Creative applications of human behavior understanding

The role of computer science in the creative industries is becoming recognised as an important way to bring forward progress in both domains. There is a need for smarter applications that sense and adapt to their users in arts, creativity, entertainment and edutainment domains. Understanding human behavior in this area is challenging because it forces practitioners to engage in both creative, and perhaps counterintuitively, analytic processes of understanding how people engage with creative phenomena. The systems constructed for this purpose promise to enhance and redefine the scope of creative industries significantly. This paper discusses scientific and technological factors that make this a challenging topic to address, provides a brief survey of related work in this area, and identifies active topics of research. Since arts, creativity, entertainment and edutainment all contribute to significant social and societal benefits, it is vital to tackle the problem of measuring and evaluating the success of automatic behavior analysis solutions as a social and human phenomenon.