I'm interested in improvisation - both as (1) a way of explaining the processes by which we reason/feel and as (2) a headway to creating new approaches to interaction with information in general and digital media creation / browsing / exchanging / performing in particular.

I take a very broad definition of improvisation, namely - improvisation is a creative activity where no boundary between cognitive and intuitive is drawn, where no clear rule-based approach can be utilized in even a superficial way, and where the focus is on the process rather than on some final goal or state.

This area is full of fascinating and unanswered questions that doubt the very foundations of how we see the world around us today. Improvisation, as defined above, provides an outlook different from the current prevalent theories on what we really do when we act in one way or another. More precisely, the underlying research questions that interest me are:

• How can human interaction, thinking, and emotion be described using improvisational models?
• In what way can improvisational models expand our ideas of AI?
• How can we apply improvisational models to creation / browsing / search / exchange / production of audiovisual and text content?
• What are the fields (e.g. arts, economics) where applications based on improvisational models will be most useful (e.g. improvisational search methods)?

My objective therefore is to develop theories and build applications that facilitate improvisational ways of creating / browsing / searching / exchanging / producing both the media content (i.e. audio, video, text) and its continuously changing structures. I'm pursuing this path by (1) developing improvisational network models; (2) incorporating these models into a multidimensional framework that allows for integration of an extensible range of AI methods, both connectionist (evolutionary in particular) and symbolic, and (3) designing applications in the fields of entertainment and learning that utilize parts of the framework.

For more information, please take a look at my ongoing thesis project, The Emonic Environment.

see also: project list / publications list / Emonic Environment