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Creative Acts beyond Dissemination

Last week Ryan and I were in DC at Creativity and Cognition 2007 (C&C) where we ran a workshop on Supporting Creative Acts Beyond Dissemination.

In its 6th year, C&C addresses creativity in both theory and practice. The research aims to provide us all with a deeper understanding of the creative processes. The conference was amazing and we were excited to be there: see it in Jean-Baptiste’s Flickr set. All of the attendees have a similar goal: to enable more people to be creative more of the time.

In our workshop, we began to think about new forms of digital creativity, one with a blurred distinction between creator-centric and experience-centric creativity. In attendance, we had a diverse set of participants (artists, dancers, research directors, business consultants, and a few computer/information scientists). Bringing together this set of people to discuss a common theme was a phenomenal experience. Each of us presented and discussed our perspective on how creativity works across a variety of domains. It’s good to see how artists and engineers intersect and connect ideas (we built a concept map of the work to show some of these connections). We then reconsidered models that cleanly separate the two, and began to seek out new models in which the user of a creative work takes on a generative role, not just an interpretive or interactive one.

World Explorer: A JCDL best paper!

Last night, we discovered our work on TagMaps / World Explorer won best paper at ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). Rahul’s in British Colombia where he presented the paper, World Explorer: Visualizing Aggregate Data from Unstructured Text in Geo-Referenced Collections.

Read the paper, check out the demo and many shouts to Shane, Mor, Rahul, & Jeannie. Fantastic!

Oh and thanks Rahul for letting us know via this Flickr photo.

Hack with Y!RB in London

What’s in a location? Our Tag Maps, ZoneTag, and Zurfer applications all involve some location-based services. In Tag Maps, we have a bounding-box query that returns a list of automatically-computed landmarks/attractions nearby. In ZoneTag, a location query returns a list of tags that might be relevant to the user at that location — perhaps useful to tag a photo they have taken there. ZoneTag also helps with Cell Tower tracking: give the ZoneTag service a cell tower ID, and it might actually tell you where in the world that cell tower is. Zurfer can also offer a few useful services - but these are not yet released.

These services are already available on the Yahoo! Developer website. If you happen to be located in London, though, and you are a hacker, and you are planning to come to Hack Day… then you might be hearing about all of these Y!RB web services first-hand this weekend.

Plus, FireEagle!

The Month of UC Berkeley (Talks) at Y!RB

Our lab has a lots reasons to love UC Berkeley. Sitting two blocks away from campus means that we can look there for inspiration, feedback, collaboration, and - above all - interns!

This month, we get some more UC Berkeley love with a series of talks from Berkeley professors in our weekly Brain Jam seminar: Ray Larson (June 8th), Marti Hearst (June 15th), Nancy van House (June 22nd) and Maneesh Agrawala / Jeffery Heer (June 29th, details TBD). Head to Upcoming for the details (here are all future events for Y!RB) or sign up to our mailing list to get weekly reminders for all our Brain Jam events. There are quite a few interesting speaker stopping by this summer!

Hack? Where? In Sunnyvale this weekend!

On Wednesday, at Where2.0, I promised on stage that we hope to deliver something that will change the way you write location-based applications.

Well, we may have a sneak preview if you come to WhereCampSF this weekend in Sunnyvale. It’s not too late to attend! Find out more about WhereCampSF here, and on Upcoming. Should be a great event, regardless of our work.