Objectives

1. To develop a novel, computationally feasible, formal model of conceptual blending that is sufficiently precise for capturing the fundamental insights of Fauconnier and Turner’s theory, and is at the same time general enough to address the syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of knowledge representations.
2. To gain a deeper understanding of conceptual blending and its role in computational creativity by linking this novel formal model to relevant, cognitively inspired computational models, such as analogical and case-based reasoning, induction, semantic alignment, and coherence-based reasoning.
3. To design a generic, creative computational system based on this novel formal model capable of serendipitous invention and manipulation of novel abstract concepts, enhancing thus the creativity of humans when this system is instantiated to particular application domains for which conceptual blending is a core process of creative thinking.
4. To validate the model and its computational realisation in two representative working domains of creativity: mathematics and music.

Topics

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
• Applied Ontology
• Cognitive Modeling

Key technologies

• Distributed Ontology Language (DOL)
• Heteregeneous ToolSet (HETS)
• ONTOhub
• Answer Set Programming

Applications

• Computational Creativity
• Robotics

Oliver Kutz is a researcher with a fixed-term contract at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Find out more about him checking out his website.