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Keynote & Invited Talks
Keynote: Text and non-text: the ascendancy of words
Stephen Robertson
Microsoft Research Cambridge & Professor of Information Systems,
Dept of Information Science, City University, London
The current archetype of a search system is the web search engine,
with a free-text entry box for the query. Items are indexed with
words (or something very like words); queries are split into words;
and the words are matched. All the sophistication lies in the logic
and statistics of matching and ranking. So what do we do with
non-verbal media?
Primarily we turn it into words! In this talk I will
discuss the
all-pervasive, all-conquering nature of this paradigm, review some
of
its methods and effects, and consider the question of how locked into
it we really are.
Invited Talk: Towards the Compleat Musicologist?
Nicholas Cook, FBA
Research Professor of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London &
Director, AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded
Music
Only a decade ago, the idea of the computer being the musicologist's
workbench seemed futuristic if not downright impractical, at least outside
the specialist circle of computational musicologists. In many ways it
is now a reality: we use our computers both to conduct our research (through
searching online databases, accessing facsimiles, or sound analysis)
and to present our results (by means of text, notation, and sound or
video clips). Yet the potential of computational approaches to change
the way we think about music remains for the most part unrealized. In
this paper I explore
what these changes might be, whether they are desirable, how they might
be brought about, and what are the factors that militate against them.
Invited Talk: Sonifications
Thomas Dolby
Headspace, Inc
Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to convey information.
By
mapping real-world data to auditory signals, it is possible to provide
a fresh perspective or 'view' of something we take for granted.
Thomas' presentation covers recent work he has produced in conjunction
with computer graphics company Alias/Wavefront, in which he sonifies
a
range of subjects including water droplets, seasonal rainfall, solar
flares, and the Asian tsunami. He will step us through the process,
explain the techniques used, and play us the results in real time.
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