ISMIR 2008: call for participation

(Apologies for any cross-postings / please re-distribute)

*ISMIR 2008*
Philadelphia, PA, USA . _http://ismir2008.ismir.net/_

*Important dates*

Submission of papers, tutorials and panels: March 26, 2008
Notification of acceptance: June 4, 2008 
Camera-ready submissions: June 25, 2008
Submission of abstracts for late breaking / demo session: July 24, 2008

ISMIR 2008: September 14-18, 2008

*Call for Participation*

The Ninth International Conference on Music Information Retrieval will 
take place September 14-18, 2008 (Sunday through Thursday), in 
Philadelphia, USA. Since its inception in 2000, ISMIR has rapidly become 
the premier venue for the multidisciplinary field of accessing, 
analyzing, and managing large collections and archives of music 
information.  The expansion of the music information retrieval (MIR) 
community reflects the enormous challenges and opportunities presented 
by the recent and tremendous growth in available music and music-related 
data.  ISMIR provides a forum for the exchange of ideas between 
representatives of academia, industry, entertainment, and education, 
including researchers, developers, educators, librarians, students, and 
professional users, who contribute to this broadly interdisciplinary 
domain.  Alongside presentations of original theoretical research and 
practical work, ISMIR provides introductory and in-depth tutorials, and 
a venue for the showcase of current MIR-related products and systems. 

To reflect the increased maturity of the event and of the field, this 
year's conference introduces several significant changes over recent 
ISMIR conferences:

. _Emphasis on interdisciplinarity_:  While ISMIR has always had been 
inherently interdisciplinary in nature, ISMIR-08 will place a singular 
premium on scholarly papers that span the two or more disciplines . 
 This preference will be applied to the balancing of the overall 
program, and will influence the selection of papers for the proceedings 
and the oral presentations.  ISMIR-08 will be single track, and all oral 
presentations will take place in plenary sessions.

. _Uniform paper status_:  There will be no 'tiering' of papers; all 
accepted papers will be allotted up to six pages in the proceedings, and 
all papers will have poster presentations -- the most effective way to 
promote substantial discussions.  In view of the increased presence of 
poster presentations, more of the conference schedule will be devoted to 
poster sessions.  A subset of papers will be selected for oral 
presentation in addition to their poster slots on the basis of their 
breadth of interest to the community at large , but without any implied 
judgment of their quality relative to the other papers.

. _Late breaking / demo session_: This session is designed to showcase 
late breaking or preliminary results and technical demonstrations, 
Submissions are in the form of abstracts, to be published on the 
conference website.  The session will be run in a poster format.

. _Limitations on papers per author_: We introduce some authorship 
limits to encourage all authors to focus on preparing their best work 
for submission, and to cultivate a broad range of work by diverse 
researchers.  Any individual may submit only one paper as first author, 
and his or her name may appear as an author or co-author on only three 
submissions in total, including late breaking/demo submissions.

The topic areas and emphasis on high quality and exciting research in 
all aspects of MIR remain unchanged.  Novel and previously unpublished 
submissions are solicited in areas including, but not limited to, the 
following:

. content-based querying and retrieval
. database systems, indexing, and query
. fingerprinting and digital rights management
. compression and streaming

. optical music recognition
. score following and audio alignment
. transcription and annotation

. computational musicology
. perception and cognition
. harmony, chords and tonality
. melody and motives
. rhythm, beat, tempo and form
. timbre, instrumentation and voice
. modification and transformation of music data

. emotion and aesthetics
. performance analysis
. applications of MIR to the performing arts and multimedia

. automatic classification
. genre, style and mood
. similarity metrics
. music summarization

. user interfaces and user models
. music recommendation and playlist generation
. text and web mining

. evaluation of MIR systems
. knowledge representation, user tags and metadata
. libraries, archives and digital collections

. methodological and philosophical issues
. social, legal, ethical and business issues

In addition to research papers, we also solicit proposals for tutorials, 
panels, and exhibits.  More details on each category are provided below.

*Contribution requirements and guidelines*

1. _Papers_: All papers will be peer-reviewed according to their 
novelty, technical content, presentation, and contribution to the 
overall balance of topics and disciplines represented at ISMIR-08. 
Papers that introduce new topics and methods to MIR research are 
particularly welcome. Special efforts will be made to recruit reviewers 
from a broad range of disciplines, to ensure that papers from all areas 
are reviewed fairly and sympathetically. Where possible, authors are 
strongly encouraged to present evaluations of their work that use 
benchmark data. Paper submissions should satisfy the following conditions:

. Formatting must comply to the guidelines and templates available on 
the submission web page (_http://ismir2008.ismir.net/submission/_).
. Submitted papers must be between 4 and 6 pages long. 
. Papers should include a 150-200 word abstract.
. Submission must consist of original contributions (not previously 
published and not currently being considered for publication elsewhere).
. Accepted papers will be designated either as poster only 
presentations, or as plenary talk with poster presentation. During 
submission, authors may indicate a preference, but the choice will be 
made by the program committee. 
. Authors of accepted papers will be asked to provide camera-ready 
copies of their papers.
. If accepted, authors are encouraged to bring laptop computers or other 
appropriate equipment to supplement their presentations. 
. For each accepted paper, at least one author must register for the 
ISMIR 2008 conference prior to submission of the camera-ready version.

2. _Late-breaking / demo submissions_: A special session during the 
ISMIR-08 schedule will be dedicated to:

(i) the presentation of preliminary results and ideas which are not yet 
fully formed nor systematically evaluated; and 
(ii) the demonstration of applications that are of interest to the MIR 
community. 

These "late breaking / demo" submissions will not be reviewed and will 
not have associated papers on the proceedings. They have been assigned a 
late deadline. Submissions should be emailed to: 
[email protected]_ <mailto:[email protected]> as a pdf 
file containing the title, author(s) and affiliation(s), and a 100-200 
word abstract outlining the work to be presented. Abstracts will be 
published online.  Should there be more submissions than allowed by the 
available presentation space, presentations that contribute to a 
balanced session will be given priority. Limitations on the number of 
papers per author apply. 

3. _Tutorials_: The first day of the conference (Sunday, September 14) 
will consist of a parallel session of introductory or in-depth tutorials 
each concentrating on a single topic and lasting approximately 3 hours, 
including a break. Submissions should be emailed to 
[email protected]_ <mailto:[email protected]> 
as pdf files containing a 1-2 page abstract including:

. an outline of the tutorial content,
. the intended and expected audience,
. short biography of the presenter(s), and
. any special requirements.

4. _Panels_: Panels should be lively, controversial, and 
thought-provoking discussions on specific topics of interest to the 
ISMIR community. Panel sessions should not consist of paper 
presentations, but should be structured so as to engage the audience in 
thoughtful and constructive dialog with the panelists. Submissions 
should be emailed to [email protected]_ 
<mailto:[email protected]> as pdf files containing a 1-2 page 
abstract including:

. the topic and issues to be discussed, if possible formulated as a 
provocative question,
. a short listing of pro and con arguments,
. short biographies of the moderator and panelists, and
. any special requirements.

5. _Exhibits and Bookstore_: Throughout ISMIR 2008, space will be 
available for publishers, software companies, booksellers, service 
providers, system vendors, and any other businesses interested in 
exhibiting their MIR-related products. They are invited to contact the 
program committee via email to [email protected]_ 
<mailto:[email protected]> regarding the ISMIR bookstore 
and/or exhibition space.


We look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia,

General Chairs:
Dan Ellis, Columbia University
Youngmoo Kim, Drexel University

Programme Chairs:
Juan Pablo Bello, New York University
Elaine Chew, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study / University of 
Southern California

---------------------------------------------------
Juan Pablo Bello
Assistant Professor, Music Technology
New York University
_jpbello-RWB/[email protected]_ <mailto:jpbello-RWB/[email protected]>
_http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jb2843 <http://homepages.nyu.edu/%7Ejb2843>_