Publications • Human-Centered Computing • Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Understanding and Augmenting Ideation Processes

Mackeprang, Maximilian

New York, NY: ACM | 2019

Appeared in: Proceedings of the 2019 on Creativity and Cognition

To effectively support individual contributors in large scale ideation settings, we need a computational understanding of their cognitive processes. Although related work exists that references models from psychology, there are two shortcomings in existing approaches: First, they only analyse ideas on a statistical level. Second, they lack a notion of individual ideator differences. This work proposes a new user model for ideation, based on process-models from psychology and knowledge-graph based information extraction from submitted idea-texts. By building a computational model of ideation, this work aims to enable new graph-based analysis methods of cognitive ideation processes and new approaches to adaptive ideation support systems. These systems could be used to detect and counter fixation in individuals and to guide group efforts based on categories that should be explored.

Keywords: I2M

Leveraging General Knowledge Graphs in Crowd-powered Innovation

Mackeprang, Maximilian; Khiat, Abderrahmane; Müller-Birn, Claudia

Despite the significant benefits of crowd ideation platforms, these introduced two main challenges: (1) many ideas generated are basic and repetitive (2) the high number of ideas generated makes it practically impossible for ideation experts to review ideas one by one in order to select novel and useful ones. A key feature to overcome these issues resides in understanding the ideas. General Knowledge Graphs describe the meaning of domain-independent terms in an computationally understandable way and therefore represent a promising solution in obtaining such meaning. In this paper, we describe our research in understanding ideas and preliminary findings in application for crowd-powered innovation.

Keywords: I2M

The Impact of Concept Representation in Interactive Concept Validation (ICV)

Mackeprang, Maximilian; Khiat, Abderrahmane; Stauss, Maximilian; Müller, Tjark Sascha; Müller-Birn, Claudia

Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin | 2019

Keywords: I2M

Discovering the Sweet Spot of Human-Computer Configurations: A Case Study in Information Extraction

Level of Automation in the ICV Process

Maximilian Mackeprang , Claudia Müller-Birn , Maximilian Timo Stauss

New York: ACM | 2019

Appeared in: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Interactive intelligent systems, i.e., interactive systems that employ AI technologies, are currently present in many parts of our social, public and political life. An issue reoccurring often in the development of these systems is the question regarding the level of appropriate human and computer contributions. Engineers and designers lack a way of systematically defining and delimiting possible options for designing such systems in terms of levels of automation. In this paper, we propose, apply and reflect on a method for human-computer configuration design. It supports the systematic investigation of the design space for developing an interactive intelligent system. We illustrate our method with a use case in the context of collaborative ideation. Here, we developed a tool for information extraction from idea content. A challenge was to find the right level of algorithmic support, whereby the quality of the information extraction should be as high as possible, but, at the same time, the human effort should be low. Such contradicting goals are often an issue in system development; thus, our method proposed helped us to conceptualize and explore the design space. Based on a critical reflection on our method application, we want to offer a complementary perspective to the value-centered design of interactive intelligent systems. Our overarching goal is to contribute to the design of so-called hybrid systems where humans and computers are partners.

Keywords: Ideas to Market, I2M

Concept Validation during Collaborative Ideation and Its Effect on Ideation Outcome

Mackeprang, Maximilian; Khiat, Abderrahmane; Müller-Birn, Claudia

ACM | 2018

Appeared in: Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

A major goal of collaborative ideation is improving the creativity of the ideas generated. Recent approaches enhance creativity by showing users similar ideas during productive ideation and diverse ideas when they reach an impasse. However, related work either demands a higher mental effort from users to assess similarity or yields only a limited number of similarity values. Furthermore, idea relationship is only considered in one dimension (similarity). In our research in progress, we introduce a new approach called concept validation. It enables us to (1) capture the conceptualization of users' ideas and (2) assess multi-dimensional relationships between all ideas in near real-time. We conducted a study with 90 participants to validate the suitability of our approach. The results indicate that adding the extraction of semantic concepts to the ideation process has no negative impact on number and creativity of ideas generated. This signifies an important step towards our vision of an idea-based knowledge graph used by an interactive system to improve computer-supported human creativity.

Keywords: I2M

Semantic Annotation for Enhancing Collaborative Ideation

Khiat, Abderrahmane; Mackeprang, Maximilian; Müller-Birn, Claudia

Amsterdam: ACM | 2017

Appeared in: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Semantic Systems

Enhancing creativity has been paid a lot of attention recently, especially with the emergence of online collaborative ideation. Prior work has shown that, in addition to the exposure of diverse and creative examples, visualising the solution space enables ideators to be inspired and, thus, arrive at more creative ideas. However, existing automated approaches which assess the diversity of a set of examples fail on unstructured short text due to their reliance on similarity computation. Furthermore, the conceptual divergence cannot be easily captured for such representations. This research in progress introduces an approach based on semantic annotation to overcome these issues. The solution proposed formalizes user ideas into a set of annotated concepts and a matching mechanism is then used to compute the similarity between users' ideas. We aim also to create a visualisation of the solution space based on the similarity matrix obtained by a matching process between all ideas.

Keywords: I2M

I- Match and OntoIdea results for OAEI 2017

Khiat, Abderrahmane; Mackeprang, Maximilian

Wien: CEUR-WS.org | 2017

Appeared in: Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Ontology Matchingco -located with the 16th International Semantic Web Conference ( ISWC 2017)

Presenting a set of similar or diverse ideas during the idea generation process leads ideators to come-up with more creative and diverse ideas. However, to better assess the similarity between the ideas, we designed two matching systems, namely I-Match and OntoIdea. In the context of the idea generation process, each idea is represented by a set of instances from DBpedia describing the main concepts of the idea. Then, the developed matching systems are applied to compute the similarity between a set of instances that represent the ideas. The purpose of our participation at OAEI is to evaluate our designed instance matching algorithm in order to apply it to assess the similarity between ideas. The re- sults obtained for the first participation of I-Match and OntoIdea systems at OAEI 2017, on different instance matching tracks are so far quite promising.

Keywords: I2M

Enabling Structured Data Generation by Nontechnical Experts

Breitenfeld, André; Mackeprang, Maximilian; Hong, Ming-Tung; Müller-Birn, Claudia

Regensburg: Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. | 2017

Appeared in: Mensch und Computer 2017 - Tagungsband : Spielend einfach interagieren

The Semantic Web provides meaning to information resources in the form of machine-accessible structured data. Research in the Semantic Web field focuses commonly on tools and interfaces for technical experts leading to various usability problems. The complexity of Semantic Web technology makes it difficult especially for nontechnical experts to use these technologies. Existing research on Semantic Web usability considers mostly consumers of structured data that leave out the creation perspective. In this work, we focus on the usability of creating structured data from text, especially on the creation of relations between entities. We reviewed existing research and state of the art annotation tools to establish shortcomings and used our knowledge to propose an interaction design for the creation of relations. We conducted a user-study which showed that the proposed interaction design performed well, making it a contribution to enhance the overall usability in the field.

Keywords: I2M