HOBOKEN, N.J. -- Two professors from Stevens Institute of Technology have collaborated across departments and disciplines to win a National Science Foundation grant for a technical-creative research project, titled, “A ‘Transderivational’ Search Engine for Creative Analogy Generation in Mixed-Media Design.” The professors are H. Quynh Dinh, from the Department of Computer Science, and Ebon Fisher, from the Department of Art, Music & Technology.
“We are inspired by the ability of artists and designers to find analogies between diverse artifacts and bring them together to compose a coherent and novel narrative,” said Professor Dinh.. “An extreme form of this ability is the neurological condition known as synaesthesia in which two or more senses are crossed, e.g., when seeing a color causes one to hear a sound.” Inspired by this phenomenon, the researcher will develop a transderivational search engine to help people to discover connections between text, 1D audio, 2D image, 3D geometry and 4D motion data.
In psychology, transderivational search is a fuzzy match that enables people to find contextual meaning in every stimulus. It is a primary component of human language and cognitive processing. “We will develop a transderivational search engine in the context of designing interactive, mixed-media installations and in a brainstorming application for artists and designers to help them make mental associations in design tasks such as gathering media artifacts for a thematic installation from an archive of media samples,” said Fisher.
The professors said further that the intellectual merit of this research is the development of matching algorithms that suggest analogies across different media forms by looking at structural similarity within media content. The expected result will be a transformative technology at the intersection of art, computer graphics, machine learning, cognitive psychology, and human-computer interaction (HCI).
“Transderivational search will enhance the synaesthetic effect in analogy generation and will naturally lend itself to a wide range of brainstorming pursuits,” said Dinh. “Finding analogies between media of different forms, e.g., audio and 3D shapes, has not been explored, nor has there been much focus on non-literal search engines.
Literal searches rely only on explicit meaning (e.g., the word “three” and an image of the number 3) and categorization to determine similarity. Instead, the researchers will compare media samples by looking for structural similarity using analytical approaches such as statistical shape distributions, frequency analysis, and machine learning techniques to discover relationships between mixed- (multi-dimensional) media samples.
The expected technical impacts of this research are in advancing artificial intelligence through transderivational search (essential to language and cognitive processing) and in opening up new research questions on search technology. “We will disseminate our algorithms under an open source license and publish research results at venues on computer graphics, vision, and multimedia retrieval,” said Dinh.
About Stevens Institute of Technology
Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value. Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,040 undergraduate and 3,085 graduate students, and a worldwide online enrollment of 2,250, with a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty of 140 and more than 200 full-time special faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.
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