May 24th, 2018
12:30
Auditorium Campus Poblenou 

IRS streaming 

Integrative Reseach Seminar 

"A Journey through Musical Computational Creativity"   by Sergi Jordà

Computational or artificial creativity is a multidisciplinary field of research located at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and the arts. Although the term was officially coined in the late 90s, the study of the use of computers for simulating or enhancing human creativity dates back from the 50s, initially inspired by the work of cyberneticists such as Weiner or Shannon. For the last 30 years, my own personal work has mainly focused on exploring, from multiples perspectives, the capabilities of computers for enhancing or complementing (though never mimicking) human musical creativity.

In this seminar, I will first introduce the context and motivation of my work, and review some of the more notable results obtained along these three decades. I will then discuss more in depth a recent study we have carried for better understanding how do we perceive rhythm, with the subsequent development of artificial expert drumming agents aimed at assisting music production.

May 24

15:30h

Room 55.309

PhD Seminars

How to do good experiments online / Good practices for online experiments

By:

• Xavier Favory - Freesound Datasets https://datasets.freesound.org/
• Maria Rauschenberger - Lessons learned from conducting a medium-scale online experiment to distinguish a person with and without dyslexia. https://mariarauschenberger.com/projects/
• Davinia Hernández-Leo / Patricia Santos - Integrated Learning Design Environment  http://ilde2.upf.edu/

Abstract

User experiments can be crucial for researchers who need to evaluate methods involving humans, or gather human-generated data. The Web has created an alternative to expensive lab experiments: online and crowdsourcing experiments are valuable resources for research which can bring many advantages. However, online experiments introduce different challenges which need to be addressed carefully in order to be accurately performed. This seminar aims at sharing good practices when performing online-based experiments as well as crowdsourcing research. First this talk will give an overview of the ways in which online experiments can be used. Then, the following researchers from the department will present their work and share valuable advices:

• Xavier Favory will present Freesound Datasets, a collaborative platform for the creation of open audio datasets.
• Maria Rauschenberger will draw your attention to  possible pitfalls and lessons learned from conducting a online experiment for children at the age of 7 till 12 for different languages with a web-game.
• Davinia Hernández-Leo will present the Integrated Learning Design Environment 2 (ILDE2), a community platform for learning design.

Background material

Making better use of the crowd. NIPS 2016, ACL 2017, and KDD 2017

Instructor: Jenn Wortman Vaughan

http://www.jennwv.com/projects/crowdtutorial.html  

June 7

15:30 h

Room 55.309

Invited Research Seminar

Reflecting on the PELARS project and Multimodal Learning Analytics,  by Daniel Spikol, PhD

Associate Professor, Faculty of Technology and Society, Department of Computer Science and Media Technology, Malmö University, Sweden

Abstract

The talk presents key results and lessons learnt from the Practice-based Experiential Learning Analytics Research and Support (PELARS) project. PELARS was a three-year project that developed a learning analytics system to investigate small group learning for open-ended engineering tasks. The aim is to share the results and challenges of the project to further the dialogue about how to increase progress for multimodal learning analytics (MMLA). The theories and different methods of the project will be discussed that include the different sensors used to capture, record, and analyse students physical interactions and how we used this data to create models to understand aspects of collaboration. To investigate the multimodal data, we started with a simple grading of the student's final products and progressed to a richer framework for assessing student non-verbal collaboration with different machine learning strategies. Some of the results illustrate that body location and movement are strong features for further investigating collaboration. However, challenges remain across the sustainability and ethics of how this data can be used to support the learners and teachers in creative, open-ended activities.

Biography

July 3

12:30 h

Room 51.100

Invited Research Seminar

"Post-quantum cryptography from supersingular isogeny problems?" 

By Christophe Petit 

Abstract

We review existing cryptographic schemes based on the hardness of computing isogenies between supersingular isogenies, and present some attacks against them. In particular, we present techniques to accelerate the resolution of isogeny problems when the action of the isogeny on a large torsion subgroup is known, and we discuss the impact of these techniques on the supersingular key exchange protocol of Jao-de Feo. 

Biography

Christophe Petit is a Lecturer in Computer Security in the University of Birmingham's School of Computer Science, and a member of the Security and Privacy research group. Previously he was a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute, where he helped founding the Cryptography group,and prior to that he worked at Université catholique de Louvain's Department of Electrical Engineering and at University College London's Computer Science Department.