Tsukuba Science City: Victoria

Last week I was at a conference on music information retrieval in Victoria (Canada). It's an annual conference which takes place in a different country every year. I've been attending it since 2002 and it's by far my favorite conference (and the only one I'm attending this year). Next year the conference will be held in Vienna! :-)

I got to see lots of interesting demonstrations, heard interesting talks on the newest developments, and had a chance to talk to many people working on similar topics as I am. I learned a lot. It was a great week!

Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to do sightseeing. But anyway, here are two pictures I took of the sea. The water was actually quite warm! :-)
(Special thanks to Michael who recommended me to rent a bike and cycle to the beach!)

At the conference one of the things I was presenting was work I did together with Masataka. Here is an excerpt of the screenshot from the MusicRainbow. (I plan to put a demonstration online soon.)

MusicRainbow is a very simple interface to help find interesting artists in large music collections. I got lots of helpful feedback on the interface. Overall it seems that it is usable. (Special thanks to David for the advice on how to make it more obvious in which direction the rainbow is turning.)

Most of the time at the conference we spent listening to talks.

One night, some researchers spontaneously turned the conference room into a concert room :-)

Personally I enjoyed the poster presentations and demonstrations even more than the talks. This demonstration by Ajay was particularly unusual :-)
(Picture taken by Paul.)

And this is one of the "unofficial" demonstrations I really enjoyed. Here Paul is demonstrating his "search inside the music" system to Oscar (who also had some nice demonstrations to show). Another really nice demonstration was the work Peter and his colleagues have been working on (an enhanced 3-dimensional version of Islands of Music with a number of very cool features).