Creative Computing: An Approach to Knowledge Combination for Creativity?

It can be agreeable that human knowledge has been accumulated to a peak level, of which one of the evidences is the coming of Big Data era. It is observed that knowledge combination presently can be a way of innovating new products and new services for people. A challenging issue is how to combine human knowledge intelligently and creatively. It is proposed and visioned that Creative Computing can be one approach to tackling the above challenge. This paper starts with questions such as what Creative Computing is, what research scope Creative Computing has, what assumptions and principles Creative Computing is based on, what new methods Creative Computing will use, what applications Creative Computing will have, and how, in particular, Creative Computing will combine knowledge. By summarising related research studies and projects, it observes the advancement of Creative Computing has enabled broad use of computers in many domains, while combined knowledge are playing key roles in most of them. As an example, the paper will present an attempt for knowledge from different disciplines to be linked and combined via software semantic techniques. Furthermore, the combined knowledge provides the basis of creativity on generating new ideas and solutions, which not only helps on solving problems but also inspires and encourages on innovative activities. Overall, this paper aims to speculate and establish a prospect and imagination of Creative Computing as an effective way for connecting and combining various and vast amount of human knowledge.

I. Introduction

It is obvious that it comes to an information explosion era, in which human knowledge has been accumulated to a peak level. Accordingly, the emerging big-data paradigm, owing to its broader impact, has attracted diverse attentions from both technological experts and the public in general [1]. Meanwhile, there is more emphasis on innovation as it is the key role of being successful in this extremely competitive market, because there are always multiple products or services striving to serve the users in the same domain [2], [3]. Knowledge is always the foundation of innovative ideas for both products and services. It is observed that knowledge combination presently can be a way of innovating new products and new services on various domains. A well-known example is Apple's iPhone, considered as a game-changing product, which merged many technical knowledge items, for instance, virtual keyboard, with the knowledge of traditional mobile phone. Over the last few years, the introduction of the iPhone has subverted the smartphone market. Traditional mobile phone companies, even the giants like Nokia and Motorola, have been forced to make huge changes and many new smartphone companies have arisen following iPhone's trend. Further, it is not only leading the trend of the mobile phone industry but also affected the computer market seriously. Sales on various brands have suffered different degrees of declining in recent years, while millions applications are available for iPhone that allow users to do all kinds of tasks in this pocket size device.