PhD Candidate in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University, Centre County, Pennsylvania
The Creative Education Foundation (CEF) is proud to present the 8th Annual Ruth B. Noller Research Grant to PhD Candidate, Simone Luchini. Luchini is a PhD student in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University. The portion of his research supported by the Noller Grant focuses on the development of equitable automated creativity assessment tools.
Luchini asserts, “It is critical that educators should have access to quick and accurate tools for the assessment of creativity, so that the latter may be fostered in students, and they may be prepared for the future labor market.” Through his research, Luchini seeks to explore language-based bias in assessment tools that rely on English. He adds, “These tools should be proven to be algorithmically fair, meaning they should not be biased against diverse students. One major barrier to this goal remains the reliance of modern artificial intelligence technologies on mainly linguistically homogeneous training data (i.e., mostly native English speakers).”
Luchini theorizes that “[t]he consequence of training deep learning models on openly available text-data (i.e., the internet) is that they will learn indiscriminately from the data, paying more attention to whatever patterns they find to be most common within it. If most of the data a model learns from is generated by native English speakers, this may lead to the undesired effect of making the model “prefer” native English speech in the future. My research will attempt to shed light on whether this linguistic bias is present in modern automated creativity assessment tools.”
Luchini describes his methodology as follows:
I will collect responses to an idea generation task from a series of engineers, either native or non-native English language speakers. I will then test how large language models perform when predicting the creativity of each of these responses and see how they face off against human-judgments. This project will allow for recommendations to be made with regards to the proper use of current automated creativity assessment tools in education. This work will further serve to identify any room for improvement in these tools when it comes to their fairness towards linguistic diversity.
CEF is thrilled to support this cutting edge creativity research that exemplifies the spirit of creativity pioneer, Ruth B. Noller. We would also like to thank our Noller Grant Committee for their dedication and service: Liz Monroe-Cook, Committee Chair, Jean Bakk, Branko Broekman, Cyndi Burnett, Clare Dus, Tim Hurson, Karina Loera-Barcenas, and Walt Stevenson.