Prof Mark Plumbley

Contact Details

Title: Professor of Machine Learning and Signal Processing
Tel: Internal: [13] 7518
National: 020 7882 7518
International: +44 20 7882 7518
Fax: National: 020 7882 7997
International: +44 20 7882 7997
Email: mark.plumbley@elec.qmul.ac.uk
Office: Eng. 354
Research Group: Centre for Digital Music

News & Events

• Dan Stowell's SuperCollider Twitter album sc140 featured on New Scientists
• Lecturer in Sound & Music Processing (Deadline 14 Aug 2009)
• 5-7 Jul 2009: At DSP 2009, Santorini, Greece
• PhD Studentship in Audio-Visual Machine Listening (Deadline 1 July 2009)
• 20-24 Apr 2009: At ICASSP 2009, Taiwan
• 6-9 Apr 2009: Keynote talk at SPARS'09, St Malo, France
• 1-3 Apr 2009: Poster with Marco Bevilacqua at Sparsity in Machine Learning and Stastics workshop (SMLS 2009), Cumberland Lodge, UK
• 15-18 Mar 2009: Keynote talk on "Analysing Digital Music" at ICA 2009, Paraty, Brazil.
• 11 Dec 2008: New EU FET-Open Project: Sparse Models, Algorithms and Learning for Large Scale Data (SMALL). Partners: INRIA/IRISA (France), Univ of Edinburgh (UK), EPFL (Switzerland), Technion (Israel). Total funding €1.9m, £249k to Queen Mary.
• 5 Dec 2008: New £5.3m EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Digital Music and Media for the Creative Industries.
• 10-14 Nov 2008: Invited talk on "Audio analysis using sparse representations" (4pMU1) in special session at 156th Meeting of the ASA, Miami. (Additional excitement via unscheduled landing at Wilmington, SC on the way back)
• Nov 2008: EPSRC Final Assessment "Outstanding" for Object-Based Coding of Musical Audio (GR/S75802/01).
• 16-19 Oct 2008: At MLSP 2008, Cancun, Mexico.
• 25-26 Sep 2008: ICA Research Network International Workshop, Liverpool, UK (Final meeting of this EPSRC-funded Network)
• 16-19 Sep 2008: Invited lecturer at the 29th Intl Summer School in Automatic Control: "Optimization on manifolds: theory and applications" Grenoble, France
• PhD Studentship in Compressed Sensing of Audio Scenes (Deadline: 19 Sept 2008)
• 25-29 Aug 2008: See you at EUSIPCO 2008, Lausanne, Switzerland!
• 27 Jul 2008: Awarded £1.2m EPSRC Leadership Fellowship in Machine Listening using Sparse Representations.
• 19 Jun 2008: Invited talk at XXIV Riunione Annuale dei Ricercatori di Elettrotecnica (ET2008), Pavia, Italy, July 2008
• 3 Jun 2008: Invited talk at ASIP-NET seminar on Audio Content Analysis, Aalborg, Denmark.
• 6 May 2008: Invited talk at HSCMA 2008, Trento, Italy.

[Earlier News & Events]

Current Research Staff & Students

Recent Research Staff & Students

Current & Recent Research Funding

• Information and Neural Dynamics in the Perception of Musical Structure (EPSRC Grant EP/H013059/1, £1,049,131 total, £286,079 to Queen Mary, 2010-2012), with Mark Sander and Samer Abdallah at Queen Mary; Geraint Wiggins, Joydeep Bhattacharya, Keith Potter and Marcus Pearce at Goldsmiths, University of London.
• Doctoral Training Centre in Digital Music and Media for the Creative Economy [Media and Ars Technology] (EPSRC Grant EP/G03723X/1, £5,923,383, 2009-2017), with Mark Sandler and Pat Healey.
• Machine Listening using Sparse Representations (EPSRC Leadership Fellowship EP/G007144/1, £1,236,776, 2008-2013).
• Platform Grant: Centre for Digital Music (EPSRC Grant EP/E045235/1, £1,057,355, 2007-2012), with Josh Reiss, Mark Sandler, Pat Healey and Nick Bryan-Kinns.
• OMRAS2: A Distributed Research Environment for Music Informatics and Computational Musicology (EPSRC Grant EP/E017614/1, £2.5m fEC, £1,451,161 to Queen Mary, 2007-2010), with Mark Sandler, Simon Dixon and Samer Abdallah at Queen Mary; Michael Casey and Tim Crawford at Goldsmiths, University of London.
• EASAIER: Enabling Access to Sound Archives through Integration, Enrichment and Retrieval (EU Project FP6-IST-033902, 2006-2009) with Josh Reiss at Queen Mary, and 6 other partners.
• Estimation of Melody from Audio using Harmonic and Rhythmic Information (Royal Society International Incoming Short Visit, £3,253, Oct-Nov 2005) with Juan Bello at Queen Mary and Dr Matija Marolt, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
• Sparse Representations for Signal Processing and Coding (EPSRC Grant EP/D000246/1, £282,902, 2005-2008), with Mike Davies.
• ICA Research Network, ICArn.org [Blind Source Separation and Independent Component Analysis Network] (EPSRC Grant EP/C005554/1, £62,058, 2005-2008), with Mike Davies at Queen Mary, plus 44 other researchers at 26 other UK institutions.
• Object-based Coding of Musical Audio (EPSRC Grant GR/S75802/01, £202,353 , 2004-2007), with Mark Sandler and Mike Davies.
• Techniques and Algorithms for Understanding the Information Dynamics of Music (EPSRC Grant GR/S82213/01, £184,965 to Queen Mary, 2005-2008), with Mark Sandler at QM, Geraint Wiggins and Michael Casey at Goldsmiths College, London.
• Digital Music Research Network [dmrn.org]. (EPSRC Grant GR/R64810/01, "Music Processing Network" £61,794, 2003-2005), with Mike Davies and Mark Sandler at Queen Mary, plus researchers at six other UK institutions. EPSRC Final Assessment: Outstanding.
• Information and noise in ICA for music (Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellowship RF&G/10214: £12,020, April-July 2002). Three month visit to Helsinki University of Technology.
• Automatic Polyphonic Music Transcription Using Multiple Cause Models and Independent Component Analysis (EPSRC Grant GR/R54620/01, £124,946, 2002-2004), with Mike Davies and Mark Sandler. EPSRC Final Assessment: Outstanding.
• Advanced Subband Systems for Audio Source Separation (EPSRC Grant GR/S85900/01, £176,431, 2004-2007), with Mike Davies and Mark Sandler.
• SIMAC: Semantic Interaction with Music Audio Contents (EU Grant FP6-IST-507142, €2,982,921 total, £219,000 to Queen Mary, 2004-2006), with Mark Sandler at Queen Mary. Partners: UPF (Spain), ÖFAI (Austria), Matrix Data (UK), Philips Research (Netherlands).

Biography

Following my graduation in 1984 (Electrical Sciences Tripos, Churchill College, Cambridge), I joined Thorn-EMI Central Research Laboratories, working on videotape data storage and high-definition TV. In 1987 I returned to Cambridge University Engineering Department as a Research Student under the late Frank Fallside, working on information theory and neural networks, continuing as a Research Associate. In 1991 I joined the Centre for Neural Networks at King's College London, initially in the Department of Mathematics and then Computer Science before moving to Electronic Engineering 1995. I was Joint Coordinator of the the EC-funded NEuroNet Network of Excellence in Neural Networks.

I have been working in source separation and independent component analysis (ICA) for 5 years, following a background in neural networks since 1987, including the particular method of non-negative ICA. I have applied ICA and related models to the analysis of music, including automatic music transcription. In 2002 I joined the new Digital Signal Processing group at Queen Mary, University of London, and later that year visited the ICA group at Helsinki University of Technology on a 3-month Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellowship. Recent EPSRC Funding includes: Automatic Polyphonic Music Transcription Using Multiple Cause Models and Independent Component Analysis (GR/R54620/01); Object-based Coding of Musical Audio (GR/S75802/01); Information Dynamics of Music (GR/S82213/01). I currently coordinate the EPSRC Digital Music Research Network (GR/R64810/01) and the ICA Research Network (EP/C005554/1).

In my spare time I dabble in website construction, including helping out on PostgraduateStudentships.co.uk, a website to help students find funding for Masters and PhD study.