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，这个项目将开发衡量一个人基于领域和基于主题的创造力的模块，并使用统计验证技术验证这些模块。创造性人才仍将是未来世界的最大差异化因素，在那里蓬勃发展的组织将这样做，因为他们拥有合适的潜力。使用基于语义的心理测量学方法，这个项目设计了评估一个人的创造力的练习和模型。该项目将帮助雇主获得有创造力的员工，并对现有员工进行培训和教育，使他们能够变得更有创造力。市场是巨大的，可能包括所有雇佣和管理具有符号分析技能的工人的雇主。根据2010年美国人口普查，有超过1.43亿人受雇于劳动力大军。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，扩大到劳动力的各个部门。目前，创造性思维战略和评估由专家和顾问以讲习班的形式讲授。这样的语义创造力评估是一个人工、耗时和昂贵的过程。这个项目创建了一套开放式练习，并根据四个创造性思维维度对每个练习进行评估：1)原创性：原创思维能力和产生新颖和现成解决方案的能力；2)流利性：构思能力和超越第一组已知反应的能力；3)灵活性：发散思维能力和非线性思维能力；4)精细化：注重细节，能够提供关于每个可能的解决方案和反应的内在细节。该项目通过使用基于语义的心理测量模型、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等方面的进步，实现了此类测试的自动化。由于易于扩展，此解决方案不限于任何一个国家或地区。该解决方案可在全球范围内部署。目前，该项目已经收集了来自全球161个不同国家的数据。该项目是在不同领域和背景下实现开放式练习自动化的第一步，这些领域和背景包括情况判断评估、情商和动机评估。

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.