FOSSMeet 2016

FOSSMeet is an annual event at NIT Calicut that brings together the Free and Open Source Community from around the country.

FOSSMeet is the annual Free and Open source software meet at NIT Calicut. We are inviting proposals for talks and workshops at FOSSMeet 2016.

What we are looking for

Through FOSSMeet, we intend to get the attendees, mostly students, get started with the development and usage of free software. You may propose to conduct a lecture, demo, tutorial, workshop, discussion or panel at FOSSMeet. If the contents of your session is the ‘I am feeling lucky’ result of some Google search, there is low probability that it’ll be accepted. Same applies to proposals titled ‘The absolute beginner introduction to X’ and others on a similar line. On the other hand, if your talk is on some obscure, albeit important, free software project that will go over most students head, this might not be the best platform to deliver that talk. There are always exceptions and we leave that to your judgement. If our audience wants it, we’ll try our best to accommodate it. Of course, if you find people interested in your proposal, you can always call a BoF. We are all for BoF’s! :)

Take the above with a pinch of salt. They are no s̶t̶r̶i̶c̶t̶ ̶r̶u̶l̶e̶s̶, only guidelines. All your proposals are welcome and we celebrate every single one that we receive! :D Looking forward to see you folks here.

Audience

Your audience (mostly) comprises of smart, above average, GNU/Linux aware students.

Important dates

Call for proposals opens: Nov 19, 2015
Proposal submission deadline: D̶e̶c̶ ̶3̶0̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶1̶5̶ Jan 23, 2016
Proposal acceptance: J̶a̶n̶ ̶0̶7̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶1̶6̶ Jan 26, 2016
Presentation upload: J̶a̶n̶ ̶1̶4̶,̶ ̶2̶0̶1̶6̶ Feb 2, 2016

Contact Us:

For more information about speaking and proposals, contact speakers@fossmeet.in.

Hosted by

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software, conducted at National Institute of Technology, Calicut. The funnel is a space for proposals and voting on events. more

Srihari Sriraman

@ssrihari

Kosha - building an open music database for indian classical music

Submitted Jan 20, 2016

Learn about a technically stimulating open source project in the music domain that allows you to contribute to the community directly, and immediately.

Outline

Introduction

Why isn’t there a standard dictionary of ragas? Why isn’t there a standard list of compositions of the trinity of Carnatic Music?

For a form of music that is centuries old, revolves around ragas and compositions, there is surprisingly less information that is structured, coherent, and on the internet. While the question of “Why?” can be daunting, “How do we solve it?” is easily answered: We build an open music database that is built by the community, for the community.

And while we’re at it, we’ll build adaptive and intelligent internet crawlers in Clojure, implement a ‘soundex’ algorithm for indic languages within Postgres, analyse music programmatically to rate the quality, and even find patterns in them!

Skeleton of the talk

  1. The data is out there
    - Detail of the different kinds of sources for the database. The most promising websites, books, the biggest reserves of recorded music, the varying qualities of recorded music, and their usability for research purposes.
    - [6 minutes]

  2. Mining the data into one place - a database
    - What has been accomplished so far - of the kosha repository, the ragavardhini repository and r4g4.com.
    - Building an intelligent crawler/scraper that can automatically tag/categorize the data that it scrapes. So we don’t have to write scrapers manually for every website.
    - Mining data off books (digital and physical), retrieving music from known large reserves (AIR, academy, etc).
    - [10 minutes]

  3. Cleaning, knitting and organizing
    - Data from multiple sources will be duplicated, filled with noise, incomplete, and inaccurate. We’ll engineer ways to deduplicate, denoise, and connect pieces of information together so we fill the missing gaps. This is non trivial, and enters the big data realm.
    - To find related chunks of data, we’ll have to improve the algorithm to search for a given keyword, given that we’re representing indic language words in english.
    - [10 minutes]

  4. Using the mined data
    - What has been accomplished so far - of r4g4’s apis and interface.
    - Building an interface to search the contents by keywords or free form, play music with ease, while having access to all the information about the kriti (meaning, notation, etc).
    - Building APIs so other applications can use the database for other purposes (research).
    - [10 minutes]

  5. Why I think this is a big step forward
    - Enter fantasy land (not really).
    - Elimination of text books in music classes, removing need to remember scales of thousands of ragas, embracing compositions with meaning every time, learning at homes, having access to reliable information in our hands.
    - [5 minutes]

Speaker bio

Srihari is a FOSS enthusiast. He has contributed to Gimp, Eclipse, Diaspora and is excited about opportunities to give back. Over the last couple of years, he has worked on building an experimentation platform, delving into a particularly dense domain, meeting tight latency SLAs, and engineering assembly lines in software using Clojure.

He sings, and does music things in technology – he has worked on synthesizing gamakas, and has been building an open carnatic music database (the ragavardhini repo, r4g4.com) in his spare time.

He is a partner at nilenso, a hippie tree hugging bicycle riding software cooperative based in Bangalore. He blogs, plays basketball, and performs carnatic music occasionally.

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Hosted by

FOSSMeet is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software, conducted at National Institute of Technology, Calicut. The funnel is a space for proposals and voting on events. more