The three partners in the SALAMI project, Fujinaga (Canada), Downie (USA) and De Roure (UK) each contribute their unique strengths to the project’s design, execution, and ultimate success. In the fields of MIR and CM research, Downie and Fujinaga are both world leaders who have published close to one hundred papers in total on these subjects. They both have strong backgrounds in music theory: Downie’s undergraduate major was Music Theory and Composition and Fujinaga holds a Bachelor’s, a Master’s and a PhD in music. De Roure is also a musician who has published music research papers and supervised CM and MIR PhDs. Downie is uniquely familiar with the wide range of state-of-the-art MIR algorithms as he is the founder and director of the annual Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX) [1] which, since 2005, has evaluated 468 MIR algorithm runs (Downie 2008). Fujinaga was responsible for the idea of OMEN (On-demand Metadata Extraction Network), which became a basis for the NEMA [2] project. Another crucial component of NEMA is jMIR (a suite of software for MIR research) developed by Fujinaga and his students. De Roure’s expertise on distributed information systems, distributed computing, standards, and software sustainability ensures a successful distributed infrastructure to deliver a project on this scale. All three are highly experienced research project leaders having managed million-dollar research grants as the PI within the last five years. All three are members of the NEMA team [3] and have every intention of sustaining their collaborative efforts for many years to come. This desire to continue our collaboration bodes well for the sustainability of SALAMI post-funding as the SALAMI team intends to make use of the SALAMI-developed data and tools to conduct further research and seek further funding. A brief biographical sketch for each SALAMI team member is provided below:
Ichiro Fujinaga is an Associate Professor in the Music Technology Area at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. He holds a BMus and a BSc (Mathematics) from the University of Alberta, and a MA in Music Theory, and a PhD in Music Technology from McGill University. In 2003–4, he was the Acting Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill. In 2002–3, he was the Chair of the Music Technology Area at the School of Music. He has been a long-term member of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) steering committee.
J. Stephen Downie is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Director of the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL). Downie was the PI on the Human Use of Music Information Retrieval Systems (HUMIRS) and the Music-to-Knowledge (M2K) music data-mining projects. He has been very active in the establishment of the MIR and Music Digital Library communities through his ongoing work with the ISMIR conferences as a founding member of the ISMIR steering committee. He is the founder and ongoing director of MIREX. He holds a BA (Music Theory and Composition), a MLIS, and a PhD in Library and Information Science, all earned at the University of Western Ontario.
David De Roure is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where he was a founding member of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group. His research interest is in the application of knowledge technologies and collaborative tools in e-Research. His leadership roles in the UK e-Science programme include the UK’s Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute and the multidisciplinary e-Research South. He pioneered the Semantic Grid initiative and leads the Semantic Grid Research Group in the Open Grid Forum, where he sits on the Grid Forum Steering Group. He is regarded as a thought-leader in Web and e-Research and is responsible for Web 2.0 and open science activities including the JISC-funded myExperiment collaborative environment for researchers sharing digital content, which uses both Web 2.0 and Semantic Web techniques. He is a member of the W3C Advisory Committee, is a Scientific Council member of the Web Science Research Initiative and has served on national committees including the JISC Committee for Support of Research and the Arts and Humanities Research Council e-Science committee. His research group holds an Arts and Humanities eScience project (musicSpace: Using and Evaluating e-Science Design Methods and Technologies to Improve Access to Heterogeneous Music Resources for Musicology) and several awards in the field of open repositories.
Networked Environment for Music Analysis. See Sections E and F for more details about NEMA and its role with this SALAMI project. See also http://www.music-ir.org/?q=nema/overview/ for an introduction to the NEMA project.
Downie is the PI, and Fujinaga is the Co-PI, of the NEMA project. De Roure is a key NEMA research partner.