Gadgets of Doraemon
The ability to conceive objects that do not exist in real life is a hallmark of human creativity. A prominent example is the Japanese manga Doraemon. The manga tells the story of how Doraemon, a cat-shaped robot from the future, helps children with futuristic gadgets. His gadgets are powerful, but their usage often leads to unexpected and hilarious effects.
Having surveyed five volumes of the manga, we propose nine creative strategies that can account for the creation of the gadget ideas and a symbolic AI algorithm that could utilize these strategies to conceive gadgets of Doraemon.
A review article by Dan McIntyre considered this work "undoubtedly one of the most creative pieces of work I read [in the year 2011], both in terms of research design and object of study" and "charmingly wacky".
- Boyang Li and Mark O. Riedl. Creative Gadget Design in Fictions: Generating Novel Object Types in Analogical Spaces. 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition. Atlanta, Georgia, 2011. pp. 41-50.
- Boyang Li and Mark O. Riedl. A Phone That Cures Your Flu: Generating Imaginary Gadgets in Fictions with Planning and Analogies. Fourth Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies, Palo Alto, California, 2011.
- Boyang Li, Alexander Zook, Nicholas Davis, and Mark O. Riedl. Goal-Driven Conceptual Blending: A Computational Approach for Creativity. International Conference on Computational Creativity, Dublin, Ireland, 2012.
A Dynamic and Dual-Process Theory of Humor
I postulated a cognitive theory of humor, which unifies several mainstream theories which had been seen as incompatible. The theory is supported by evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience.
- Boyang Li. Humor: A Dynamic and Dual-Process Theory with Computational Considerations. Advances in Cognitive Systems. 2016.
- Boyang Li. A Dynamic and Dual-Process Theory of Humor. The 3rd Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems . Atlanta, GA. 2015.