Tag Archives: ismir

05/11/2023 · 19:50

Personal reflection on my ISMIR journey

Today November 5th, 2023, is the 1st day of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, which is taking place in Milan, Italy. 

Unfortunately, ISMIR 2023 coincides with the award ceremony of ROMA (Women, University & Business) Awards 2023, and I had the honor of being awarded this year, and this, added to current work load, made me cancel my attendance to ISMIR in Milan. 

Here I am with mixed feelings: happy for a great recognition to my career but sad to miss ISMIR, this year in Europe. Given the fact I am finalizing my service to ISMIR in 2023 as co-editor in chief of Transactions of ISMIR journal, I devoted this Sunday afternoon to reflect on all these wonderful ISMIR years. 

Highlights of more than 20 years of ISMIR journey:

  • 2001 – I become a member of ISMIR community, Paris was my 1st ismir! 
  • 2002 – I have been reviewer and author of the conference since them.
  • 2010 – I joined the Program Committee, and have been acting as meta-reviewer. 
  • 2011 – I attended the fist Women in MIR meeting and became one of the core organizers, having contributed to the mentoring program, open repository, blog, with great colleagues, notably I worked with Anja Volk and Blair Kaneshiro. 
  • 2012 and 2017 – I acted as tutorial chair, and realized how important tutorials are to introduce newcomers to the MIR field, and contributed to having interesting introductory tutorials, this ending in a book with Markus Schedl and Jullián Urbano. 
  • 2016 – I became a member of board as President elect in 2016-2017 supporting Fabien Gouyon who was president by then. 
  • 2018 – I became the 1st female President of ISMIR (I hope there will be more soon please!). During this period, I tried to push for diversity in the field, from its community members to the bread of topics that we address, and tried to contribute to make our community both excellent in scientific terms and human values.  
  • 2018 – I acted as Program co-chair, which was a great experience to learn about the machinery of ISMIR reviewing process. 
  • 2019 – I had the pleasure to act as ISMIR General co-chair with Cynthia Liem. Happy to have contributed to a push for diversity in the field, including MIR for classical music (with PHENICX & TROMPA), staring a discussion around the link between fairness and diversity in MIR, with a tutorial on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Music Information Research (FAT-MIR)  with Andre Holzapfel, Marius Miron and Bob L. Sturm.
  • 2020 – I was one of the co-founders of Transactions of ISMIR, acting since them as co-editor in chief.   
  • 2022 – I contributed to a tutorial on Trustworthy MIR: Creating MIR applications with values, where we reflected, with Christine Bauer, Andrés Ferraro and Lorenzo Porcaro, on the recent developments on AI ethics as related to our field.
  • 2023 – since 2019, I contribute as co-organizer to a satellite workshop on Human-Centric MIR. 

The present and future in MIR and my research path

From 2024, I will be stepping out of TISMIR, leaving other people taking the lead and contributing with fresh ideas and innovations, in a field that needs to address and adapt to present and future challenges. The need to incentivize reviewers, engage in open discussions, foster scientific excellence, social impact or balance personal and collective good are amazing topics to deep on.

In the last years, I had focused in providing the scientific and technical support needed to Artificial Intelligence policies in Europe as, starting from the music domain, I can address broad societal challenges linked to the impact data-driven algorithms, looking at the balance between the opportunities they offer in terms of cognitive assistance, automation and scalability, and the risks they pose to safety and fundamental rights. AI ethics and regulation is an amazing field at the moment, particularly in Europe, where I am privileged to contribute, as lead scientistof the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency, leading a team that provides technical and scientific support to the Digital Services Act and the AI Act within the European Commission.

My experience in the music information retrieval field has provided me the opportunity to witness along my career the tremendous impact that data-driven music technologies are having in music education and consumption. ISMIR has been pioneer in many of the current research trends, e.g. openness, multi-disciplinarity, diversity of views (academia, industry, cultures) and strong social impact.

It is now time to be fully aware that all the algorithms we create have a strong impact on listeners, singers, musicians, jobs, copyright, how we feel and think about the world, and our future. So it is for us the research community to make sure that MIR technologies are created WITH people and FOR people’s wellbeing. It is also for us to continue making our community inclusive, diverse and welcoming for new ideas and schemes, which will be much needed.

It has been a pleasure to serve the ISMIR community all these years, and I am looking forward to be part of it for many more, now from another angle, and hopefully attending ISMIR in the future!

In the meanwhile, greetings to all folks, I will miss you and the conference this year and still meeting some of you online for the editorial board meeting of TISMIR and HCMIR! 

emilia

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31/12/2019 · 11:46

My last day as ISMIR president

This is my last day as ISMIR president. I am very proud of how our community has managed to establish ISMIR as a leading forum for music information research. I joined the board in 2014, became president-elect in 2016 and president in 2018. My main motivations have always been to contribute to strengthen scientific quality, inclusive spirit and diversity. During these years, I have witnessed the origins and impulse of TISMIR and WiMIR, the consolidation of ISMIR location alternating between Europe, America and Asia, and the evolution of the MIR field including the involvement of industry in our community, changes of on topics and MIR-related disciplines, as reflected in its 20th anniversary edition.

But, among all, I have had the privilege to meet great researchers and people in a community I now considered a bit as my family. I want to thank all excellent board members and colleagues I had the chance to work with. I do not have enough space to express my gratefulness.

Now it is my time to take a break from scientific service, which is sometimes exhausting and no so well recognised. However, I will keep my compromise as TISMIR co-editor in chief, WiMIR mentor and PC member, and hopefully as an ISMIR author for many years. I am sure the next president and board will do a great job and I wish them all the best to face the main challenge I foresee: how to keep ISMIR spirit (single track conference), scientific insights, inclusion and diversity in a deep learning world.

 

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09/09/2019 · 16:37

OpenBMAT: a new open dataset for music detection with loudness annotations

Last week we announced the publication of OpenBMAT, an open dataset for the tasks of music detection and relative music loudness estimation. The dataset contains 27.4 hours of audio from 8 different TV program types at 4 different countries, cross-annotated by 3 people using 6 different classes. It has been published as a dataset paper at Transaction of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, the open journal of ISMIR. This research has been carried out as a collaboration between the MTG and BMAT in the context of the industrial Doctorates program of the Catalan Government.

For more information you can read the related news at MTG web site: https://www.upf.edu/web/mtg/home/-/asset_publisher/sWCQhjdDLWwE/content/id/227864284/maximized#.XXZ_IZMzab8

 

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06/04/2018 · 07:35

Interview at ACM SIGMM Records and the need for interdisciplinary research

The March Issue (Vol.10, Issue 1) of ACM SIGMM Records (News for the Multimedia Community) is out and it includes an interview of myself for the interdisciplinary column, kindly chaired by Cynthia Liem and Jochen Huber.

It is awesome already that there is an interdisciplinary column at SIGMM, recognising the challenges and also the potential of interdisciplinary research and insights as a way to have a comprehensive understanding, in this case, of multimedia computing. I was very pleased to ask questions about my experience in the MIR field and about diversity and interdisciplinarity.

You can read the interview and other interesting content here.

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08/09/2016 · 12:15

¿Pueden los hombres diseñar tecnologías relevantes para las mujeres? El ejemplo en las aplicaciones para la música

Justo antes de vacaciones tuve la oportunidad de escribir un post informal sobre el tema de género gracias a la invitación de MujerTekSpace, un proyecto liderado de la Universidad de Deusto donde se intenta mejorar la visibilidad de la mujer en la ingeniería.

Aquí podéis leer el post publicado, pero lo copio a continuación en su versión extensa, ya que empecé a escribir y se me hizo demasiado largo…

……..—-…….

Desde hace algún tiempo veo a más y más personas preocupadas porque hay pocas mujeres en ingeniería: hay pocas ya en los primeros cursos de la carrera y van quedando menos que hagan el doctorado o lleguen a lo alto de la pirámide profesional (altos cargos directivos o catedráticas). Yo personalmente me he convertido poco a poco en una acérrima defensora de la mujer en la ingeniería, en particular en la investigación y el desarrollo tecnológico.

Mi preocupación fundamental es la siguiente: ¿Cómo será el mundo del futuro si las tecnologías que utilizaremos son investigadas, desarrolladas y evaluadas mayoritariamente por hombres?

Como ejemplo pongamos mi comunidad de investigación: la International Society for Music Information Retrieval (www.ismir.net) (sociedad internacional para la recuperación de la información musical), la cual tengo el honor de presidir (primera presidenta electa por cuestiones estadísticas, como luego verán), formada por investigadores de todo el mundo. Nuestra comunidad está relacionada con compañías punteras hoy en día como shazam, spotify, iTunes, soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/), deezer (http://www.deezer.com/) BMAT o pandora (¡no las pulseras sino la radio por internet!), empresas que configuran el panorama comercial en sistemas de recomendación de música. Seguro que tienen algunas de éstas aplicaciones en sus ordenadores o teléfonos móviles.

Un estudio que se presentará éste Agosto en la conferencia de Nueva York, y que ha sido liderado por Xiao Hu, investigadora de la Universidad de Hong Kong (Hu et al. 2016), constata la desigual distribución por género (14.7% mujeres vs 85.3%) de autores de artículos científicos a lo largo de los años. De hecho son muy pocas mujeres las que presentan oralmente en la conferencia, y en los últimos 3 años todas las ponencias invitadas las han dado hombres.

1

Además, tanto en nuestro proyecto de mentorías para mujeres como en el panel industrial de la conferencia, hemos podido constatar que la proporción de mujeres es incluso menor en la industria que en la investigación, posiblemente dado que las condiciones laborales son más favorables para la conciliación. Esto parece confirmar que las pocas mujeres que hay se dedican a una investigación que está menos en contacto con el producto.

En el lado positivo, éste estudio refiere que las mujeres más productivas lo son igual que los hombres, que las tendencias no varían entre continentes, que las mujeres que están en grupos de investigación grandes tienen más impacto, y que trabajan en entornos más aplicados, aunque lejos de un producto, lo que parece indicar que la interdisciplinariedad puede proporcionar entornos más diversos en la ingeniería.

Con éstos datos, yo diría que podemos afirmar que nuestras aplicaciones musicales están siendo diseñados por el género masculino, con las consecuentes barreras para la mujer, ya que se incorporan inconscientemente decisiones de diseño no equilibradas. ¿Puede ser que por eso éstas tecnologías no son tan atractivas para la mujer? ¿Puede eso explicar en parte por qué las niñas de hoy en día se sienten poco atraídas por el entorno tecnológico?

Supongo que es algo general en otro tipo de aplicaciones (por ejemplo videojuegos, televisión digital, tecnologías del automóvil o revistas online). Imaginemos entonces que en el futuro pase algo como nos ocurre a los zurdos: ¿será el futuro un mundo donde no podrás cortar bien un papel o tendrás dificultades para abrir una lata de conservas, pero en el dominio digital?

Esperemos que podamos poner remedio antes.

Sobre la autora

Emilia Gómez

Soy el típico caso del bicho raro, como casi todas las mujeres de mi ámbito: una de las dos mujeres que eligió dibujo técnico en mi promoción, una minoría en ingeniería de telecomunicaciones, una de las dos mujeres de mi promoción en el máster en Acústica, Procesado de Señal e Informática Musical del IRCAM en Paris, la única doctoranda hasta ahora de mi director de tesis y la única profesora de mi grupo de investigación. También soy la primera mujer presidenta electa de la ISMIR (International Society in Music Information Retrieval), y la primera en muchas otras cosas, no por ser muy buena sino por cuestiones estadísticas. De hecho soy a menudo una mujer dando clase a un grupo de hombres. Y además soy zurda.

Referencia

Hu, X., Choi, K., Lee, J. H., Laplante, A., Hao, Y., Cunningham, S. J., Downie, J. S. (2016). WiMIR: An Informetric Study on Women Authors in ISMIR. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR).

 

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13/01/2016 · 12:43

President-elect of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR)

ismir_04barstaff

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:

  1. to foster the exchange of ideas between and among members whose activities, though diverse, stem from a common interest in music information retrieval,
  2. to stimulate research, development, and improvement in teaching in all branches of music information retrieval,
  3. to encourage publication and distribution of theoretical, empirical, and applied studies,
  4. to cooperate with representatives of other organizations and disciplines toward the furtherance of music information retrieval, and
  5. 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.

estadisticas

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:

IMG_2984

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14/11/2014 · 12:57

Un mes irrepetible / A unique month

Yes, last month has been so unique for me that I wanted to share it with a post.

ISMIR 2014

ismir

From October 27th to November 1st, I attended the 15h International Conference of Music Information Retrieval in Taipei, Taiwan. ISMIR is by far my favorite conference, where I meet most of my colleagues, get to know the advancements in the field, and get fresh ideas for my research. This year, it was a busy edition for me. We presented some work related to the PHENICX project, where we try to apply MIR techniques for classical music, in particular for symphonic repertoire and within the context of a concert, so including real-time description. In addition, we had several meetings of the society board, where I take part as a member. Finally, I was co-authoring a poster on the robustness of low-level features, another one on melodic similarity of flamenco music, in the scope of our COFLA project, and presenting a demo of our MIR.EDU library for music education! A lot for a single week!

proxy  It was a great conference: amazing city and landscape, very good organization, nice presentations and research outcomes, and good perspectives for next year in Málaga, Spain.

After coming back from ISMIR, I had my tenured defense on November 5th. After some years working at UPF and a long waiting period due to economic restrictions, I got tenured assistant professor thanks to the Serra Hunter program of the Catalan government. I am really happy for that!

One week later, this Wednesday, I attended a workshop in Madrid that the Spanish Association of Symphonic Orchestras (AEOS) and BBVA foundation devoted, in its first day, to the new challenges and opportunities that technology offers for orchestras. I presented the PHENICX project, including use cases and the technologies that the different partners are researching and developping, integrated in our prototype. You can find here my slides and complementary material. It has already appeared in press.

Although we are not far from summer, I now feel I need some rest!

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15/10/2012 · 09:51

ISMIR 2012

Last week I attended my favorite conference, the International Society of Music Information Retrieval Conference. It took place in Porto, Portugal. I gave a presentation on our flamenco project. If you are interested, these are the slides.

It was a very intense conference, where I attended very nice presentations and I got many great ideas for future research. I specially enjoyed the last-minute demo session, which was something different to what I am used to.

Now, back to work!

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06/12/2011 · 17:07

ISMIR 2012

I am tutorial chair at ISMIR 2012 in Porto. I am looking forward to organize a good tutorial sessions, so proposals and ideas are very welcome!

 

 

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26/10/2011 · 09:41

Remote contribution to ISMIR 2011

It’s a pity I cannot attend this year’s ISMIR, as the place is very nice (I have some very good friends in Miami) and the program seems very nice too. It’s not easy with two small children to be away for so long!! In any case there are some small contributions to MIREX I have been involved in, leaded by our PhD students Justin Salamon (predominant melody estimation) and Jose Zapata (tempo estimation). We had very good results. You can have a look at our MIREX poster for a brief overview and read the abstracts for more details.

 

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