Artificial Imagination

Artificial Imagination (AIm), also called Synthetic Imagination or machine imagination is defined as artificial simulation of human imagination by general or special purpose computers or artificial neural networks.

The term artificial imagination is also used to describe a property of machines or programs: Among some of the traits that researchers hope to simulate using machines include creativity, vision, digital art, humor, satire, etc.

Artificial Imagination research uses tools and insights from many fields, including computer science, Rhetoric, psychology, creative arts, philosophy, neuroscience, affective computing, Artificial Intelligence,cognitive science, linguistics, operations research, creative writing, probability and logic.

The various practitioners in the field are researching various aspects of Artificial Imagination, such as Artificial (Visual) Imagination, ["Visual Information Retrieval Using Synthesized Imagery" http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1282303&type=pdf] Artificial (Aural) Imagination, ["AUDIO CONTENT TRANSMISSION" by Xavier Amatriain & Perfecto Herrera, http://www.iua.upf.es/mtg/publications/dafx2001-xamat.pdf ] , modeling/filtering content based on human emotions ["Is It Out There? The Perspectives of Emotional Information Retrieval from the Internet Resources" by R. Rzepka, K. Araki, and K. Tochinai (Japan), 2007 http://actapress.com/PDFViewer.aspx?paperId=25600] and Interactive Search ["An Artificial Imagination for Interactive Search. ICCV-HCI, 4796: 19-28, 2007" byBart Thomee, Mark J. Huiskes, Erwin M. Bakker and Michael Lew http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/iccv/iccv-hci2007.html#ThomeeHBL07 ] . Some articles on the topic speculate on how artificial imagination may evolve to create an artificial world which people may not want to leave at all. ["Hypertext and “the Hyperreal”" by Stuart Moulthrop, Yale University http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=74224.74246] .

Some researchers in the field, such as G. Schleis and M. Rizki, Dept. of Comput. Sci., Wayne State Univ. have focused on using artificial neural networks for simulating artificial imagination. ["Learning from a random player using the reference neuron model" in the "Proceedings of the 2002 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, 2002." http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1007019] The topic of artificial imagination has gotten interest from scholars outside the computer science domain, such as noted teacher-scholar Earnest G Bormann, a remarkable teacher-scholar, who came up with the symbloic convergence theory and has worked on a project to develop artificial imagination in computer systems. ["Twentieth-Century Roots of Rhetorical Studies", by Jim A. Kuypers and Andrew King, 2001. published by Praeger/Greenwood, page 225.] .

"How to Build a Mind: Toward Machines with Imagination" by Igor Aleksander is a good book on the topic.

And of course, the popular press is catching the term as well. ["RoboBusiness: Robots that Dream of Being Better" May 16, 2007 http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/05/16/robobusiness-robots-with-imagination/]

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