Machine Listening Lab 2018: The year in review
2018 has been a fascinating year for the Machine Listening Lab. Here are the headlines!
Grant success and projects
- Emmanouil Benetos is co-investigator (Co-I) for the Science Foundation Ireland funded PhD project “Data-driven quality prediction for digitally restored audio archives”, with Dr Andrew Hines (UCD, Ireland) as PI. The project includes an “enrichment” year at The Alan Turing Institute, supervised by Emmanouil Benetos. Budget: €166,544. Duration: 09/2018 – 08/2021.
- Dan Stowell received £3,000 from The Alan Turing Institute towards the organisation of the 2nd International Workshop on Vocal Interactivity in-and-between Humans, Animals and Robots (VIHAR 2019), taking place on 29-30 August 2019 in London, UK.
- Helen L. Bear received £4,717 from the QMUL-EPSRC Flexible Innovation Starter Fund towards accelerating the impact of EPSRC project EP/R01891X/1.
Events
- MLLab Symposium 2018: featuring an invited industrial speaker (Katerina Kosta, Jukedeck), 3 internal speakers, and 11 lightning talks from students and postdocs. There were 42 attendees including MLLab members, interested people from around QMUL, and a collaborator visiting from Brazil (Rodrigo Schramm).
- SoundCamp 2018: Animal Diplomacy Bureau, an art/design/public engagement commission by Kaylene Kau for Dan Stowell’s research project. Lots of members of the public, adults and children, engaged with bird sounds and birds’ lives in a park in South London.
MLLab students helped make this a success: Will Wilkinson, Veronica Morfi, and Sophie McDonald. - QMUL Festival of Ideas, a group of MLLab academics and postdocs got together to play FolkRNN tunes from Bob Sturm’s algorithm.
- The second Bird Audio Detection challenge took place in Summer 2018: a data challenge lead-organised by Dan Stowell. Thirteen teams from around the world took part, and the highest-scoring systems represented a dramatic improvement on the state of the art.
- Emmanouil Benetos was Programme Co-Chair for the 19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2018).
- Machine Listening Lab researchers took part in the 2018 Workshop and Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE 2018) – presenting papers and also leading a task on Bird Audio Detection. (More info)
- Dan Stowell announced a Special Session on “Wildlife Bioacoustics and Adaptive Signal Processing”, to happen at the ICASSP 2019 conference. He will chair it together with Naomi Harte and Theo Damoulas.
Awards
- Dan Stowell and Emmanouil Benetos were awarded Turing Fellowships from The Alan Turing Institute (2018-2020).
- Emmanouil Benetos received the “Outstanding Contribution to ISMIR Award” from the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (Oct 2018).
- Emmanouil Benetos was promoted to Senior Lecturer (Oct 2018).
- Emmanouil Benetos received a “Research Performance Award” from the Faculty of Science & Engineering of Queen Mary University of London (Jan 2018).
New people, visitors, and farewells
Farewells:
- We said farewell to Bob Sturm – a founding member and co-leader of the MLLab, he has now moved to Stockholm to take up a position as Associate Professor at KTH.
- Congratulations to MLLab PhD student Maria Panteli, who successfully defended her PhD on Computational Analysis of World Music Corpora (April 2018).
New people:
- Yogi (Helen L.) Bear, post-doctoral research assistant working with Emmanouil Benetos on his EPSRC First Grant project on computational sound scene analysis.
- Lies Zandberg, post-doctoral research assistant working with Rob Lachlan and Dan Stowell on the BBSRC project “Machine Learning for Birdsong Learning”.
- Inês Nolasco, research assistant (and former MSc student) working with Emmanouil Benetos and Helen L. Bear on beehive sound analysis and taxonomies for sound scenes.
- Emir Demirel, PhD student working on representation learning in singing voice.
- Carlos Lordelo, PhD student working on automatic instrument recognition and separation.
- Arjun Pankajakshan, PhD student working on computational sound scene analysis.
- Vinod Subramanian, PhD student working on robust deep learning for music information processing.
Visiting researchers:
- Pavel Linhart and Tereza Petruskova (Czech Republic)
- Vincent Lostanlen (Cornell University & New York University, USA)
- Mathieu Lagrange and Felix Gontier (Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France)
Editorial activities
- Emmanouil Benetos has been named Associate Editor for the EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing
- Dan Stowell joined PeerJ Computer Science as an Academic Editor.
Invited talks
- Dan Stowell gave the invited opening lecture at the 2018 Intelligent Sensing Summer School (video online here), and an invited talk at Silwood Park (Imperial College London).
- Emmanouil Benetos gave a keynote on “Automatic transcription of world music collections” at the 8th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, Thessaloniki, Greece, June 2018.
- Emmanouil Benetos gave an invited talk on “Automatic Music Transcription: Representations and Categorical (mis)Conceptions” at the 5th International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music, Thessaloniki, Greece, June 2018.
Selected Publications
Book chapters:
Approaches to complex sound scene analysis
E Benetos, D Stowell, and M D Plumbley
Computational Analysis of Sound Scenes and Events, Springer, 2018
Computational bioacoustic scene analysis
D Stowell
Computational Analysis of Sound Scenes and Events, Springer, 2018
Journal articles:
Deep Learning for Audio Event Detection and Tagging on Low-Resource Datasets
V Morfi and D Stowell
Applied Sciences 8 (8), 1397
Automatic acoustic detection of birds through deep learning: the first Bird Audio Detection challenge
D Stowell, MD Wood, H Pamuła, Y Stylianou, and H Glotin
Methods in Ecology and Evolution
A supervised classification approach for note tracking in polyphonic piano transcription
JJ Valero-Mas, E Benetos, and JM Iñesta
Journal of New Music Research, 1-15
A review of manual and computational approaches for the study of world music corpora
M Panteli, E Benetos, and S Dixon
Journal of New Music Research 47 (2), 176-189
Speaker recognition with hybrid features from a deep belief network
H Ali, SN Tran, E Benetos, and ASA Garcez
Neural Computing and Applications 29 (6), 13-19
Detection and classification of acoustic scenes and events: Outcome of the DCASE 2016 challenge
A Mesaros, T Heittola, E Benetos, P Foster, M Lagrange, T Virtanen, and MD Plumbley
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP) 26 (2), 379-393