The 129th RCKC Colloquium by Prof. Ichiro Fujinaga and Prof. Stephen Downie
| Title | Part 1: Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis Project / Part 2: The Challenges of MIREX: Maximizing evaluation access within the bounds of copyright restrictions |
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| Speaker | Ichiro Fujinaga (Associate Professor, Music Technology Area at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University) / Stephen Downie (Associate Dean for Research and a Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) |
| Date | Tuesday, January 26th, 2016, 13:00-14:40 |
| Location | Meeting Room for Joint Research 1 on the 3rd floor of ULIS bldg. in Kasuga Area |
| Abstract | Part 1: A thousand years of print and manuscript music sits on the shelves of libraries and museums around the globe. While on-line digitization programs are opening these collections to a global audience, digital images are only the beginning of true accessibility since the musical content of these images cannot be searched by computer. The goal of the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis project (SIMSSA: http://simssa.ca) is to teach computers to recognize the musical symbols in these images and assemble the data on a single website, making it a comprehensive search and analysis system for online musical scores. Based on the optical music recognition (OMR) technology, we are creating an infra-structure and tools for processing music documents, transforming vast music collections into symbolic representations that can be searched, studied, analyzed, and performed.
Part 2: The Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX; http://music-ir.org/mirexwiki) had its first plenary meeting at Queen Mary College, University of London in October 2005. It has been run annually each year since 2005 with the upcoming August 2016 plenary marking its 12th iteration. MIREX has evaluated some 2761 individual music information retrieval (MIR) algorithm runs over 54 different test collections. The MIREX evaluations represent the wide range of MIR tasks and sub-tasks that have interested researchers over the years. MIREX has involved researchers from over 24 different countries with a median of 109 individual participants per year. This talk summarizes the history of MIREX from its earliest planning meeting in 2001 to the present. It will reflect upon the challenges MIREX has faced and reflect upon how those challenges have been surmounted. In particular, we will discuss how MIREX and the MIR community has dealt with the conflicting requirements of running an evaluation that is as open as possible while still respecting copyright restrictions. The presentation will propose some new models--some evolutionary, some revolutionary--for the continued success of MIREX. Audience members are encouraged contribute their personal suggestions and ideas. |
| Participation | The seminar will be presented in English. No charge to participate and no reservation is needed. |
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Notes
Ichiro Fujinaga is an Associate Professor in Music Technology Area at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. In 2003-4, he was the Acting Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill. In 2002-3, 2009-12, and 2014-5, he was the Chair of the Music Technology Area. Before that he was a faculty member of the Computer Music Department at the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University. Research interests include optical music recognition, music theory, machine learning, music perception, digital signal processing, genetic algorithms, and music information acquisition, preservation, and retrieval.
J. Stephen Downie is the Associate Dean for Research and a Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Downie is the Illinois Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). He is also Director of the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) and founder and ongoing director of the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). He was the Principal Investigator on the Networked Environment for Music Analysis (NEMA) project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He was Co-PI on the Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI) project, jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). He represents the HTRC on Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project funded by the SSHRC Partnership Grant programme. All of these aforementioned projects share a common thread of striving to provide large-scale analytic access to copyright-restricted cultural data. Stephen has been very active in the establishment of the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community through his ongoing work with the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conferences. He was ISMIR's founding President and now serves on the ISMIR board. Professor Downie holds a BA (Music Theory and Composition) along with a Master's and a PhD in Library and Information Science, all earned at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.