I have been interviewing a lot of people for various types of university positions over the years. Most often these interviews are conducted using a video-conferencing system. Here I provide some tips to help people prepare for a video-based job interview: We (and many others) typically use Skype for interviews, not because it is the best system out there (of commercial platforms I prefer Zoom), but because it is the most widespread solution....
Earlier today I was asked about what tools I use when writing. This is not something I have written about here on the blog before, although I do have very strong opinions on my own tools. I actually really enjoy reading about how other people work, so writing about it here may perhaps also be interesting to others. Text editor: Atom Most of my writing, whether it is e-mail drafts, meeting notes, or academic papers, is done in the form of plain text files....
So I decided to install Ubuntu on my daughter’s new laptop, more specifically an HP Pavilion. The choice of this particular laptop was because it looked nice, and had good specs for the money. It was first after the purchase I read all the complaints people have about the weird UEFI implementation on HP laptops. So I started the install process with some worries. Reading on various forums, people seemed to have been doing all sorts of strange things to be able to install Ubuntu on HP laptops, including modifying the UEFI setup, changing the BIOS, and so on....
My 9-year old daughter is getting her first laptop. But which OS should she get started with? I have been using various versions of Ubuntu as my main OS for around 5 years now, currently using Ubuntu Studio on my main laptop. This distro is based on XFCE, a very lightweight yet versatile OS. The reason for choosing Ubuntu Studio over the regular XUbuntu was to get a bunch of music apps by default....
Circular pictures (like the one to the right) has become increasingly popular on the web. We have, for example, included circular pictures in RITMO’s annual report, and we therefore also wanted to use circular pictures in a presentation at our upcoming LARGO conference. The question, then, is how to create such circular pictures? The circular pictures in the annual report are made through a CSS overlay. So if you try to right-click and save one of those, you will get the original rectangular version....
I have spent the two last days at a “Train the Trainers” workshop organized by the Carpentries project. Here I will summarize some thoughts on the workshop, and things that I will take with me for my own teaching practice. The Carpentries The Carpentries project comprises the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry communities, with a shared mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers. I have taken several Carpentries lessons over the last years, organized by volunteers here at the University of Oslo....
This week I led the workshop “Open Research Strategies and Tools in the NIME Community” at NIME 2019 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We had a very good discussion, which I hope can lead to more developments in the community in the years to come. Below is the material that we wrote for the workshop. Workshop organisers Alexander Refsum Jensenius, University of Oslo Andrew McPherson, Queen Mary University of London Anna Xambó, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology Dan Overholt, Aalborg University Copenhagen Guillaume Pellerin, IRCAM Ivica Ico Bukvic, Virginia Tech Rebecca Fiebrink, Goldsmiths, University of London Rodrigo Schramm, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Workshop description The development of more openness in research has been in progress for a fairly long time, and has recently received a lot of more political attention through the Plan S initiative, The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), EU’s Horizon Europe, and so on....
My PhD student Cagri Erdem developed a performance together with dancer Katja Henriksen Schia. The piece was first performed together with Qichao Lan and myself during the RITMO opening and also during MusicLab vol. 3. See here for a teaser of the performance: This week Cagri, Katja and myself performed a version of the piece Vrengt at NIME in Porto Alegre. We also presented a paper describing the development of the instrument/piece:...
The MCT master’s programme has been running for a year now, and everyone involved has learned a lot. In parallel to the development of the programme, and teaching it, we are also running the research project SALTO. Here the idea is to systematically reflect on our educational practice, which again will feed back into better development of the MCT programme. One outcome of the SALTO project, is a paper that we presented at the NIME conference in Porto Alegre this week:...
My PhD student Qichao Lan is at SMC in Malaga this week, presenting the paper: Lan, Qichao, Jim Tørresen, and Alexander Refsum Jensenius. “RaveForce: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Environment for Music Generation.” Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing Conference. Malaga, 2019. Download The framework that Qichao has developed runs nicely with a bridge between Jupyter Notebook and SuperCollider. This opens for lots of interesting experiments in the years to come....