PhD Research Seminar

Introduction to ethical issues in research

Invited Research Seminar

Automatic Assessment of Student Music Performances

By Alexander Lerch, Georgia Institute of Technology


Abstract

While there is large interest in Music Information Retrieval tasks focusing on extracting score-like information such as pitches, chords, and rhythmic properties, less attention is being paid to performance information such as (micro-)tempo, intonation, and dynamics.
This presentation will look at Music Performance Analysis from the perspective of assessing student music performances. The possibilities and limitations of current data-driven approaches to the assessment of middle and high school students will be discussed based on real-world results on a large dataset of graded student recordings.

Biography

Alexander Lerch is Assistant Professor at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, where he leads the music informatics group. He is working on new artificially intelligent technologies for accessing, producing, and listening to music. His main research field is called Music Information Retrieval (MIR), an emerging interdisciplinary field. He is Co-Founder of the company zplane.development, a research-driven technology provider for the music industry. His book “An Introduction to Audio Content Analysis,” published by Wiley/IEEE Press, is used as course text book in multiple institutions.

More: https://www.alexanderlerch.com/

PhD Research Seminar

"How do agile practice support organizing a PhD"  

Invited Research Seminar

How do people explore virtual environments?  

By Belen Masia

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) systems provide a new medium that has the potential to have a significant impact on our society. The experiences offered by these emerging systems are inherently different from radio, television, or theater, opening new directions in research areas such as cinematic VR capture, interaction, or content gener ation and editing. However, the behavior of users who visually explore immersive VR environments is not well understood, nor do statistical models exist to predict this behavior. Yet, with unprecedented capabilities for creating synthetic immersive environments, many important questions arise. How do we design 3D scenes or place cuts in VR videos? How do we drive user attention in virtual environments? Can we predict visual exploration patterns? How can we efficiently compress cinematic VR content?

To address these and other questions from first principles, it is crucial to understand how users explore virtual environments. In this talk, I will go through our work on analyzing user behavior in cinematic VR scenarios.

Biography

Dr. Belen Masia is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Universidad de Zaragoza, and a member of the Graphics & Imaging Lab of the I3A Institute. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at MPI Informatik, and a member of the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication.