With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Adam Green and his team are seeking to map the process of creative ideation, using what they call the shape of thought.
“We’ve developed metrics that look at the trajectory of a person’s thought,” Green explains. “As you generate ideas, whether it’s when you’re writing an essay or you generate hypotheses as part of a task that we set up, you travel through idea space and that travel has a shape that we can look at in semantic space.”
With machine intelligence seeming to dominate so many quantitative skills, Dr. Green predicts that the value of human creativity is on the rise in today's workplace. “This is an exciting opportunity to advance how we measure creativity at a time when creativity matters more than ever,” Green shares. “The project gives us a chance to identify how new approaches to creativity can provide a means for educating more creative STEM students, and for predicting academic and professional success outcomes.”