Rob Saunders is Associate Professor in the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University. His research interests include Computational Creativity and Creative Robotics.

More information about Rob Saunders

Rob Saunders is Associate Professor in the Leiden Institute for Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University.

Dr Saunders was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Sydney in 2002 for his work at the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition on Curious Design Agents and Artificial Creativity. Dr Saunders’ doctoral dissertation developed computational models of individual, social and cultural creativity and applied these models to Design Computing and Computational Creativity. Prof. Simeon Simoff, Dean of the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics at the Western Sydney University, pronounced his doctoral dissertation was “nothing less than the definition of a new area of research in design computing”.

Dr Saunders’ research has made significant contributions to the fields of Computational Creativity and Design Computing, opening up new areas of research in the computational modelling of intrinsic motivations in creative design systems, the use of multi-agent systems to computationally study social and cultural aspects of creativity, and the embodiment of creative, material processes through the development of creative, social and architectural robotics. In particular, his work on the computational modelling of social creativity has proven to be influential and has recently been included in Readings in Computational Creativity, a collection of canonical papers on the subject. His research has been praised in Ecologies of Invention (University of Sydney Press, 2013: 51) by Professor Dan Lovallo “[Saunders] is breaking new ground on modelling creativity algorithmically…In Saunders’ model, creativity is a function of both an algorithm’s individual evaluations of creativity combined with emergent social definitions of creativity. That is, the robots individually define what is creative based upon their own set of interactions with the environment, and thereby influence emergent social definitions of creativity”.

Dr Saunders is internationally recognised as a leader in the Computational Creativity research community. He has held positions on the Steering Committee for the International Conference for Computational Creativity and the Advisory Board for the Association of Computational Creativity. Dr Saunders is regularly invited to speak on the subject of Computational Creativity and Creative AI to academic, industry and public audiences.