DarwinTunes - Evolution of Music by Public Choice

The natural world – creatures, plants, infections – is the result of Darwinian evolution by natural selection, i.e., the gradual process of (biological) traits become either more or less common in a population based on the success of the organism carrying these traits. This process, repeated for two billion years, has created the vast diversity of life on earth.
The same process can be also observed in human society where cultural artifacts – words, songs, images, ideas – are constantly remixed and reinterpreted by people. A reinterpretation is an imperfect copy and therefore a “mutation”. Thus, the variety of our culture is the result of a cultural evolution.
In order to examine the underlying mechanism of cultural evolution, Robert M. MacCalluma, Matthias Mauch, Austin Burta, and Armand M. Leroia constructed a Darwinian music engine consisting of a population of short audio loops that sexually reproduce and mutate.
The selection is based on human feedback via a webpage that implements the remixing of tunes as a game. By remixing your tune with others, the other parent gets a score point. Your goal is to make an attractive tune - the more often you get remixed, the more points you have.

In 2010, researchers from the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt released a similar system where people could vote for recombinations of music tunes.  

Links:

• http://game.darwintunes.org 
• #LetsPlayDarwinTunes on Twitter (informs whenever a player joins)
• Robert M. MacCalluma, Matthias Mauchb, Austin Burta, and Armand M. Leroia. Evolution of music by public choice.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2012.
• Self-Organizing Networked Systems. Mozart meets Darwin - Creating music by evolution. November 2010

Tenure Track Research Professor Position in Big Data at UNAM

The Computer Science Department of the Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (IIMAS) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) has a open call for a tenure-track research professor in big data.

Located in the heart of the UNAM's Ciudad Universitaria, a UNESCO World Heritage site, the IIMAS has been the leader in computer science in Mexico since the first computer in the country was acquired by UNAM. Researchers at UNAM have a privileged position for several reasons. UNAM is the highest ranked spanish speaking higher education institution in the world and produces half of the research in Mexico and is the largest in the continent (300K+ students). Professors in faculties do more teaching than research, while researchers in institutes (such as IIMAS) do more research than teaching (about 48 hours per year, usually to the best graduate students in the country. Groups of more than five students get a teaching assistant). Students in most graduate programs at UNAM receive automatically a scholarship, and there is travel budget for researchers, minimizing the grant writing load. There are several grant calls with high acceptance rates. There are also two postdoctoral fellowship calls per year internal to UNAM. High performing researchers can reach tenure in less than five years.

Requirements for this call are:

1. To be less than 39 (women) or 37 (men) years old.
2. To have a PhD degree in computer science, statistics, or related areas from a renowned institution.
3. To have published high quality research papers related to big data.
4. To have teaching skills at undergraduate and graduate levels.
5. To have abilities to direct undergraduate and graduate theses.
6. To be able to collaborate in multidisciplinary research projects.
7. To fulfill the norms described at http://dgapa.unam.mx/html/sija/sija.html

Interested candidates should send the following documentation to Dr. Ricardo Berlanga (berlanga "at" unam.mx), Academic Secretary of IIMAS before October 7th, 2014:

1. Application request (in Spanish).
2. Updated Curriculum Vitae, including publication list (in Spanish).
3. Copy of PhD degree.
4. Copy of publications.
5. At least two references with email included.
6. A work plan which includes research and teaching prospects for the next three years (in Spanish.

Selected candidates will be invited to give an open talk or videoconference at IIMAS. An ad hoc commission will make a final decision.

More information can be requested to:

Dr. Carlos Gershenson

Head of Computer Science Department, IIMAS, UNAM

cgg "at" unam.mx