Travel on Srikanth Cherla

Attending ISMIR 2019

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Four of us from Moodagent — Reinier de Valk, Pierre Lafitte, Tomas Gajarsky, and myself — are attending ISMIR 2019 in Delft, Netherlands.

Two presentations from the team:

Reinier de Valk: “JosquIntab: A Dataset for Content-based Computational Analysis of Music in Lute Tablature” (main conference)
Tomas Gajarsky: “Reinforcement Learning Recommender System for Modelling Listening Sessions” (late-breaking session)

Come find us at the posters if you’re attending.

Remote Talk at Event Organised by Music Tech Community – India

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was invited by Music Tech Community – India to speak at an event in Bengaluru on December 29th, focused on “Machine Learning for Art & Music Generation.” Since Nina and I were on holiday in Mararikulam, Kerala at the time, I delivered it remotely via Skype.

The organisers — Albin Correya, Manaswi Mishra, and Siddharth Bharadwaj — made sure everything ran smoothly. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity, and it worked out well. Other speakers included Harshit Agarwal and two of the organisers.

Oral Presentation at ISMIR 2018

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I attended ISMIR 2018 in Paris with colleagues from Jukedeck to present our StructureNet paper. This year’s format gave every accepted paper both an oral and a poster slot — a nice change from the traditional division.

I gave the oral presentation; colleagues Gabriele and Marco handled the poster. The talk was recorded and is on YouTube. Gabriele also wrote up a post on the Jukedeck R&D Team’s Medium page.

A highlight was the jam session organised by Uri Nieto from Pandora — I played bass with fellow attendees on two songs, alongside music ranging from AI-composed pieces to jazz, blues, rock, and heavy metal. I also played guitar for a cover of Blackest Eyes by Porcupine Tree, recorded on the boat cruise on the Seine. Also great to reconnect with people from the Music Informatics Research Group at City and to finally get a photo with both my master’s supervisor Hendrik and my PhD supervisor Tillman.

Invited Talks at IIIT-Bangalore and Robert Bosch

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m on a break from Jukedeck until September 22nd, visiting Bangalore. Past mentors invited me to present at two organisations.

Today I gave a talk at IIIT-Bangalore covering my PhD work on sequence modelling in music — RBMs and Recurrent RBMs. A similar talk is scheduled at Robert Bosch on September 18th. Slides are available as a PDF if anyone is interested.

Reflections on Three Months of Remote Work

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

From October 2016 to January 2017, Nina and I were in Hyderabad, India — and I worked remotely for Jukedeck throughout. Here’s what I learned.

Setup

Before leaving London, my team lead Kevin and I agreed on IST working hours (11 AM–7 PM, giving five hours of overlap with London), daily standup updates via Slack, and asynchronous participation in planning via Google Docs and Skype.

Standups

We initially had a colleague hold a laptop during in-person standups, but audio quality was poor. We switched to asynchronous video messages via Skype — which had the unexpected benefit of keeping standups brief and concise.

A Visit to MusicMuni Labs

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

While Nina presented on Music Therapy for Dementia at ARDSICON 2016 in Bangalore, I visited MusicMuni Labs — a startup founded by Gopala Koduri and Sankalp Gulati, mentored by Prof. Xavier Serra and researchers from the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

They’re building on research from the CompMusic project — focused on Hindustani and Carnatic classical music — with two products currently in beta:

Riyaz — An Android app for beginner to intermediate students that uses music technology to evaluate singing against reference lessons and give detailed feedback.

Oral Presentation at IJCNN 2015

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My paper was accepted for oral presentation at the 28th International Joint Conference on Neural Networks in Killarney, Ireland.

“Discriminative Learning and Inference in the Recurrent Temporal RBM for Melody Modelling” — The paper proposes the Recurrent Temporal Discriminative RBM (RTDRBM), which combines discriminative learning with recurrent structure to predict probability distributions for the next note in a melody. Evaluated on 8 folk and chorale melody datasets, it outperforms n-grams and other connectionist models with statistically significant improvements.

Oral Presentation at ISMIR 2014

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I attended ISMIR 2014 in Taipei with two accepted papers:

“Multiple Viewpoint Melodic Prediction with Fixed-Context Neural Networks” — Continuing earlier work on neural network–based note prediction using the multiple viewpoints representation, an event-based representation of symbolic music data.

“An RNN-based Music Language Model for Improving Automatic Music Transcription” — Co-authored with Siddharth Sigtia and Emmanouil Benetos.

Both presented as posters. Prof. Ye Wang’s keynote on music’s therapeutic applications in rehabilitation was a highlight — it made me think about how melody modelling research could eventually serve therapeutic purposes.

Poster Presentation at the Machine Learning Summer School

Fri, 09 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was selected to attend the Machine Learning Summer School in Reykjavik (April 25–May 4, 2014) and received a travel grant. I presented a poster on musical pitch prediction with neural networks.

Particularly valuable tutorials: Machine Learning and HCI (Roderick Murray-Smith), Introduction to ML (Neil Lawrence), Deep Learning (Yoshua Bengio). The reinforcement learning content was especially interesting — I could see potential applications in my music modelling work.

Outside the summer school: the Golden Circle Tour, a hike up Mount Esjan, and a last-minute trip to the Blue Lagoon before flying home. Reykjavik is one of the most unique places I’ve visited.

Oral Presentation at ISMIR 2013

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I presented “A Distributed Model for Multiple Viewpoint Melodic Prediction” at ISMIR 2013 in Curitiba, Brazil. The paper uses a Restricted Boltzmann Machine to model melodic sequences — demonstrating that the model can make use of information in longer contexts more effectively than n-gram models. It won the Best Student Paper Award.

I also organised a late-breaking session on MIR applications in educational settings.

After the conference I spent a week in Rio de Janeiro — Cristo Redentor, Sugarloaf Mountain, beaches near Copacabana. My supervisor and a colleague came along for sightseeing. A fabulous experience.