Ocsai going offline (we'll be back!)
tldr: Ocsai is temporarily down while I safeguard against malicious or bot use, while keeping it as open and useful for researchers.
A goal of Ocsai is to make creativity scoring available easily to as many people as possible. To this end, I aim to make the site and API maximally open.
Open Creativity Scoring is also designed privacy-first. Lots of data privacy issues stem from greedy data collection; we try not to store anything until it’s necessarily. By design, we don’t know who’s scoring and how much.
Unfortunately, the reality of having an open service online is that you sometimes run into abusive or excessive use, sometimes accidental (which is okay!) or sometimes malicious (like bots - not okay!). The service incurs real out-of-pocket costs, and to date I’ve found them an acceptable trade-off for the ease of use. Unfortunately, they’ve grown a bit too high. In the past day, we were hit with massive amounts of requests which triggered some downtime. Before I put the system back online, I’ll have to explore ways to ensure that bots are rejected while good faith users aren’t.
I expect that the site will be back online in the next few days. My hope is to keep the service exactly the same as it currently is for low use and add some authorization features for high use. So, if a bot finds the server and can form a proper request, they’ll still be rejected. I’ll send out an email when those updates are available.
If you have any emergency need for scoring this week or have questions, please let me know at peter.organisciak@du.edu.
Oh yeah, new newsletter!
I started this newsletter specifically to keep you in the loop for times like this - when there’s downtime, or changes in how the system is used. Of course, I look forward to sharing new features and models too - we have some cool stuff coming. Editing brief messages directly into the website isn't a sustainable way to communicate!
If you know of other users of Open Creativity Scoring, please direct them to this newsletter to stay up-to-date. Other than emergency communications about big issues - like today - I hope to keep the email frequency low and never annoying.
Other Recent Updates
Thank you to the users that alerted us to some odd behavior with Ocsai, as well at the secondary service for scoring large files. It turns out it was certificate issue, after IT inadvertently issues two new security certificates instead of one. This has now been fixed.
AERA
Selcuk Acar, Denis Dumas, and myself were at AERA earlier this month. Selcuk and I served on a panel, AI Today and Tomorrow in Gifted, Creativity, and Talent Research, moderated by Tim Spitsberg and alongside Tugce Aldemir, Marek Urban, and Kamila Urban. Thank you to the Research on Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent SIG for hosting and Karen E. Rambo-Hernandez for organizing, it was a great discussion.
We also presented on our work applying computer vision models to figural tests of creativity (drawings!), the work that is covered in our recent pre-print: A Comparison of Supervised and Unsupervised Learning Methods in Automated Scoring of Figural Tests of Creativity. As our manuscript works its way through review, I’m working on making it available for easy use in the browser. Phew, it’s a busy sabbatical!
If that manuscript piques your interest in figural scoring, also see the tidy, well-written AuDrA: An Automated Drawing Assessment Platform for Evaluating Creativity from Patterson et al.
Peter