Research Projects

Dr Inventor, A Personal Research Computer Assistant for Scientific Creativity

This research project received funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme.

Dr Inventor will be the first web-based system that supports the exploration of scientific creativity via a computational approach, which will overcome a lot of human limitations: People have difficulty in seeing past the current problem description; they often fail to notice useful analogies even when they are present; they tend to rate distant analogies as less useful even if they produce better results, and they suffer from working memory limitations, false memories, selective thinking, perception limitations, biases, emotional hindrances etc. Within this context, Dr Inventor has a great potential in inspiring scientific novelty through fostering of a broader openness to creativity and through overcoming problem fixation, through retention of potentially useful comparisons between relevant works due to a broader awareness of the state of the art. It will feature interesting functionalities that provide computer-generated research concepts and workflows that would be thought as creative if performed by a human.

Activity ICT (FP7-ICT-2013.8.1), Grant agreement no: 611383

Professor Jian Jun Zhang