Preface

Contents

In recent years a growing number of researchers working in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer graphics, computer music, and multimedia have begun to explicitly address issues of “style” or connotative semantics in their work. While it is still difficult to precisely characterize these concepts satisfactorily (we know it when we see it), common denominators of much of this work are: an emphasis on manner rather than topic, a focus on affective aspects of expression and understanding, and a search for “dense” representations of meaning in which elements simultaneously symbolize multiple layers of meaning at once. Work in all media shares problems of formalizing notions of style and developing modeling languages that can represent differing styles. However, due to the widely varying technical requirements of work in different media, little communication has heretofore taken place between different “style research” communities. The goal of this symposium, therefore, is to bring together researchers working on a wide range of style-related problems in computational frameworks, so that we may together explore possible commonalities in our work and create a more defined research community. We seek to generate discourse among researchers working with diverse media and approaches, and so move towards a better understanding of style in all its manifestations, by developing computational models and tools.