From: "atwhite@juno.com" Date: July 29, 2007 9:26:24 AM PDT To: atwhite@juno.com Subject: MIT Pasadena Luncheon August 2nd 2007 Hi, fellow alum's...... There will be a meeting WITH TWO PRESENTERS, Elaine Chew and Alexandre Francois, Thursday, August 2, 2007 on a topic I expect to be entirely different from any we've had in the past (to my knowledge). I have included all the information I received to ensure a useful description of the topic. I will have copies for your more detailed perusal at the meeting as I know it is longer than usual. Where: The Beckham Grill, 77 West Walnut Street, Pasadena When: Thursday, August 2, 2007 Cost: Whatever you spend plus 25%. Please note that all drinks are one price of $2.50 each. Time: Noon ------------------------------------------------------------------- The topic is: MIMI (Multi-modal Interaction for Musical Improvisation) in the Context of Music and Computing Description: Researchers and research conferences focusing on music and computing have mushroomed in recent years. This growth has been spurred by industry's interest in tools for analyzing, manipulating, and generating digital music. We will give a quick overview of recent advances in music and computing, with a focus on some of the recent work conducted at the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory (MuCoaCo) at the University of Southern California. We will demonstrate our latest interactive music improvisation and visualization software system, MIMI. Elaine Chew is an Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and of Electrical Engineering, at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She received her BAS in Music Performance (distinction) and Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) from Stanford University, and her S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Operations Research from MIT in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Her research interests center on the computational modeling of music and its performance. She founded and heads the Music Computation and Cognition (MuCoaCo) Laboratory at USC, where she conducts and directs research on music and computing. She received the NSF Career/PECASE Awards for her research and education activities at the intersection of music and engineering. Chew also holds diplomas and degrees in piano performance from the Trinity College, London (FTCL, LTCL); in 1998, she received MIT's prestigious Laya and Jerome Wiesner Student Art Award for her contribution to the arts. She was an Affiliated Artist of MIT's Music and Theatre Arts from 1998-2000, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Lehigh University before joining USC in 2001. A proponent of contemporary and eclectic repertoire, she performs widely as chamber musician and soloist. At USC, she has initiated and participated in the multimedia concerts The Mathematics in Music, Flying Sonics, and Dark Blue Sky Dream. Alexandre Francois is a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He received the Diplome d'Ingenieur from the Institut National Agronomique Paris- Grignon (France) in 1993, the Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies (M.S.) from the University Paris IX - Dauphine (France) in 1994, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from USC in 1997 and 2000 respectively. From 2001 to 2004 he was a Research Associate with the Integrated Media Systems Center and with the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, both at USC. Francois' research has focused on the modeling and design of complex dynamic (software) systems, as an enabling step towards the understanding of perception, cognition and interaction. He is creator of the Software Architecture for Immersipresence (SAI), a general formalism for the design, analysis and implementation of complex software systems. His Modular Flow Scheduling Middleware (mfsm.sourceforge.net) provides an open source implementation of SAI's abstractions. Leveraging the SAI/MFSM framework, his experimental courses in software development, graduate and undergraduate, pool the efforts of the entire class on a single, ambitious collaborative project. ------------------------------------------------------------------ If you wish to be removed from this mail list or change your address or if you have any comments to make to the group and cannot attend this meeting, please let me know. Arthur White