Email: bodipaul@isu.edu
Office: BA 539
Phone: (208) 282-4932
Office Hours: Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:30am in BA 539 or via Zoom (link on Moodle), other times by appointment
Paul Bodily is an assistant professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department and head of the Computational Creativity and Intelligence Lab (CCIL) at Idaho State University. His research addresses the question of whether or not computers, beyond possessing artificial intelligence, can exhibit autonomous creativity. His primary research interest focuses particularly on the domain of lyrical music composition and the challenge of invoking long-term structure in sequence generation. His approach incorporates a modular machine learning framework called hierarchical Bayesian program learning, which facilitates breaking the problem of music composition into smaller pieces, and focuses primarily on developing machine learning models that solve the problems related to structure. He has developed an adaptation of non-homogenous Markov models that enables long-range constraints and a structural learning model adapted from the Smith-Waterman alignment method, which extends sequence alignment techniques from bioinformatics. He has incorporated these advances into a full-fledged computational creative system called Pop* (pronounced popstar) and has shown through various evaluative methods that the system can be argued to possess, to varying degrees, the characteristics of creativity. Professor Bodily's prior research also includes several bioinformatics publications on heterozygous genome assembly algorithms.
Dr. Bodily holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University (BYU). He graduated summa cum laude from BYU with a B.S. in Bioinformatics, a B.A. in Italian, and minors in Computer Science and Music. Dr. Bodily has an extensive music background as a composer and performer. In addition to playing several instruments, he is an alumnus of BYU’s 9-man internationally-renowned a cappella group Vocal Point.
