SBIR Phase II: Large-scale Creative Thinking Assessment for the Workforce

这个SBIR第二阶段项目的重点是量化和发展一个人的创造性思维能力。 更详细地说，这个项目将开发测量一个人的领域基础和学科基础创造力的模块，并使用统计验证技术验证模块。在未来的世界中，创造性人才将仍然是最大的差异化因素，而在那里蓬勃发展的组织将这样做，因为他们拥有正确的潜力。 本计画以语意为基础的心理测量方法，设计评估创造力的练习与模型。该项目将帮助雇主获得有创造力的员工，并培训和教育现有员工，使他们能够变得更具创造力。 这个市场是巨大的，潜在地包括所有雇佣和管理具有符号分析技能的员工的雇主。 根据2010年美国人口普查，有超过1.43亿人就业的劳动力。该项目将通过与劳动力教育公司和人才/人力资本管理公司的分销渠道建立战略伙伴关系，扩展到劳动力的各个部门。 目前，专家和顾问以讲习班的形式教授创造性思维战略和评估。 这样的语义创造性评估是一个人工的、耗时的和昂贵的过程。 该项目创建了一组开放式练习，并根据四个创造性思维维度评估每个练习：1）独创性：原创思维能力和产生新颖和开箱即用解决方案的能力; 2）流畅性：构思能力和推动第一组已知响应的能力; 3）灵活性：发散思维能力和非线性思维能力;以及4）EQUIPMENT：注重细节，能够提供关于每个可能的解决方案和响应的内在细节。该项目通过使用基于语义的心理测量建模，自然语言处理（NLP），计算语言学的语义网络和大型语料库统计挖掘的计算能力来自动化此类测试。 由于易于扩展，该解决方案不限于任何一个国家或地区。该解决方案可以在全球范围内部署。目前，该项目已收集了来自世界各地161个不同国家的数据。 该项目是在各种领域和背景下实现开放式练习自动化的第一步，如情景判断评估，情绪智力和动机评估。

This SBIR phase II project is focused on quantifying and developing one's creative thinking abilities. In more details, this project will develop modules that measures one's domain-base and subject-base creativity and validate the modules using statistical validation techniques. Creative talent will remain the great differentiator in the coming world, and the organizations that thrive there will do so because they have the right potentials. Using the semantics-based psychometric approach, this project designs exercises and models that assess one's creativity. This project will help employers in acquiring creative employees and also train and educate current employees in ways by which they can become more creative. The market is vast, encompassing potentially all employers who hire and manage workers with symbol-analytic skills. According to the 2010 U.S Census, there are over 143M people employed in the workforce. This project will expand to various sectors of the workforce using strategic partnerships with distribution channels in workforce education companies, and talent/human capital management companies. Currently, creative thinking strategies and assessments are taught by experts and consultants in the form of workshops. Such semantic creativity assessment is a manual, time-consuming and expensive process. This project creates a set of open-ended exercises and evaluates each exercise based on the four creative-thinking dimensions: 1) Originality: Original thinking capacity and ability to generate novel and out-of-the-box solutions; 2) Fluency: Ideation capacity and ability to push past the first set of known responses; 3)Flexibility: Divergent-thinking capacity and ability to think non-linearly; and 4) Elaboration: Detailed-oriented and ability to provide intrinsic details about each possible solution and response. This project automates such testing by using advances in semantic-based psychometric modelling, natural language processing (NLP), semantic networks from computational linguistics and computational power for statistical mining of large corpora. Due to ease of scalability, this solution is not limited to any one country or region. The solution can be deployed world-wide. Currently, this project has gathered data from 161 different countries around the world. This project is the first step towards automation of open-ended exercises in various fields and contexts such as situational judgement assessments, emotional intelligence and motivational assessments.