The University of Waterloo hosted this week the 14th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), held over five days at Federation Hall.
The conference explores key themes in the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems. The interdisciplinary group of researchers in attendance included computer scientists and mathematicians, and other scientists and engineers, as well as humanists and social scientists. Professor Jessica Thompson, Director of Waterloo’s Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, gave a keynote lecture about her artistic practice; the other two were by Professor Stacy Allison-Cassin from Dalhousie University and by Dr. Kory Mathewson from Google DeepMind.
A topic of several of the conference’s paper presentations is the impact of generative AI in the field of computational creativity, design and on the artistic endeavour broadly.
“It’s been great to host ICCC at Waterloo, and learn about how our field is responding to the changes caused by the generative AI revolution, and to show off some of the great work happening here at Waterloo and in Canada,” says Dan Brown, professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the conference’s general chair. “Many presenters spoke about the ethical implications of the field. How can we as a research community build generative art systems that avoid perpetuating societal bias? What are the implications for climate change of generative art?”
Along with paper presentations, the conference also included special panels with representatives from industry and the arts, as well as a doctoral consortium program as a platform for students. ICCC’23 ran from June 19–23; full details, including the papers presented, are available at https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc23/.
