ARTICLE IN PRESS

Computers & Graphics 33 (2009) 474

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Computers & Graphics

0097-84

doi:10.1

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cag

Editorial

The International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in In 2006 he moved to the University of Tubingen to study under

Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging, has now been running annuallysince 2005. Computational Aesthetics bridges the analytic andsynthetic by integrating aspects of computer science, philosophy,psychology, and the fine, applied & performing arts. It seeks tofacilitate both the analysis and the augmentation of creativebehaviour. CAe also investigates the creation of tools that can enhancethe expressive power of the fine and applied arts and furthers ourunderstanding of aesthetic evaluation, perception and meaning.

In 2008 the event was organized by INESC and took place inLisbon, Portugal and featured a collection of papers that followedthe general philosophy of the conference series. We have chosenfour of these papers as a representative sample of the areas thatare close to the heart of the subject matter that CAe seeks toexplore. The authors have been given time to explore thesethemes further and produce papers that go beyond the initialofferings published in the conference proceedings and include aminimum of 30% original material.

In ‘Balancing the expected and the surprising in geometric

patterns’ the author is inspired by the ‘Op Artists’ of the 1960s,particularly Bridget Riley’s work. He analyses these works andcomments on the perceptual effects in these patterns. In thesecond paper, ‘Categorizing art: comparing humans and computers’,the authors tackle the difficult subject of trying to categorizeartwork and performing computational experiments to explainthe categorization from low-level appearance information in theimage. The third paper, ‘Automatically Mimicking Unique Hand-

Drawn Pencil Lines’ proposes an algorithm that mimics lines drawnby humans. The goal in this work is to produce an arbitrary,unique line, without repetition that can substitute for computergenerated lines. In the fourth paper, ‘Improving Scans of Black and

White Photographs by Recovering the Print Maker’s Artistic Intent’,the author examines the aesthetic decisions made by a printmaker in producing a print from a negative and then attempts toreproduce these digitally. The research also extends this techniqueto produce a method of restoring a print by combining scans ofdifferent versions of the same image.

In these days of world recession, humans are in great need ofaesthetic content in their lives and we hope that this sampling ofthe work done under the banner of computational aesthetics willinspire more cooperation between arts and science.

� Corresponding author. Tel.: +403 220 6009.

Douglas Cunningham’s career has focusedon integrating perception and computergraphics. He received his Ph.D. in cognitivepsychology in 1997 from Temple University,where he specialized in perception. Afterworking for 2 years in applied perception atLogicon, he moved to Germany in 1999 towork for Heinrich H. Bulthoff at the MaxPlanck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

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Wolfgang Straßer, where he received his Habilitation in 2007.Starting in October 2009, he will be a guest professor forinformatics at the Technical University of Cottbus.

Victoria Interrante is an associate profes-sor in the Department of Computer Scienceand Engineering at the University of Min-nesota, working in the fields of computergraphics, visualization and virtual environ-ments. Broadly speaking, her research fo-cuses on the application of insights fromvisual perception to the design, implemen-tation, and evaluation of novel methods for

effectively communicating scientific data

and information through computer-generated images. Interrantereceived the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists andEngineers in 1999 and was a 2001–2003 McKnight Land GrantProfessor at the U of M. She is a senior member of ACM and IEEE,and an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on AppliedPerception.

Brian Wyvill graduated from the Universityof Bradford, Uk with a Ph.D. in computergraphics in 1975. As a post-doc he workedat the Royal College of Art and helped makesome animated sequences for the Alienmovie. He moved to Canada in 1981 wherehe has been working in the area of implicitmodeling and animation, sometimes withhis brother Geoff Wyvill (University of

Otago) with whom he devised the first

implicit surface polygonizer and later the BlobTree. He hasworked on two short movies shown at the SIGGRAPH electronictheatre, and is currently interested in the design of an implicitmodelling system to build artistic models. He is also interested insketch based modeling and NPR and enjoys combining these areasof research. Brian recently took up an appointment as Professorand Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria, BritishColumbia.

Douglas Cunningham, Victoria Interrante, Brian Wyvill �

The University of Victoria, Department of Computer Science, Victoria,

Canada

E-mail address: blob@cs.uvic.ca (B. Wyvill)17 July 2009; accepted 18 July 2009