An interview with ACM-W Europe Celebration of Women in Computing: womENcourage 2016 keynote speaker Prof. Gerhard Widmer 

The program committee of ACM-W Europe womENcourage 2016 announces that Gerhard Widmer, a professor at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, where he heads the Institute
for Computational Perception, will present a keynote address at the 3rd womENcourage. In addition to his work at JKU, Gerhard also founded and leads the Intelligent Music Processing and Machine Learning Group at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Vienna. He is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI),
and the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant (2015) of the European Research Council.

His keynote address intends to give the audience a glimpse of what it means for a computer to ‘perceive’ and in some (limited) sense ‘understand’ music, and what such musically literate machines can do for us. In particular, he will show how computers can give us new insights into the complex and subtle art of music performance; how they enable us to intuitively explore large sound and music collections; and how they will provide the basis for humans to interact with music in new ways. The goal of this talk is not so much to explain the mathematical and algorithmic details of the underlying methods, but to motivate and inspire the conference participants to consider music as an exciting and rewarding and worthwhile field for computer science research.

Bev Bachmayer spoke to Gerhard about his planned presentation and his motivation for speaking.

Bev: In your opinion, why should students attend womENcourage 2016?

Gerhard: It is a great opportunity to get to know interesting and nice and like-minded persons (of either sex). You get to learn about what they do, get inspired by their ideas and enthusiasm and big and small successes. You can find out that you are not the only person in the world facing certain difficulties, and get inspiration from how others deal with these.

Bev: What do you hope the attendees will take away from your talk?

Gerhard: That computer science is an exciting field, and that there are still many open research frontiers. And that scientific research is beautiful and even fun (sometimes).

Bev: Why is womENcourage important to you?

Gerhard: Because its goals are important. The field of computer science is in dire need of creative young researchers, and we should do anything we can to encourage them to venture into this field, to connect to others, and to persevere. Actually, the word that I like best in the conference’s self-description is celebration: it’s not (only) about problems of women in computer science, it’s also about opportunities, successful role models, inspiration, and creative ideas.

Bev: Why did you choose your topic for womENcourage?

Gerhard: My goal is to encourage and motivate students to consider computer science as an exciting research field, and one that has more facets than they might have thought. And I believe the best and most convincing way to do so is to talk about things that are close to one’s heart — and that, in my case, is music, computational music research, and how it connects both scientific and technological and human questions.