In this thesis it is posed that the central object of preference discovery is a co-creative process in which the Other can be represented by a machine. It explores efficient methods to enhance... Show moreIn this thesis it is posed that the central object of preference discovery is a co-creative process in which the Other can be represented by a machine. It explores efficient methods to enhance introverted intuition using extraverted intuition's communication lines. Possible implementations of such processes are presented using novel algorithms that perform divergent search to feed the users' intuition with many examples of high quality solutions, allowing them to take influence interactively. The machine feeds and reflects upon human intuition, combining both what is possible and preferred. The machine model and the divergent optimization algorithms are the motor behind this co-creative process, in which machine and users co-create and interactively choose branches of an ad hoc hierarchical decomposition of the solution space.The proposed co-creative process consists of several elements: a formal model for interactive co-creative processes, evolutionary divergent search, diversity and similarity, data-driven methods to discover diversity, limitations of artificial creative agents, matters of efficiency in behavioral and morphological modeling, visualization, a connection to prototype theory, and methods to allow users to influence artificial creative agents. This thesis helps putting the human back into the design loop in generative AI and optimization. Show less
Today, virtually everything, from natural phenomena to complex artificial and physical systems, can be measured and the resulting information collected, stored and analyzed in order to gain new... Show moreToday, virtually everything, from natural phenomena to complex artificial and physical systems, can be measured and the resulting information collected, stored and analyzed in order to gain new insight. This thesis shows how complex systems often exhibit diverse behavior at different temporal scales, and that data mining methods should be able to cope with the multiple resolutions (scales) at the same time in order to fully understand the data at hand and extract useful information from it. Under these assumptions, we introduce novel data mining and visualization methods for large time series data collected from complex physical systems. In particular, we focus on three fundamental problems: the detection of multi-scale patterns, the recognition of recurrent events, and the interactive visualization of massive time series data. We evaluate our methods on a real-world scenario provided by InfraWatch, a Structural Health Monitoring project centered around the management and analysis of data collected by a large sensor network deployed on a Dutch highway bridge. The application of our methods resulted in the identification of the relevant scales of analysis in the InfraWatch data (and other datasets), the detection of the different recurring motifs and the visualization of terabytes of time series data interactively. Show less
