Anja Volk awarded this year’s Westerdijk Award

Blog post written by Vincent Koops. 

Dr. Anja Volk, one of WiMIR leading scholars, is awarded this year’s Westerdijk Award at the Utrecht University in recognition of her efforts to create a more diverse organization. Besides her efforts in building the WiMIR network, she established the Women in Information and Computing Science network. This network is very active in organizing events that stimulate more diversity and inclusion within the department and in applying for funding to finance these events. Anja is furthermore a major contributor to develop concrete recommendations for more diverse leadership within her department. Anja is deeply appreciated because of her passionate efforts to improve diversity and inclusion within and beyond Utrecht University!

You can read the complete news here: https://www.uu.nl/en/news/anja-volk-wins-westerdijk-award

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WiMIR session at ISMIR 2017

We are looking forward to the next WiMIR session at ISMIR conference in Suzhou, kindly organized by our WiMIR co-chairs:

Jin Ha Lee University of Washington, USA

Preeti Rao Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India

Zhongzhe Xiao Soochow University, Mainland China

The WiMIR meeting will take place in October 24th from 13:20 to 14:20, according to the program. There will also be a WiMIR reception at 18:00.

For this year’s WiMIR session, we will begin with a brief overview of the group, recognition of WiMIR sponsors, and report on disbursement of WiMIR funding. We will then summarise and discuss various initiatives that happened in the previous year. This will be followed by the talk by Shawn Carney, Director of IT at Spotify, titled Bye Bye Bias: Promoting Diverse Teams. 

Finally, we will wrap up the session with Q&A with Shawn Carney, and discussion of ideas for new initiatives to further support women in the field.  More information is available at the ISMIR 2017 web page.

We thank the generous WiMIR sponsors of ISMIR2017:

   

         

Round 2 of WiMIR travel awards to attend ISMIR 2017 in Suzhou, China

Round 2 of #WiMIR travel awards to attend @ISMIR2017 in Suzhou, China, Oct 23-27 is now open.

We have made a slight adjustment to the timeline for late-breaking demo (LBD) submissions associated with Round 2 of the WiMIR travel awards for the ISMIR2017 conference. Current information is below.

Application form: http://bit.ly/2i5nCpc

Deadline to apply: August 31, 2017

Acceptance notifications: September 8, 2017

Deadline to submit completed LBD draft (for LBD recipients): October 8, 2017

Deadline to complete minor LBD revisions and submit final version (for LBD recipients): October 22, 2017

 

Eligibility requirements:

– Female author (first or supporting) on accepted full paper; and/or female first author on accepted late-breaking demo (LBD) submission.

– WiMIR applicants do not need to be students.

Questions? Email ismir2017-grants@ismir.net

Convolutional Methods for Music Analysis

Blogpost by Gissel Velarde, researcher in Music Information Retrieval and WiMIR mentor, summarising her PhD work.  

In April this year, I defended my thesis entitled: Convolutional Methods for Music Analysis, available here.

This work introduces convolution, its relevance for perceptual tasks, and its effect on music analysis in applications to music segmentation, pattern discovery and classification. The methodology we have followed was to systematically study and evaluate the effect of convolution (filtering) and other processing techniques together with machine learning algorithms, from k-nearest neighbours, single linkage, support vector machines to convolutional neural networks.

The novel convolution-based methods for music analysis presented in my thesis have been developed together with my supervisors Associate Professor David Meredith, Aalborg University and Senior Lecturer Tillman Weyde City, University of London, as well as in collaboration with researchers from The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence: Carlos Cancino Chacón and Maarten Grachten.

Picture of PhD Defense of Gissel Velarde, April 2017, Aalborg University

Bio
Gissel Velarde completed her PhD studies in computer science at Aalborg University, supported by a scholarship from the Department of Architecture Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, and partially supported by the European Commission, FET grant number 610859. She also holds a Masters degree in Electronic Systems and Engineering Management from the Südwestfallen University of Applied Sciences, supported by a DAAD scholarship. Her Licenciatura degree in Systems Engineering was obtained from the Universidad Católica Boliviana. She was a research member of the European Commission Project “Learning to Create” (Lrn2Cre8).

Before dedicating to technology, Velarde studied piano at the Conservatorio Plurinacional de Música in La Paz, Bolivia and won as a pianist, several prices and honors.

During her doctoral studies at Aalborg University, she published research papers on computational methods for music analysis. She was teaching assistant on the Master of Science program in Sound and Music Computing and supervised various projects of the Bachelor program in Medialogy.

WiMIR exciting news

WiMIR group is quite active at the moment!!!

• WiMIR now has an official Twitter account, @Women_MIR. Please follow us to receive updates on the WiMIR mentoring program, ISMIR travel grants, and other initiatives supporting diversity in the field. Feel free to direct tweets to @Women_MIR as well, and we will spread the word!
• We are starting the next round of our mentoring program, and we are looking for mentors and mentees to sign up before December 11th. More info in our mentoring program page.
• Iris Ren and Julia Wilkins joined WiMIR as student volunteers, welcome to the team!
• Our WiMIR representatives at ISIMIR 2017: Jin Ha Lee, Preeti Rao, and Zhongzhe Xiao More details here.

Greetings,

The WiMIR team

“WiMIR mentorship programme” by Iris Yuping Ren, one of our mentees

Post by Iris Yuping Ren, one of the mentees of our mentoring program about her experience:

Thanks to Anja Volk who invited me to write about my experience on the WIMIR mentorship programme. I’m Iris Yuping Ren, a PhD student at the University of Rochester. I play the violin for fun and I studied mathematics and complex system science for my Bachelor and Masters. I’m now working in the Audio Information Research (AIR) lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department. You can find out more about me here.

I still remember that, when I was signing up for this programme, I was 80% excited and curious about:

• What is a mentorship programme? (since I’ve never been in one)
• What kind of person will be my mentor?
• How will the programme help me?
• etc.

but also 20% uncertain about whether I should be involved

• Will there be extra workload for me?
• What if the conversations go wrong?
• etc.

Taking a weighted average of the pros and cons, I decided to join anyway! And now I’m glad that I did that.

After filling in the sign-up sheet for the programme, I got an email about a few weeks later. I was assigned a mentor: Oriol Nieto, Scientist at Pandora. I was filled with joy: I like Pandora very much! I wanted to know more about the company, more about what research they do that made this guy choose the company and be choosen by them. Plus, the Committee was very considerate in the introduction email, providing a set of questions for us to talk about. I felt silly that I worried about the nothing-to-talk-about-first-time-Skyping embarrassment.

Oriol and I were then in contact, and had our first Skype a few days later. I was amazed by how the conversation was just flowing between us: from basic introduction to academical questions to considerations for the future. An hour of Skyping felt short! And that doesn’t happen much.

Till now, Oriol and I have had 4 very nice sessions over Skype. Sometimes there are glitches from the internet connections (that’s about all I can complain about), but every time I had such a great time chatting and learning with him. I could write the details of each Skype session, but I guess it won’t offer much since they differ a lot from other mentors and mentees. But I think a more common thing is that I feel lots of support from a knowledgeable and experienced someone who works in the same field and cares about more things than just their work. I can’t speak for everybody, but it was great for me to experience that!

WiMIR Grants to attend ISMIR 2016

Women in MIR (WiMIR) Grants are being offered for the first time thanks to the generous support of industry partners (Smule, Shazam) to female first or supporting authors of accepted full papers, as well as female first authors of accepted late-breaking demo (LBD) submissions to be presented at ISMIR 2016.

Applicants do NOT need to be students to apply for the WiMIR Award.

If you are a female MIR researcher, are planning to attend ISMIR, and you need some support, please apply before May 20th.

Application instructions are found at the ISMIR 2016 web page.

Thanks to our sponsors!

                           

WiMIR session at ISMIR 2016

Our next meeting will take place at the next ISMIR Conference in NYC, August 2016. More info here.

For this year’s WiMIR session, we will begin with a short overview of the group, recognize WiMIR sponsors, and report on disbursement of WiMIR funding. We will next summarize and discuss the initial offering of the WiMIR mentoring program. The final component of the session will be devoted to discussion of proposed initiatives to further support women in the field; broadening the scope of diversity in MIR and inclusion of other underrepresented groups; and expanding university-level initiatives.

Welcome to our new web page!

 

Welcome to our new web page!