Painting fool

If a team from Imperial College London’s Department of Computing have their way, bespoke, individualised and beautiful pieces of artwork generated by Artificial Intelligence could become a reality.

Last month, Dr Simon Colton, PhD student Michel Valstar, and Dr Maja Pantic from the Department of Computing, won the prestigious award for the best Machine Intelligence demonstration at the British Computer Society’s Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence (SGAI) conference, held at Cambridge University.

The SGAI award, voted by some of the world’s foremost authorities on Artificial Intelligence (AI), recognised the team’s innovative and creative automated software technology – The Painting Fool – which creates portraits by reading the facial expressions of a human subject and interpreting the emotion conveyed by expressions.

Dr Colton, who designed The Painting Fool, said he was excited by the challenge of creating an automated artist, which produces beautiful pieces of artwork. He also said his work raised some interesting questions about how people perceive creativity.