  Computational creativity is an emerging branch of artificial intelligence
that places computers in the center of the creative process. Broadly,
creativity involves a generative step to produce many ideas and a selective
step to determine the ones that are the best. Many previous attempts at
computational creativity, however, have not been able to achieve a valid
selective step. This work shows how bringing data sources from the creative
domain and from hedonic psychophysics together with big data analytics
techniques can overcome this shortcoming to yield a system that can produce
novel and high-quality creative artifacts. Our data-driven approach is
demonstrated through a computational creativity system for culinary recipes and
menus we developed and deployed, which can operate either autonomously or
semi-autonomously with human interaction. We also comment on the volume,
velocity, variety, and veracity of data in computational creativity.
