on theoretical and applied aspects of creative thinking, and he has given invited addresses on the subject around the world, including England, Spain, and China. His books on creative cognition include Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications (1992), The Creative Cognition Approach (1995), Creativity and the Mind: Discovering the Genius Within (1995), and Creative Thought: An Investigation of Conceptual Structures and Processes (1997). Dr. Smith’s applied research in creativity, funded by the National Science Foundation, has dealt with creative conceptual design in engineering, and with information discovery in computer science. His research on the creative design process has examined design fixation, incubation effects in ideation, and alignment of creativity research across levels of complexity and ecological validity. In the field of human-computer interaction, Dr. Smith has helped articulate the information discovery framework, and he has published experimental studies of combinFormation, a mixed-initiative system for collaborative collection of information from the internet and digital libraries that represents discovered material in a navigable visual composition space.

Professor Robert Woodbury holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton University where he was awarded the Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal in Architecture in 1981. He earned his Master of Science and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He was a faculty member in Architecture and the Engineering Design Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University from 1982 to 1993, at Adelaide University in South Australia from 1993 to 2001, at the Technical University of British Columbia from 2001 to 2002 and is now at Simon Fraser University. He was founding Chair of the Graduate Program in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU. Currently he is Scientific Director of the Canadian Design Research Network, the national association of design researchers in Canada.

Dr Woodbury’s research is in computational design. From his research group have come many of the implementations of generative design systems, including the Genesis system, which was further developed and deployed at Boeing. His current work in generative systems is on subsumption-based design space explorers—an alternative to the long-standing and dominant rule mechanism. Since 1995, he has used the Internet as a means to enhance student learning. His particular emphases have been on peer-to-peer learning and the enhancement of competence and confidence through learning games. Recent projects include an online architecture gallery—A•VI•RE, the GeometryWare system for teaching the mathematics of computer graphics and Learning Object for Design, a collection of multimedia resources for design learning.

Dr Woodbury has won numerous national competitive and private foundation grants for both research and teaching, totaling over $4.7M. He has over 100 technical publications. In 1999 he was awarded a national citation for curriculum development from the Association of Australasian Schools of Architecture. In 2000 he won the Stephen Cole the Elder Prize as one of two top teachers at Adelaide University. In 1980 he was a member of the Canadian Olympic Sailing Team.

Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Group and the teaching and research program in Human-Computer Interaction Design u. He is also a founding faculty member of the new Stanford Institute of Design ( u). He is a regular consultant to Google, a search engine company founded by Stanford students from his projects. His early research on natural language understanding by computers (SHRDLU) was the basis for two books and numerous articles. *Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design* (Addison-Wesley, 1987, co-authored with Fernando Flores), took a critical look at work in artificial intelligence and suggested new directions for the integration of computer systems into human activity. He co-edited a volume on usability with Paul Adler, (*Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools* Oxford, 1992) and edited *Bringing Design to Software* (Addison-Wesley, 1996).

Winograd was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, of which he is a past national president. He is on the editorial board of several journals, including Human-Computer
Interaction, ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, Personal Technologies, and Information Technology, and People. He was elected to the ACM CHI Academy in 2003.

Tom Hewett is Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Drexel University where for 30 years he has taught courses on Cognitive Psychology, Psychology of Human Computer Interaction, and Problem Solving and Creativity. Tom has offered variants of this tutorial to hundreds of interaction designers at conferences and in-house training sessions. He has several times taught a weeklong course on Human Problem Solving for the User System Interaction program at the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. In addition, he has been visiting fellow, visiting professor or visiting researcher at the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland, Twente University, Hengelo, The Netherlands, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, The University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece, and the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Tom is a published courseware author and has worked on the development and evaluation of several interactive computing projects, including a hypertext guidebook, instructional computing software and scientific problem solving environments. Some of the his recent research has involved collaborating with a team of researchers working on enabling and facilitating mathematical problem solving using mobile devices. As a consultant for over 2 years to NIST on the NIMD project Tom participated in multiple observations of intelligence analysts at work and advised on the development of Metrics and Measures for assessing the impact of novel software tools. Other recent projects have involved field trials evaluation of use and effectiveness of software tools designed to support Emergency Response Teams using mobile devices.

John Gero is Professor of Design Science and Director of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition at the University of Sydney. He is the editor/author of 43 books and has published over 550 research papers. He has been a Visiting Professor of Architecture, Civil Engineering, Computer Science, Cognitive Psychology, Design and Computation, and Mechanical Engineering in the USA, UK, France and Switzerland including at MIT, UC-Berkeley, Columbia, UCLA, and CMU in the USA, Strathclyde and Loughborough in the UK, INSA-Lyon and Provence in France and EPFL-Lausanne in Switzerland. His former doctoral students are professors in the USA, UK, Australia, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

He has been the recipient of many excellence awards including the Harkness Fellowship, two Fulbright Fellowships, and various named University Chairs including the Perloff Chair of Architecture at UCLA and the Springer Chair of Mechanical Engineering at UC-Berkeley. He is on the editorial boards of numerous journals related to computer-aided design, artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering and design and is the chair of the international conference series Artificial Intelligence in Design, the new conference series Design Computing and Cognition and co-chair of the international conference series Computational and Cognitive Models of Creative Design.

His research spans computer-aided design, design optimization, design theory, artificial intelligence in design, design cognition and computational design creativity.

Mark D Gross’s area of research is design methods and computational means. He has worked on constraint programming language for design, sketch recognition and analysis, tangible interaction, and architectural robotics. His current research, exploring the design space of next-generation computationally enhanced construction kit toys and craft for teaching and learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is supported by an Information Technology Research grant from NSF.

Gross received a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Design (1978) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Design Theory and Methods from the same institution in 1986. While an undergraduate student he worked in Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group on interactive models and tools for architectural design. After completing the undergraduate degree Gross worked at the MIT Logo Laboratory on personal computer implementations of the Logo programming language for children. His doctoral work, supervised by N. John Habraken, Aaron Fleisher, and Seymour Papert, developed a model of designing as exploring constraints and a software strategy to support this model. During this time Gross also worked at the Atari Cambridge Research Laboratory on educational computing.

From 1986-1988 Gross worked as a post-doctoral fellow at MIT with Habraken on "Concept Design Games," and with Fleisher, Donald Schön, and Larry Bucciarelli on "Designing and Designing Knowledge in Engineering and Architecture". From 1988-1990, with Habraken, he consulted for the Shimizu Construction Corporation on computer tools for spatial coordination in architectural design.

Gross taught at the University of Colorado from 1990-1999 in the College of Environmental Design, which became the College of Architecture and Planning, where he was also a fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science. He also briefly held a joint position in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering. From 1999-2004 he taught at the University of Washington, Seattle in the Department of Architecture, where held joint appointments in the Departments of Landscape architecture and Computer Science and Engineering. He helped found a PhD program in Planning and Design at Colorado, and another in Built Environment at Washington. He joined Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture faculty in 2004 where he teaches in the computational design graduate program.

Kumiyo Nakakoji received the B.A. degree in computer science from Osaka University, Japan, in 1986, and the M.S. degree in 1990 and the Ph.D. degree in 1993, both in computer science from University of Colorado, Boulder, certified in Institute of Cognitive Science. She is currently Full Professor at Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), University of Tokyo, Japan, and directs the Knowledge Interaction Design Laboratory. She also works for SRA Key Technology Laboratory, Inc., Japan as senior research fellow. She has served as a chair, editor, and committee member for a number of research communities, journals, and conferences, both locally and internationally. She was a Board member of Human Interface Society, Japan, and is currently chairing IPSJ SIGHCI, Japan. She was awarded Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from College of Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2006. Her research interests include human-computer interaction design and collective creativity, specifically Knowledge Interaction Design, which is a framework for the design and development of computational tools for creative knowledge work. Her latest work addresses cognitive and social factors of software development as knowledge-intensive collective creative tasks.
Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/), and Member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM ) in 1997 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed. 2004) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/ . He pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. His move into information visualization helped spawn the successful company Spotfire http://www.spotfire.com/ . He is a technical advisor for the HiveGroup and ILOG. With S Card and J. Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). His books include Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), which won the IEEE Distinguished Literary Contribution award in 2004.
Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy ("buy chee") was appointed Director of CITRIS at the University of California, Berkeley on November 1, 2001 and stepped down in August 2005. Prior to coming to Berkeley, she was Assistant Director of the Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) between December 1, 1998 and September 1, 2001. As head of National Science Foundation’s CISE directorate, Dr. Bajcsy managed a $500 million annual budget. She came to the NSF from the University of Pennsylvania where she was a professor of computer science and engineering.

Dr. Bajcsy is a pioneering researcher in machine perception, robotics and artificial intelligence. She is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Berkeley. She was also Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory, which she founded in 1978. Dr. Bajcsy has done seminal research in the areas of human-centered computer control, cognitive science, robotics, computerized radiological/medical image processing and artificial vision. She is highly regarded, not only for her significant research contributions, but also for her leadership in the creation of a world-class robotics laboratory, recognized world wide as a premiere research center. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the Institute of Medicine. She is especially known for her wide-ranging, broad outlook in the field and her cross-disciplinary talent and leadership in successfully bridging such diverse areas as robotics and artificial intelligence, engineering and cognitive science.

Dr. Bajcsy received her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in 1957 and 1967, respectively. She received a Ph.D. in computer science in 1972 from Stanford University, and since that time has been teaching and doing research at Penn’s Department of Computer and Information Science. She began as an assistant professor and within 13 years became chair of the department. Prior to her work at the University of Pennsylvania, she taught during the 1950s and 1960s as an instructor and assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Department of Computer Science at Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. She has served as advisor to more than 50 Ph.D. recipients. In 2001 she received an honorary doctorate from University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. In 2001 she became a recipient of the ACM A. Newell award.

Pamela Jennings is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University with a joint appointment in the School of Art and the Human Computer Interaction Institute. Jennings worked as a research interaction designer and web producer at IBM Almaden Research Center for the Advanced Technology and Software Solutions Group and the User System Ergonomics Research Lab. She also worked as a research instructional designer for the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI international. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. in the Center for Advanced Inquiry in Integrative Arts program; M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts; M.A. from the International Center of Photography and New York University; and B.A. from Oberlin College.

Jennings’ digital media art works make visible personal narratives by revealing hidden realities while simultaneously encouraging public discourse. In particular, her research in critical creative technologies is informed by a convergence of critical theories of technology, human centered computing, and contemporary practices in interaction design and digital media art. Resulting in the development of new information technologies and collaborative applications for facilitating face-to-face discourse in public spaces with others in situations where communication may be stifled by societal norms.

Jennings’ art work has been cited in Lisa Farrington’s Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists, Oxford University Press and Phyllis Klotman and Janet Cutler’s Struggles for Representation: African American Film/Video/New Media Makers, Indiana University Press. Her papers have been published and presented in the 2005 ACM Creativity and Cognition, 2005 Human Computer Interaction Consortium, several Inter-Society for Electronic Arts symposiums since 1997, several ACM Computer Human Interaction workshops, 2003 Interact Conference, and the 1999 European Union I3Net Symposium. Her journal articles have been published in the Leonardo Journal for Art and Science, Convergence: the Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, and the CAA Art Journal.

Jennings’ internationally recognized digital media arts research advocacy work includes the New Media Arts | New Funding Models white paper commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, and co-writer of the Helsinki Agenda documentation of the 2004 Experts Meeting on International New Media Arts Policy sponsored by the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA). She is chair for Speculative Data and the Creative Imaginary: shared innovative visions between art and technology and exhibition to be held at the National Academy of Sciences Gallery in Washington D.C. as part of the 2007 ACM Creativity and Cognition conference. She co-chaired the 2006 ACM CHI conference workshop titled About Face: Interface – Creative Engagement in New Media Arts and Human Computer Interaction and the first Interactive Art track for the 2004 ACM Multimedia Conference.

Ken Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University, He was founding director of the Media Research Laboratory and also directed the NYU Center for Advanced Technology from 1994-2004. His research interests include graphics, animation, user interfaces, science education and multimedia. In January 2004 he was the featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2002 he received the NYC Mayor's award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU. In 1997 he won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television. In 1991 he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Perlin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in 1986, and a B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard University in 1979. He was Head of Software Development at R/GREENBERG Associates in New York, NY from 1984 through 1987. Prior to that, from 1979 to 1984, he was the System Architect for computer generated animation at Mathematical Applications Group, Inc., Elmsford, NY, where the first feature film he worked on was TRON. He has served on the Board of Directors of the New York chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Software Industry Association.


Workshop Participants

Bill Mitchell
Design Lab, MIT
http://web.media.mit.edu/~wjm/

Gerhard Fischer
Computer Science, University of Colorado
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/

Larry Leifer
Mechanical Engineering, Stanford Center for Design Research (CDR) and
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school)
http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~leifer/

Roger Dannenberg
Comp Science and College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/

Ben Shneiderman
Computer Science, University of Maryland
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/

John Gero
Design Science, University of Sydney, Australia
http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~john

Mark dInverno
Department of Computing, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas02md/

Thomas T. Hewett
Psychology, Drexel University
http://www.psychology.drexel.edu/Hewett.htm

Kenneth H Perlin
Media Research Laboratory, NYU
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/

Dana Plautz
Chair of the Art and Entertainment Committee, Intel
Studio Director, Second Story
www.secondstory.com

Rob Saunders
Design Computing, University of Sydney, Australia
http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rob/

Kumiyo Nakakoji
Interaction Design, Collective Creativity, University of Tokyo, Japan
http://www.kid.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~kumiyo/

Michael Leyton
DIMACS Center for Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science and Department of Psychology, Rutgers
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~mleyton/homepage.htm

Pamela Jennings
School of Art and Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon
http://studio416.cfa.cmu.edu/

Mark Gross
Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/mdg2/

Steven Smith
Psychology, Texas A&M
http://people.tamu.edu/~stevesmith/

Ruzena Bajcsy
EECS, UC Berkeley
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bajcsy/

Rob Woodbury
Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Terry Winograd
Computer Science, Stanford
http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/