(not quite the next post) - a little breather!

Just wanted to record in this blog that....

I've finally finished all the funding applications!!!!

well nearly....

All my work on the applications is done now, and I don't think I'll find any more places to apply to (although I need to check out one organisation I found once called SEMPRE...) So the only work I have to do now is to chase up some forms if they don't get forwarded on by my previous universities, and then prepare for any interviews I might get offered. So, for a while...

No more form filling!!! :):)

Who is my peer community?

Looking at the last part of my last entry, I think now is a good point for me to record exactly who the peer community is that I am aiming to become part of.

I think that there are many different layers to this peer community, and the separating criteria between these layers are the different levels to which I want to interact with other academics in this area. Let me explain....

So my work is highly interdisciplinary; I am influenced by (in no particular order):

• Informatics including Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science
• Cognitive Science
• Music analysis, Musicology, Composition and Performance
• Psychology
• Philosophy (to a very small extent - because of my lack of knowledge and ability rather than lack of interest!)
• Maths
• Linguistics and Natural Language Processing
  
• Neuroscience and biologically-inspired/evolutionary methods

I think I could even add to this list, but its long enough already!

So to what extent do I want to become involved with, say, the Maths or Linguistics-based academic community in comparison to the Informatics based academic community? This would be far less than for Informatics, because of demands on time and the amount of information my poor little brain can actually process. However I really don't want to exclude what something like Maths has to offer, not completely. I want to stay aware of relevant strands of information.

So, in all these areas, I am keeping aware of things like departmental seminars and local talks, and occasionally looking at courses within these departments that might be worth sitting in on. However my peer community is, I suppose, concentrated around Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and particularly both those subjects with a Music bias. (My Dphil study addresses Computational Modelling of Musical Creativity)

Here is a not so little collection of people that I am particularly keen to keep knowledgeable about and maybe get to meet. These lists are the product of a couple of term's work...

People, where they are based and their interests that concern me
Ani Patel (Neurosciences institute: Music and the Brain)
Bryan Pardo (Northwestern university: AI and music)
Chris Darwin (Sussex: Perception inc. sound perception)
Chris Raphael (Indiana: Automatic accompaniment and statistical methods in music)
Diana Deutsch (UCSD: Psychology of music)
Emilios Cambouropoulos (Thessaloniki, Music Informatics) - the co-organiser of the course in Greece that I am going to and a former PhD student of my old supervisor - so hopefully i'll be able to talk to him sometime at the conference)
Geraint Wiggins (Goldsmiths: Computational creativity)
People at IRCAM (Music informatics research institute in France)
Isabelle Peretz (Montreal: Music Neuroscience)
JJ Bharucha (Tufts: Music Neuroscience)
People at Jyvaskyla university in Finland: Music cognition labs
Michael Mozer (Colorado: Neuroscience inc Music)
Maggie Boden (Sussex: Computational Creativity)
Nick Collins (Sussex - my supervisor! - computer music)
Chris Thornton (Sussex - my second supervisor - creativity and machine learning)
Philip Johnson-Laird (Princeton: creativity psychology)
Eduardo Miranda (Plymouth: Evolutionary Music)
Roger Dannenberg (Carnegie Mellon: AI in music)
W. Jay Dowling (Texas: Music Psychology)
David Meredith (Taptu.com and formally Goldsmiths: Music information Retrieval)
David Huron (Ohio: Music Cognition and computational methods in music)
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (not sure where he's based: Creativity theory)

Phew- and that was an edited version of the lists I keep!
So many people whose work I find fascinating... such little time to find their work and get in touch with them. Generally I am hoping to meet people at conferences and also to approach them when I am working on projects similar to them, for example I've been intouch briefly with Chris Raphael about a former project I did in AI accompaniment.

Conferences
The major conferences of interest to me are:
ICMC - International Computer Music Conference
ISMIR - music information retrieval
MIREX - music information retrieval
ICMPC - Music Perception and Cognition
NIME - New Interfaces for Musical Expression
AISB - simulation of behaviour

How can I get involved in these conferences? Obviously I can't go to all of them! or very many of them in fact. So I need to combine attending conferences with reading the proceedings for others.

So far I have submitted a paper to ICMC - lets see how that goes! and extensively used papers from ICMC, ISMIR and MIREX in various projects up till now. I'd like to find out a little bitmore about the AISB and ICMPC conferences though, especially the recent AISB workshops on computational creativity which are next on my list of things to read about.
There are a few smaller conferences that also interest me, such as CIM (interdisciplinary musicology) and LCC (language communication and cognition) which I will be going to as a presenter of a paper and poster respectively, and also CMMR - Computer Music Modelling and retrieval, which I'd like to look at the papers for when I get some time.

Generally these conferences accept both papers and posters, the academic standards, although many music-oriented conferences take demos of systems in operation or musical performance recordings as well, and have gigs alongside the academic presentations - such as ICMC which should be a very interesting week in Belfast this year! Requirements for submitting vary widely - the three conferences I have submitted to so far have all wanted different things - a full paper, an extended abstract and a short abstract. Criteria for acceptance is standard for academia in Informatics, (I have this impression anyway!), with conferences such as ICMC being of a higher global reputation and correspondingly harder to get into, but conferences such as CIM being smaller (and more focussed on particular themes rather than a general coverage).

Journals
Another way I want to keep up to date with current research is by scanning the latest articles published in various journals. CurrentlyI have bookmarks, RSS feeds and emails telling me titles of the latest articles published in: Computer Music Journal, Journal of New Music Research, Leonardo and Leonardo Music Journal, Psychology of Music, Music Perception, and various other Cognitive Science/Neuroscience journals. I try and have a look at these titles fairly regularly but will only click through to a title if it really interests me (because of time restraints). However I quite like the fact that this gives me a wee idea of whats going on, even at the most brief of levels.

A look ahead at a future entry: Current Themes of interest in my community
Current themes of interest particularly in my area: Well the massive one is computational creativity which is a real buzz-word at the moment. Also evolutionary methods are getting very popular (with a very strong bias in this direction at Sussex, although this isn't yet replicated everywhere and I doubt some institutions will consider this approach worthwhile for many years to come - although in such a public arena as a blog I won't go into detail here!)
I'm very interested in the latest advances in neurologically and biologically inspired cognition, especially computational modelling of various levels of cognition. This is getting to be a very exciting area.

In the next post, I'll take a look at one of these themes in particular: a recent discussion on computational creativity. I have had a book of proceedings sitting on my desk for this conference for weeks now, without having looked at it properly. So here's my chance!

OK I've written so much here, but this is an area I've been really looking into over the last two terms, and with so many different academic influences... I know I will have to focus my thesis into smaller areas, but I really like the multidisciplinary ethos at Sussex and how I can incorporate it. This was a major attractor of Sussex for me when choosing where to go for a PhD. So what if there is a greater amount of reading to do, or more areas where I feel like a dunce until I've done some work - I'm really enjoying this research approach! I will focus as time goes on, but not just yet...

Criteria for my blog

I realised that I haven't actually documented anywhere who this blog is aimed at, or how I am going to use it. So here is a retrospective look at how I've been writing the blog content:

Who is the audience
Primarily the audience is mostly intended to be myself; I am treating the blog as a 'dumping ground' for the thoughts and reflections that I would normally record on paper or just in my head. Other people that I think may read the blog are other people in the advanced technical communications course. I doubt anyone else will stumble upon it: in particular although I have told my supervisor about it, I wouldn't think he would have the time to read through it, and I'm not expecting him to. So I am really writing this blog as a personal reflection but making the contents public for the benefit of the ATC course.

What tone will I adopt
In keeping with the above point, I have mostly used quite a conversational and informal tone. If I am mostly communicating my thoughts, then I don't want to rephrase them in more formal language, but to keep them as raw thoughts. I have, in an earlier entry, practised some more formal writing, which was very useful for formulating my abstract for my voice separation paper. But I have quite a few outlets for formal writing this term - papers and funding applications - and wanted to keep this relatively informal.

What types of content will I write about
In addition to the required entries, which I have been considering the content for over the last week, I have used this blog to 'dump' my thoughts and self-reflections/organisations in, as I mention above. I do this to some extent on paper in a notebook I keep on my DPhil, but for this term I decided to try and use the blog for this. It has been relatively useful, however I can't bring this blog to lectures and talks in the same way as I can bring a notebook (not without a laptop anyway).
One way this blog has been useful is that I can always access the content anywhere there is a computer,rather than having to have the notebook physically with me. Of course with this there is the proviso that I need to have a computer nearby, attached to the internet...

To what extent do I want to engage with a peer community
I assume this refers to this blog in particular, i.e. to what extent do I want this blog to be a point of interaction with a peer community. I have little objection to the contents of this blog being in the public domain in general (although I'm not sure I will keep the entries online about where I have put down my reactions to other people's papers - they are by no means a considered and well-founded reaction to the papers' content but just my reactions after a few sweeps of the paper, on what I think is the general gist of the paper).

I don't think that an academic peer community would be particularly interested in this blog's comments, however, as it is written as a personal reflection of what I've been up to this term rather than providing any academic contribution. I have my personal and Sussex website up for providing information about me to the academic peer community I am hoping to be considered part of - hopefully those sites do a much better job of this than this blog does.

The only peer community that might be interested to a small degree in the blog contents are other DPhil students, and ATC students (MSc and DPhil), to compare with their own personal reflections. However, as I say, this blog is very much for personal critical reflection and thoughts.

oh dear....

So I don't think I'm really keeping up with the assignments side of this Advanced Technical Communications course so well.. I thought that the required entries we had to make for this blog were to be done by next Thursday but actually they have to be there ready for review well before then, so that the reviewers can submit their reviews by Thursday.

Sorry Gareth and Maria, I've only done one of the required entries so far... I will get the others done ASAP so you can do your reviews - please be kind :)

What makes a good presentation?

Now that I have given my presentation and had the chance to watch some other presentations, I feel quite equipped to tackle this 'required entry'. (Maybe it would have been better if I could have carried out this reflection before my presentation, however time wasn't kind to me at that point..!)

I'm going to start this by thinking about what makes a bad presentation:

- Poor communication skills:
Not addressing the audience directly can make the audience feel like the presenter isn't talking to them!
Mumbling - so you can't hear what the presenter is saying - so what's the point in talking....?
- Inappropriate level of content:
The level of detail needs to be right. Too much detail and the audience will be overwhelmed by information and this might obscure the take-home message you are trying to convey to the audience. Too little detail and the audience will just not appreciate what you are trying to tell them, and the talk won't be informative
Content not directed at audience's general level of knowledge.
Need to make the content relevant and understandable for the audience, otherwise the message won't get through
- An 'uninteresting talk'
This is so important! If you don't make it interesting then people aren't going to listen.


There is a general theme across all of these observations -the point of a talk is to convey information to the listeners. You need to be sure what you want the listeners to get from the talk and that this is a reasonable amount of information that you can get across in the time. Presentation of your material is key to this as well, both visually (slides) and how you speak to the audience.

Having been at a couple of talks yesterday, I would have to add that there seems to be a threshold of time that you can talk to an audience for before they lose concentration - even if the audience is particularly keen to listen!

I've been trying to think of ways to get around this. Perhaps it wouldn't be too bad to disrupt the flow of what you are talking about, in order to give the audience something unexpected that attracts their attention. I suppose this should be relevant to the talk (although I remember a very good lecturer who used to stop half way through a lecture, show a random funny video, to give us a break from the lecture material - that worked well!) Another way around this would be to engage the audience in active participation, or to use sound or video as an alternative method of presenting information. I'd quite like to think of other ways around this as well - it would make my presentation style much better, I think, and more individual.

demands on time

Oh dear I haven't done any of the posts required for this blog yet, and I'm so busy with funding applications, marking and work for conferences. I _will_ make time for them in this next week - I have to!

This term has been so busy, what with getting so many deadlines met for various things. Especially now I have my list of possible things to be working on, I am realising that I spend far too much time thinking about exactly how to do things rather than getting stuck in. There's an importance in thinking about things, of course, but at the end of the day the work has to be done!

In that frame of mind, then, lets finish the second draft of my AHRC funding application! Last application form I do (I hope!) and then I can get on with the reading I want to do

reflection on presentation

On Friday, I gave a presentation on my Bach fugue project to the members of the Advanced Technical Communications course.

I found this presentation quite tricky to prepare, as in ten minutes I had to explain the problem I was addressing (quite a specialised musicological problem) and the solution I implemented - I left out so much detail that I would have loved to put in! but had to be ruthless.

I think the presentation went quite well overall. I was very worried about the fact that I wanted to use sound in my presentation, but although I got there quite early to try out several versions of my presentation (I nearly resorted to using the backup of the backup of the backup of the backup plan!) I still kept people waiting a little at the beginning of the session while I got Eric to help me set the sound up on the PC we were using. Lessons learnt - its not enough to be there early - if I don't know how to do something, I need to be much more forceful in asking for help setting things up, and not be afraid to admit that I don't know how to fix things.

Overall I think the presentation went ok, and I think I managed to convey what I was trying to do, and how successful my work had been to that point. There are always points to improve upon, and I picked up a few tips watching others - Geoff's air of complete knowledge and authority in what he was talking about, Maria's engaging with the audience during the talk by asking them questions, Chris's demo half way through his talk which was short but exciting to watch and the way that Gareth looked around the whole audience while he talked, not just a random focal point in the group, and how he talked very deliberately and a little slower than he normally talked.

I've enrolled for an Oral presentation skills course which is on next week - I wish it had been on before this presentation! But seeing as I have a couple of talks coming up to give at Edinburgh uni and the conference in Greece (and perhaps one at Warwick uni), I think I'm going to have plenty of opportunity for practice...