Aesthetics is the realm of feeling, imagination, passions, tastes, and perspectives (in order of ascending nuance and complexity). User modeling has largely avoided the philosophical pitfalls of aesthetics by leaning on generic logical or mathematical framings of the issue, such as case-based reasoning about user demographics, or defining aesthetic similarity as distance in the vector space model. These are completely valid computational tools, but unfortunately they tempt us to jump to the Ends, e.g. accurate recommendations, without really understanding or appreciating the Means, i.e. the etiology and system dynamics governing one's tastes and viewpoint.
My research on aesthetic issues in user modeling begins with philosophically-inspired architectures of people's aesthetic faculty, and attempts to operationalize those high-level ideas into workable computational models and even end-user applications. I will narrate models that have been implemented and evaluated for aesthetic domains such as cultural taste, social attitudes, sense-of-beauty, sense-of-humor, and taste-for-food. Additionally, I will present some recent results from a collaboration with Rada Mihalcea on ethnographic insights gleaned from the blogosphere apropos the dimensionality of happiness and gender difference. Through this approach, I hope to persuade you that humanistic insight can be a complementary partner to computational tools in all of your user modeling endeavors.
Hugo Liu is a postdoctoral scholar at the MIT Media Laboratory, and
with the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He recently
co-chaired a workshop on Computational Aesthetics at AAAI-06, and
spoke at Robert Mondavi's 40th Anniversary celebration about the
aesthetics of food. Access to his published articles on the
intersection between AI & aesthetics can be had at:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo.
This talk is part of the CLIP Colloquium Series, organized by Jimmy Lin (jimmylin -at- umd .dot. edu). For the complete schedule, please visit http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/research/CLIP/colloq/.