Geraint A. Wiggins will present recent work on spectral knowledge representation, a new approach to knowledge representation in AI, that relates to the comprehension of music. This is an on-going project, concerning a cognitive architecture called Information Dynamics of Thinking. The architecture combines hierarchical, information-theoretic structure-finding over multidimensional perceptual input sequences (episodic memory) with the assembly of continuous spaces of meaning (semantic memory) which are described using Hilbert Space mathematics. The principle is to use mathematics that can directly model the dynamic behaviour of the brain in a way that is tractable for digital computers. The whole sits within a statistical predictive cognition framework, and is driven by a domain-independent heuristic of information efficiency. In this talk, he will outline the hierarchical segmentation mechanism, to give context, but the main focus will be the formation of semantic spaces, and the particular spaces that he will describe are those of musical pitch and musical harmony. The results are validated against long-standing empirical results from the music cognition literature.
Geraint A. Wiggins is a Professor of Computational Creativity at Vrije Universiteit Brussel & Queen Mary University of London. He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and holds PhDs from the University of Edinburgh's Artificial Intelligence and Music Departments. His main research area is computational creativity, which he views as an intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He is interested in understanding how humans can be creative by building computational models of mental behaviour and comparing them with the behaviour of humans.
He has worked at the University of Edinburgh and three colleges of the University of London: City, Goldsmiths, and Queen Mary. He recently moved his Computational Creativity Lab to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in Belgium. He is a former chair of SSAISB, the UK learned society for AI and Cognitive Science, and of the international Association for Computational Creativity, of whose new journal he is editor-in-chief. He is associated editor (English) of the Musicae Scientiae (the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music), a consulting editor of Music Perception (the journal of the Society for Music Perception) and an editorial board member of the Journal of New Music Research.