Eye on the prize

Proceedings of the ISCIE International Symposium on Stochastic Systems Theory and its Applications, 2017

Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) is known as an efficient method which reflects user's subjective preference on media contents. However, user's fatigue caused by repetitive evaluation tasks remains as a severe problem in IEC. The purpose of this study is to propose a new framework of IEC, continuous evaluation-based IEC (CEIEC) that continues user's evaluation tasks in many days. CEIEC allows the user's subjective evaluation day by day to have many evaluation times without severe fatigue, while conventional IECs performed user's task in one time in one day. This study also performed a listening experiment for investigating efficiencies of CEIEC. The target of search with CEIEC was to design a bright sign sound. Sixteen subjects participated in the listening experiment which is composed of tasks of three days: in the 1st and the 2nd days, the subjects performed a selection task throughout fifteen generations. Successive update of the solution was observed during these two days. In the 3rd day, the subjects evaluated three sign sounds with 7-point scale. These three sounds were picked up from the 0th, 14th, and 29th generations, respectively. The sound with the highest score was found in the 29th generation. These results show the efficiencies of CEIEC.

Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, 2012

Our understanding of creativity is limited, yet there is substantial research trying to mimic human creativity in artificial systems and in particular to produce systems that automatically evolve art appreciated by humans. We propose here to study human visual preference through observation of nearly 500 user sessions with a simple evolutionary art system. The progress of a set of aesthetic measures throughout each interactive user session is monitored and subsequently mimicked by automatic evolution in an attempt to produce an image to the liking of the human user.

Fitness assignment is one of the biggest challenges in evolutionary art. Interactive evolutionary computation approaches put a significant burden on the user, leading to human fatigue. On the other hand, autonomous evolutionary art systems usually fail to give the users the opportunity to express and convey their artistic goals and preferences. Our approach empowers the users by allowing them to express their intentions through the design of fitness functions. We present a novel responsive interface for designing fitness function in the scope of evolutionary ant paintings. Once the evolutionary runs are concluded, further control is given to the users by allowing them to specify the rendering details of selected pieces. The analysis of the experimental results highlights how fitness function design influences the outcomes of the evolutionary runs, conveying the intentions of the user and enabling the evolution of a wide variety of images.

Neural Computing and Applications, 2020

Unequal area facility layout problem is an important issue in the design of industrial plants, as well as other fields such as hospitals or schools, among others. While participating in an interactive designing process, the human user is required to evaluate a high number of proposed solutions, which produces them fatigue both mental and physical. In this paper, the use of eye-tracking to estimate user's evaluations from gaze behavior is investigated. The results show that, after a process of training and data taking, it is possible to obtain a good enough estimation of the user's evaluations which is independent of the problem and of the users as well. These promising results advice to use eyetracking as a substitute for the mouse during users' evaluations.

User fatigue is probably the most pressing problem in current Interactive Evolutionary Computation systems. To address it we propose the use of automatic seeding procedure, phenotype filters, and partial automation fitness assignment. We test this approaches in the visual arts domain. To further enhance interactive evolution applications in aesthetic domains, we propose the use of artificial art critics -systems that perform stylistic and aesthetic valuations of art -presenting experimental results.

2010

Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) community aims at reducing user's fatigue during an optimization task involving subjective criteria: a set of graphic potential solutions are simultaneously shown to a user which task is to identify most interesting solutions to the problem he had to solve. Evolutionary operators are applied to user choices expecting to produce better solutions. As traditional IEC ask the user to give a mark to each solution or to explicitly choose bests solutions with a mouse, we propose a new framework that uses in real time gaze information to predict which parts of a screen is more significant for a user. We can therefore avoid the user to explicitly choose which solutions are interesting for him. In this paper, we mainly focus on automatically ordering solutions shown on a screen given a gaze path obtained by an eye-tracker. We applied several supervised learning methods (SVM, neural networks…) on two different experiments. We obtain a formula that predict with 85% user choices. We demonstrate that decisive criterion is time spent on one solution and we show the independency between this formula and the experiment.

Complexity, 2019

One of the general aims of evolutionary art research is to build a computer system capable of creating interesting, beautiful, or creative results, including images, videos, animations, text, and performances. In this context, it is crucial to understand how fitness is conceived and implemented to explore the “interestingness,” beauty, or creativity that the system is capable of. In this paper, we survey the recent research on fitness for evolutionary art related to aesthetics. We also cover research in the psychology of aesthetics, including relation between complexity and aesthetics, measures of complexity, and complexity predictors. We try to establish connections between human perception and understanding of aesthetics with current evolutionary techniques.

IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2000

We use a new measure of creativity as a guide in an interactive evolutionary art task and tie the results to natural language usage of the term "creative". Following previous work, we explore a tractable definition of creativity, one emphasizing the novelty of systems, and its addition to an interactive application. We next introduce a generative ecosystemic art system, EvoEco, an agent-based pixel-level means of generating images. EvoEco is used as a component of an online survey which asks users to evolve a pleasing image and then rank the success of the process and its output. Evolutionary search is augmented with the creativity measure, and compared with control groups augmented with either random search or a measure of phenotypic distance. We show that users consistently rate the creativity measureenhanced version as more "creative" and "novel" than other search techniques. We further derive additional insights into appropriate forms of genetic representation and pattern spacetraversal in an interactive evolutionary algorithm.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

To respond to the quickly changing and diversifying customer's requirements, a system for supporting an industrial design where a customer can personally participate in the design process is proposed. Our system uses Interactive Evolutionary Computing (IEC) technique where a customer can express his or her requirement such as a Kansei image by interacting with the system. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our system, we applied it to the design of an eyeglass frame shape. Harmony with the customer's face is an important key factor in the design of an eyeglass frame. In our system, the user evaluates some samples suggested by our system, and then gradually he or she comes to the design he or she likes. The systems' effectiveness was demonstrated through the experiments of user operations and questionnaires.