Since January 1st I became the president-elect of the ISMIR. That means that I will be assisting the current president and I will become ISMIR president in two years.
I am very honoured to serve the community but it is a big responsibility! The current board was elected at last ISMIR (business meeting) and it includes colleagues around the world Fabien Gouyon as the current president, Eric J. Humphrey as secretary, Xiao Hu as treasurer, and Amélie Anglade, Meinard Müller and Geoffroy Peeters and as board members.
For those who do not know, the International Society for Music Information Retrieval , as it appears on its website, is a non-profit organization seeking to advance the access, organization, and understanding of music information. As a field, music information retrieval (MIR) focuses on the research and development of computational systems to help humans better make sense of this data, drawing from a diverse set of disciplines, including, but my no means limited to, music theory, computer science, psychology, neuroscience, library science, electrical engineering, and machine learning. More formally, the goals of ISMIR are:
- to foster the exchange of ideas between and among members whose activities, though diverse, stem from a common interest in music information retrieval,
- to stimulate research, development, and improvement in teaching in all branches of music information retrieval,
- to encourage publication and distribution of theoretical, empirical, and applied studies,
- to cooperate with representatives of other organizations and disciplines toward the furtherance of music information retrieval, and
- to support and encourage diversity in membership and the disciplines involved as a fundamental aspect of the society.
ISMIR was incorporated in Canada on July 4, 2008. It was previously run by a Steering Committee, and you can become a member by applying here.
The main activity of ISMIR is happening at the annual ISMIR conference, taking place in different countries worldwide (ISMIR 2015 was in Málaga and ISMIR 2016 will be in New York). In this graph published by ISMIR 2015 organizers, it can be noted that ISMIR is a well established conference with an attendance of 200 to 300 people and around 100 papers published in each edition.
Those papers have a great impact: ISMIR is currently the 5th ranked publication in the “Multimedia” subcategory of “Engineering and Computer Science” and the 1st ranked in the “Music&Musicology” subcategory of “Humanities, Literature, and Arts“.
If you cannot make it, you can Join the ISMIR Community group. Since its inception in 2000, the ISMIR community mailing list has grown into a forum of over 1,800 members from across the world, and routinely receives announcements about conferences, career opportunities, concerts, and wide variety of other issues relevant to music information retrieval.
My mains goals are to make ISMIR more accessible and interdisciplinary. I am also involved in the definition of an open access journal and I am particularly involved in WiMIR (I am in fact the first female president as far as I know). WiMIR is a group of people dedicated to promoting the role of, and increasing opportunities for, women in the MIR field. We meet to socialize, share information, and discuss in an informal setting, with the goal of building a community around women in our field. A photo of ismir 2014 meeting:
Emilia Gómez: personal website 