Phd Studentship: Tangible, Embedded, and Whole Body Music Computing (Open University)

PHD STUDENTSHIP: TANGIBLE, EMBEDDED AND WHOLE BODY MUSIC COMPUTING

OPEN UNIVERSITY

DEADLINE: 21 JULY 2009

A fully funded 3 year PhD studentship in Music Computing is available at the Open University to develop and study new technologies, and new kinds of interaction, to support Music Composition, Performance and Education, with particular reference to Tangible, Embedded, and Whole Body Music Computing. The project will use motion capture and vibrotactile devices to investigate how visual and haptic feedback can be used to help musical beginners develop musical skills, while helping experienced musicians to gain new insights. The initial focus will be on rhythm. Background information to the project can be found at http://www.esenseproject.org/ and

http://musiccomp2008.open.ac.uk/

Applicants should have, or expect to gain, a BSc (1st or 2.1 class) or preferably MSc in computing or other related discipline. Formal musical training is not required, but applicants should have musical skills and experience of playing an instrument. The research is interdisciplinary and experience or interest in any of the following areas would be advantageous: programming for pervasive, tangible or music computing, hardware prototyping, interaction design, and user studies.

We encourage you to informally discuss your interest with Dr Simon Holland (s.holland@open.ac.uk). Applications should contain an application form, a CV and a two-page research proposal outlining how you would tackle this project. Closing date for applications is 21st July 2009. The studentship will commence in October 2009.

For detailed information and to apply email s.a.parsons@open.ac.uk or telephone 01908

653280. Quote reference "Interdisciplinary PhD Studentships in Music"

Further details of music-related research at the OU can be found at

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/music/research/

PhD Studentships: Music Related Research (Open University)

INTERDISCIPLINARY PHD STUDENTSHIPS IN MUSIC

OPEN UNIVERSITY (MILTON KEYNES)

DEADLINE: 21 JULY 2009

The Open University offers up to two full-time, 3 year PhD studentships (to start 1 October 2009)

Music-related research at the OU encompasses a wide range of approaches (including historical, social, empirical and technological methods) with a distinctive emphasis on innovation and interdisciplinary research. We welcome applications for PhD studentships in any of our areas of strength, which include

* Social and cultural theory and analysis (including ethnomusicology,sociology, social psychology, human geography)

* Historical study (including documentary and archival research)

* Empirical investigation of performance

* Music computing (including Music Computing and Pervasive Interaction; the design and evaluation of new tools for performance, composition, analysis &education)

* Musical acoustics

* Music education and pedagogy

Projects which will benefit from supervision across traditional disciplinary boundaries (e.g. ethnomusicology and psychology, acoustics and historical musicology, or music computing or sociology) are particularly encouraged. Also encouraged are proposals with links to one of our existing research groups or collaborative projects (for details of these, and of our research facilities, go to the web address below).

Potential candidates are urged to make contact as soon as possible, in order to discuss and develop a project with support from potential supervisors prior to submission. Informal enquiries are encouraged to Prof. Martin Clayton, Director of Music Research (m.r.l.clayton@open.ac.uk)

For detailed information and to apply email s.a.parsons@open.ac.uk or telephone 01908 653280.

Further details of music-related research at the OU can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/music/research/

Closing date: 21 July 2009

Equal Opportunity is University Policy

PhD Studentship: Developing Technologies to Enhance Musicians' Posture Using Multi-Modal Feedback (Open University)

PHD STUDENTSHIP: DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGIES TO ENHANCE MUSICIANS' POSTURE USING MULTI-MODAL FEEDBACK
FACULTY OF MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING AND TECHNOLOGY
OPEN UNIVERSITY, MILTON KEYNES, UK
DEADLINE: 26 JUNE 2009

A fully funded 3 year PhD studentship in Music Computing is available in the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology to develop novel technologies to increase children’s awareness of their body posture when they are learning to play stringed instruments and when singing. Initial studies will use motion capture technology to track bowing actions and investigate how visual and vibrotactile feedback can be used to improve technique. More generally, the project aims to develop engaging and playful tools that will motivate children to practise regularly. More information about this project is available on http://www.esenseproject.org/.

Applicants should have, or expect to gain, a BSc (1st or 2.1 class) or preferably MSc in computing or other related discipline. Formal musical training is not required, but applicants should have musical skills and experience of playing an instrument. The research is interdisciplinary and experience or interest in any of the following areas would be advantageous: motion capture technology; physical computing; interaction design; games programming; and music education.

We encourage you to informally discuss your interest with Dr Janet van der Linden (j.vanderlinden@open.ac.uk), Professor Yvonne Rogers (Y.Rogers@open.ac.uk) or Dr Jon Bird (jonba@sussex.ac.uk).

Applications should contain an application form, a CV and a two-page research proposal outlining how you would tackle this project; quote reference "Developing Technologies to Enhance Musicians' Posture using Multi-Modal Feedback".

Detailed information on how to apply is available either through email (mcs-studentship-recruitment@open.ac.uk) or from http://www.computing.open.ac.uk/research-degrees/studentships.

Closing date for applications is 26 June 2009. Interviews will be held mid July (please notify us of any dates you will not be available for interview). The studentship will commence in October 2009.

CFP: 25th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (Switzerland)

25th ACM SYMPOSIUM ON APPLIED COMPUTING
SIERRE, SWITZERLAND
21 - 26 MARCH 2010
CALL FOR PAPERS
http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2010/

Important Dates
September 08, 2009: Full Paper Submission
October 19, 2009: Notification of paper acceptance/rejection
November 02, 2009: Camera-ready copies of accepted papers

For the past twenty-four years the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) has been a primary and international forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers and application developers to gather, interact and present their work. The ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP) is the sole sponsor of SAC. The conference proceedings are published by ACM and are also available online through ACM's Digital Library.

The 25th Annual SAC meeting will be held March 2010 in Sierre, Switzerland, and is hosted by the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland (HES-SO) and Ecole Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Visit the SAC 2010 home page for further information: http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2010/

Special Track on Information Access and Retrieval (SAC-IAR)
The research on information access and retrieval aims at modelling, designing, implementing and evaluating systems that provide a fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of multimedia information. One main issue of such systems is to estimate the relevance of documents to user information needs. This is a very hard and complex task due to several reasons that a large volume of research has attempted to analyse and tackle, among which the subjective and multi-aspect nature of relevance. Information Retrieval (IR) can be considered as the first historical research area aimed at defining systems for the automatic access to huge amounts of information (together with DBMSs whose main aim is to manage and access huge amounts of data). In the past 30 years, IR has grown well beyond its primary goals of indexing and searching textual documents in static bibliographic collections, and has moved away from the perception of being the narrow area of interest of librarians and information experts. With the expansion of the Internet and of the Web, other access techniques have been identified and developed, such as Recommender Systems and Information Filtering systems, Question Answering Systems, Meta-search engines, Geomap information services, and collaborative information retreieval services. Information access technologies and IR in particular, are currently being used in many different application contexts that go far beyond the initial scope of their design. The application of models and techniques proposed and tested in standard experimental contexts to new application areas is a very challenging task that we believe is worth of great attention by the researchers. Nowadays, research in information access includes document indexing, document classification and categorization, system architecture, user interfaces, information visualisation, query languages, topic detection, management of multi-lingual information, content indexing of audio-visual information, collaborative searching, etc.

This special track is the ninth edition in the context of SAC and is concerned with the theory, implementation and evaluation of information access and retrieval technologies to novel application areas and novel contexts.

We invite submission of original research contributions, and experimentations in emerging fields such as Geographic Information Retrieval, Collaborative search and retrieval, User Interfaces for information access, presentation, and exploration, information retreival on the Web.

The topics of interest include:
* (Multimedia) document clustering and categorization,
* (Multimodal) Interfaces for information access, presentation, and exploration,
* Flexible query languages,
* Topic detection and tracking
* Cross language retrieval,
* Content indexing of multimedia information,
* Information extraction and mining
* Modeling user context,
* Ontology based Information Retrieval Systems,
* Conceptual information retrieval
* Collaborative information searching and retrieval
* Spoken IR,
* (Mobile) Search engines and meta-search engines,
* Models of information access and retrieval,
* Applications of advanced information access and retrieval systems,
* (Multimedia and multimodal) information access and retrieval systems,
* Content-based and collaborative information filtering,
* Distributed information access and retrieval.

Track Chairs
Gabriella Pasi
Department of Informatics,Systems and Communication (DISCo),
University of Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy
pasi@disco.unimib.it
Gloria Bordogna,
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, IDPA ,
Dalmine (BG), Italy.
gloria.bordogna@idpa.cnr.it

Guidelines for Submission:
Original papers from the above-mentioned or other related areas will be considered.
Submissions fall into the following categories:
Original and unpublished work
Reports of innovative computing applications in the arts, sciences, engineering, and business areas
Reports of successful technology transfer to new problem domains
Reports of industrial experience and demos of new innovative systems
Peer groups with expertise in the track focus area will blindly review submissions to that track. Each submitted paper will be reviewed by at least three referees. Accepted papers will be published in the annual conference proceedings. Submission guidelines can be found on SAC 2010 Website. Papers should be submitted per track using the provided automated submission system via the website: eCMS site http://sac.cs.iupui.edu/SAC2010/
Submission of the same paper to multiple tracks is not allowed. For more information please visit the SAC 2010 Website. Submissions must follow the template reported at the conference web site. Each paper can have a length of 5 pages according to the template, with a maximum of 3 extra pages in the camera ready format. There will be a charge of 80USD per extra page. extra page will be charged 80USD. Submissions should be printable on a standard printer on common paper formats, such as US letter and A4.
The author(s) name(s) and address(es) must NOT appear in the body of the paper, and
self-reference should be in the third person. This is to facilitate blind review. Notice that Papers that report the author names will not be sent to the reviews and will be rejected. Only the title should be shown at the first page without the author's information."

Special Track on: INFORMATION ACCESS AND RETRIEVAL
http://www.disco.unimib.it/go/Home/IAR-2010

Fully Funded Visiting Research Studentships Available (Open University)

VISITING RESEARCH STUDENTSHIPS
MUSIC COMPUTING LAB, OPEN UNIVERSITY
COMMENCING: 1 MAY 2009

Four fully funded places for three-month Visiting Research Studentships, available immediately at the Music Computing Lab at the Open University.

Up to four fully funded places for three-month Visiting Research Students are immediately available at the Music Computing Lab at the Open University. The projects will be undertaken in collaboration with the Pervasive Interaction Lab. You must be an EU or UK National. Prospective students could be excellent final year undergraduates, Masters students, or PhD students, or could have recently completed any of these awards.

You must be available to start in May 2009. Broadly, we are interested in candidates with experience in HCI, Pervasive Interaction, Music Computing or Haptics.

We welcome recommendations for likely candidates from researchers or teachers from relevant disciplines in university departments. Students or recent students are equally welcome to apply on their own behalf.

Visiting students will work on predefined research projects as summarized below.

The studentships are available to start from 1st May (with a small amount of flexibility). The studentships will run until 31st July, although in an exceptional case a studentship might be extended by a few weeks.

Students will be based at the Open University Campus in Milton Keynes. We will pay for accommodation in Milton Keynes plus living expenses. We can also cover reasonable travel expenses at the start and finish of the studentship.

Project Area 1
Music Computing and Pervasive Interaction: Implementation

1.1 Multi-touch shared tabletop interaction in Music Computing
1.2 Haptics and force feedback in Music Computing
1.3 Expressive, interactive animated graphics for Music Computing tools
1.4 Tangible, embedded, and whole body Music Computing
1.5 New tools for supporting beginning String Players

Project Area 2
Music Computing and Pervasive Interaction: Evaluation
The purpose of this family of projects is to assist in carrying out user studies and other
kinds of evaluation of new tools for music performance, composition and education.

Project Area 3
Exploratory Music programming for the iPhone.

Project Area 4
Collaborative creativity between professional musician(s), and the general public
This project involves assisting in the design, implementation and evaluation of tools to
support collaborative creativity between professional musician(s), and the general public.
This work is likely to involve a Multi-touch shared tabletop interface.

For full details and more information on the projects, contact mcs-computing-secretaries@open.ac.uk. Applications should also be sent to this address. Informal enquiries for projects 1-3 should be sent to s.holland (insert here) open.ac.uk. For details of projects 1 and 2 also contact j.vanderlinden. For project 3, also contact r.w.griffiths. The contact for project 4 is r.c.laney. (All addresses are open.ac.uk.)

Applications should include a CV and covering note that summarizes
• evidence of appropriate knowledge, skills and experience for the specific studentship,
• why you want to undertake this particular studentship,
• why you think you would be a good candidate,
• telephone, email and postal contact details for two referees, at least one of whom must be able to comment on subject discipline specifics.

This is an opportunity to gain experience on practical projects run in collaboration between the Music Computing Lab and the Pervasive Interaction Lab. Each project is intended to lead to a publication with the student as co-author.

Dr. Simon Holland
Director of Music Computing Lab
Department of Computing
Faculty of Mathematics and Computing
The Open University
Milton Keynes
UK
MK7 6AA