M. Cameron Jones

The Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange: Some Observations and Insights

Advances in the science and technology of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems and algorithms are dependent on the development of rigorous measures of accuracy and performance such that meaningful comparisons among current and novel approaches can be made. This is the motivating principle driving the efforts of the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) and the annual Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). Since it started in 2005, MIREX has fostered great advancements not only in many specific areas of MIR, but also in our general understanding of how MIR systems and algorithms are to be evaluated. This chapter outlines some of the major highlights of the past four years of MIREX evaluations, including its organizing principles, the selection of evaluation metrics, and the evolution of evaluation tasks. The chapter concludes with a brief introduction of how MIREX plans to expand into the future using a suite of Web 2.0 technologies to automated MIREX evaluations.

Resolving Incommensurable Debates: A Preliminary Identification of Persona Kinds, Attributes, and Characteristics

Persona-based design (PBD) has become a popular method for enabling design teams to reason and communicate about user-centered design issues and trade-offs. There is a growing body of literature that describes different ways in which personas have been applied by researchers and practitioners. Despite this diversity in practice the debates about the usefulness of PBD as a method treat it as a single design method that is either good or bad. As a result, the present authors feel it is important to look more critically at what different authors are doing when claiming to use the persona concept, and to develop a theoretical distinction between various persona kinds and their attributes, as well as different characteristics which individual personas may exhibit. This method of analyzing the creation of personas, they believe, can be applied to other design techniques, in order to gain a better understanding of how they work, and how different methods of application can have different consequences for the resultant designs.

Community Inquiry and Informatics: Collaborative Learning Through ICT

Studies of learning and human-computer interaction have often focused on settings and practices that are relatively fixed and well- defined, such as a college-level course, a workgroup in a company, or a museum exploration. These studies have contributed much to our understanding of the potential and the problems associated with incorporating computers into collaborative practice.

Wikifying your interface: facilitating community-based interface translation

We explore the application of a wiki-based technology and style of interaction to enabling the incremental translation of a collaborative application into a number of different languages, including variant English language interfaces better suited to the needs of particular user communities. The development work allows us to explore in more detail the design space of functionality and interfaces relating to tailoring, customization, personalization and localization, and the challenges of designing to support ongoing incremental contributions by members of different use communities.

Toward an understanding of similarity judgments for music digital library evaluation

This paper presents an analysis of 7,602 similarity judgments collected for the Symbolic Melodic Similarity (SMS) and Audio Music Similarity and Retrieval (AMS) evaluation tasks in the 2006 Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). We discuss the influence of task definitions, as well as evaluation metrics on user perceptions of music similarity, and provide recommendations for future Music Digital Library/Music Information Retrieval research pertaining to music similarity.

I-Vote: an audience voting system

In this paper, we describe the I-Vote system for audience response voting at the Olympic Games. The audience members vote by using a

Mashed layers and muddled models: Debugging mashup applications

2 handheld device that they can keep as a souvenir. The devices are simple to use, come in multiple designs, and are tradable. These devices do not hold any personal information so privacy is never an issue. The vote results are presented on a large public display, which is loaded with information in the form of graphs that are quickly understood. People can retrieve their personal votes later on the Internet. The system was designed through a process involving brainstorming, creating scenarios, searching for information, doing cognitive walkthroughs, developing prototypes, and revising and refining ideas.

Thinking inside the XBox: elements of information organization in video games

Publisher Summary This chapter explores the relevant research on debugging and evaluates how debugging is complicated by the added complexities of Web programming. Furthermore, it discusses how solutions designed to mitigate the problems and complexities of Web mashup programming introduce new complexities to debugging. In one such environment, the Yahoo! Pipes visual language for Web mashup programming, a community of developers has emerged in which many debugging activities take place through the sharing and collaborative editing of Pipes programs. The community can marshal diverse skills, knowledge, and expertise to debug a broken program, perhaps mitigating some of the complexities particular to Web mashup programming. This discussion concludes with several questions about the future of end-user programming for the World Wide Web, such as do authoring tools such as Yahoo! Pipes actually support true “end users”? How much knowledge of the underlying infrastructure, protocols, and technologies is needed to get started?

Thinking inside the XBox

Video games are a novel and unique context in which numerous principles of information organization can be observed. In this poster, we explore the intersection of video games and formal information organization by examining several examples from popular video games. By doing so, we highlight some of the common organization principles that are applied in video game design, and perhaps discover new ways of organizing information objects and assess their application in real life contexts.

Chapter 22 – Mashed layers and muddled models: Debugging mashup applications

Video games are a novel and unique context in which numerous principles of information organization can be observed. In this poster, we explore the intersection of video games and formal information organization by examining several examples from popular video games. By doing so, we highlight some of the common organization principles that are applied in video game design, and perhaps discover new ways of organizing information objects and assess their application in real life contexts.