Introducing the WiMIR Editorial team, and Issuing a Call for Contributions!

Women in Music Information Retrieval (WiMIR) is very excited to introduce the WiMIR Editorial Team! In this blog post, we introduce the team members, our goals, and most importantly, how you can collaborate with us!

Meet the 2020-2022 Team

Alia Morsi, Masters student in Sound and Music Computing at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. My current research interests are MIR for enhancing music education.

Giorgia Cantisani, PhD student in Audio Signal Processing at Télécom Paris, France. My current research interest is MIR, brain responses to music and source separation.

Kyungyun Lee, Masters student in Music and Audio Computing Lab at KAIST, South Korea. My current research interest is music performance generation and HCI.

Rui Guo, PhD Student in Music at University of Sussex, England. My current research is to generate symbolic music compositions by AI.

Saul Ivan Rivas Vega, Masters student at IIMAS of the UNAM, México. I’m interested in MIR using AI models as tools for performers and to generate autonomous compositions.

 

The WiMIR Editorial team is supervised by Blair Kaneshiro, PhD (Stanford University).

What are the team objectives? In a nutshell, our work revolves around:

• Maintaining the WiMIR blog
• Coordinating and managing community contributions, and presenting them in a meaningful way.

We strongly emphasize the second point, because in addition to posts that announce WiMIR initiatives, we would like to expand the blog’s content to include other types of interesting material, and in that we strongly encourage community involvement! 

Call for Contributions

Suggestions include the following ideas:

• Reflection on a topic related to WiMIR mentoring (e.g., networking, work-life balance, jobs in industry or academia, applying to graduate school, dealing with sexism).
• Reflection on personal experiences as a woman, underrepresented minority, or ally in MIR.
• Review of a book, article, paper, or other resource related to mentoring or otherwise supporting diversity and inclusion.
• Review of a conference, workshop, meetup, concert, or other event that is relevant to the aims of WiMIR.
• Review of research, codebase, creative work, or other contribution by a woman or other underrepresented minority in MIR or related field.
• Tips for newcomers to MIR as a research field and/or community.

But also, feel free to suggest more topics! Blog posts are contributions from community members, so this is where everyone can help.

• If you would like to write a blog post, please submit a form with some initial info about your idea: https://bit.ly/WiMIRBlogPost  
• If you have any topic ideas, feedback, or comments, please contact us at wimir-editorial@googlegroups.com. 
• Also, your support is important! So we hope you enjoy reading our posts and also sharing them with others who might be interested. In addition to the community driven blog posts, we will be publishing a set of interviews so stay tuned!

Advertisement

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

WiMIR 1st Annual Workshop

WiMIR 1st Annual Workshop

WiMIR is excited to partner with Spotify to offer the first-ever WiMIR Workshop, taking place on Friday, 28 September 2018 at Télécom ParisTech in Paris, France. This event is open to all members of the MIR community.

The goal of this event is to provide a venue for mentorship, networking, and collaboration among women and allies in the ISMIR community, while also highlighting technical work by women in MIR in different stages of completion. This is the first time we’ve organized such an event, and we’d love to see you there!

 

An ISMIR Satellite Event

The workshop will take place following the ISMIR2018, featuring a WiMIR reception and the Late-breaking & Demos session. This satellite event aims to complement the conference in three notable ways:

• Further amplify the scientific efforts of women in the field.
• Encourage the discussion of proposed or unfinished work.
• Create additional space for networking.

 

Opportunities for Research, Networking, and Mentorship

The WiMIR Workshop will combine a variety of activities, including a poster session (see below), networking lunch, and small-group ideation and prototyping sessions under the mentorship of senior members of the WiMIR community. From the poster session to the group activities, the event will emphasize early research ideas that can be shaped and developed through discussions that occur throughout the day!

Who Can Participate?

The WiMIR Workshop is open for everyone to attend, and is free! You do not need to attend ISMIR to attend the WiMIR workshop.

Researchers who self-identify as women are invited to submit short abstracts for poster presentations on projects at any stage of completion, from proposal to previously published work. Preliminary and early results are especially encouraged so that presenters can get feedback from peers and mentors. Any topic broadly related to the field of MIR is welcome and encouraged. Click here to submit a poster. Poster submissions close on August 15, 2018, and acceptance notifications will be sent by August 31, 2018.

Please don’t hesitate to send questions to wimir.workshop@gmail.com.

Schedule

0930	1000	Registration/coffee
1000	1015	Opening Remarks
1015	1100	Mentoring Session I (intros and big picture)
1100	1200	Poster Session
1200	1300	Lunch/theme breakout
1300	1600	Mentoring Session II (deep dive into the topic)
1600	1700	Group Presentations
1700	1715	Closing remarks

We look forward to seeing you at the Women in Music Information Retrieval 1st Annual Workshop!

The WiMIR Workshop Organizers

• Blair Kaneshiro, Stanford University
• Katherine M. Kinnaird, Brown University/Smith College
• Eric J. Humphrey, Spotify
• Thor Kell, Spotify

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Abstract submission form here: https://goo.gl/forms/hy3ygYnKKS9fTLa13

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.