Creativity Conference at SOU Ashland set to begin

Creativity Conference at Southern Oregon University set to begin May 15

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(Ashland, Ore.) — The 7th annual Creativity Conference at Southern Oregon University will offer something for everyone in four days of presentations, May 15 through 18. The conference delivers a wealth of information for those who study the science of creativity, seek to leverage research on creative thinking or simply consider themselves to be creative.

The Creativity Conference at SOU features a lineup of more than 100 presenters, with both in-person and virtual events that allow for exhibits, performances and presentations – and attendees – from a variety of countries. It draws many of the world’s leading scholars, researchers and practitioners from the field of creativity, including this year’s five keynote and invited speakers.

“This annual conference brings together internationally renowned speakers, researchers and artists who are leaders in creativity research and application,” said SOU Associate Provost Daniel DeNeui, co-executive director of the conference. “This is an opportunity to learn and imagine, and also to network and build relationships that could have a meaningful impact on the world.”

Participants will be able to join in several applied workshops that feature hands-on activities for developing and using creativity in the workplace. Previous presentations have included “Fostering Creativity Through Virtual Environments” and “Attitudes toward creative people and innovators.”

All sessions – remote and in-person – will be accessible via livestream, ensuring inclusivity and engagement. Archived presentations will be available for viewing post-event.

The 2025 conference will feature in-person sessions all day Thursday through Saturday, May 15-17. A full day of remote sessions will be featured on Sunday, May 18. The in-person featured speakers will include:

  • Denis Dumas, Ph.D., who will be presenting his research on the creativity and psychology of stage and screen actors;
  • International scholar Todd Lubart, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the Université Paris Descartes, who will offer a 75-year retrospective on creativity research;
  • Laura McBain – designer, educator and managing director of the Stanford d.school – who will address how human-centered design can be used to shape more preferable futures;
  • International scholar Tuuli Mattelmäki, associate professor in design at Aalto University in Finland, who will present research on how creative practices stimulate eco-social change; and
  • Ivonne Chand O’Neal, Ph.D. – the founder and principal of creativity and arts impact research firm MUSE Research, LLC – who will discuss culturally responsive storytelling in opera, and its impact on artistic creativity.

Attendees can expect a range of formats, including 60-minute panel discussions, 40- to 50-minute individual presentations, 15-minute “boom talk” sessions that deliver concise insights and engaging poster presentations. Opportunities for interactive dialogue and exchange will be offered in each format.

The Creativity Conference at SOU welcomes sponsorships from individuals and organizations. For more information or to register for this year’s conference, visit soucreativityconference.com. Conference co-executive director Daniel DeNeui can be reached at creativity@sou.edu.

About the Creativity Conference and Southern Oregon University
The Creativity Conference, sponsored by Southern Oregon University, is located in beautiful Ashland, Oregon. Ashland is home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a burgeoning wine industry and an array of outdoor recreational opportunities, providing the perfect backdrop for creativity and innovation.

Southern Oregon University is a medium-sized campus that provides comprehensive educational opportunities with a strong focus on student success and intellectual creativity. Located in vibrant Ashland, Oregon, SOU remains committed to diversity and inclusion for all students on its environmentally sustainable campus. Connected learning programs taught by a host of exceptional faculty provide quality, innovative experiences for students. Visit sou.edu.

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Tacit knowledge grant awarded to SOU Ashland's Boscoe

SOU’s Boscoe awarded second “tacit knowledge” grant

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Bernadette Boscoe, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Southern Oregon University, has been awarded a second grant to fund her study of tacit knowledge in research settings – gathering, storing and retrieving the unspoken practices of academic teams that sometimes are lost when a project is disrupted or ends.

The latest grant, from the National Science Foundation, totals about $164,000 over two years, beginning July 1.

Boscoe received a $250,000 grant last fall from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to help fund her creation of a Large Language Model (LLM) of artificial intelligence to archive the protocols of scientific groups researching environmental science at SOU, astronomy at UCLA and violin acoustics at Cornell University. The tacit knowledge archive, if successfully developed, would benefit researchers in those and other academic disciplines by preventing the loss of unstated practices in research labs when participants leave the projects.

Research funded by the NSF grant is closely related to that funded by the Sloan grant, but is focused more on what Boscoe calls “the technical tool-building side” and looks exclusively at astronomy research.

“The Sloan grant is more (about) using three research group spokes and doing an investigation of the tacit knowledge capture,” Boscoe said. “The NSF grant doesn’t look at that – it is more about how we can improve astronomy workflows and tools.”

Boscoe is using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), an AI framework that pairs an LLM with an information retrieval system to improve accuracy and relevance of resulting data. She is working with SOU computer science graduate Chandler Campbell to build the project’s RAG-LLM tool, called AquiLLM – named after the constellation Aquila.

“Research groups often face challenges managing and accessing work such as paper drafts, research experiments, plots, and meeting notes, especially as these resources grow over time and researchers transition in and out of projects,” an NSF abstract on the project said.

“This project benefits research groups by offering a way to use natural language to ask questions about their data, yielding links to relevant documents.”

Boscoe is a computer and information scientist who builds and researches infrastructures and tools to help domain scientists do their work. She earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York, an associate degree in computer science from Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in mathematics from California State University-Northridge and a Ph.D. in information science from UCLA.

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