Wide-field multi-object spectroscopy with MANIFEST

MANIFEST is a multi-object fibre facility for the Giant Magellan Telescope that uses 'Starbug' robots to accurately position fibre units across the telescope's focal plane. MANIFEST, when coupled to the telescope's planned seeinglimited instruments, offers access to larger fields of view; higher multiplex gains; versatile focal plane reformatting of the focal plane via integral-field-units; image-slicers; and in some cases higher spatial and spectral resolution. The TAIPAN instrument on the UK Schmidt Telescope is now close to science verification which will demonstrate the feasibility of the Starbug concept. We are now moving into the conceptual development phase for MANIFEST, with a focus on developing interfaces for the telescope and for the instruments

Living Lab Evaluation for Life and Social Sciences Search Platforms -- LiLAS at CLEF 2021

Meta-evaluation studies of system performances in controlled offline evaluation campaigns, like TREC and CLEF, show a need for innovation in evaluating IR-systems. The field of academic search is no exception to this. This might be related to the fact that relevance in academic search is multilayered and therefore the aspect of user-centric evaluation is becoming more and more important. The Living Labs for Academic Search (LiLAS) lab aims to strengthen the concept of user-centric living labs for the domain of academic search by allowing participants to evaluate their retrieval approaches in two real-world academic search systems from the life sciences and the social sciences. To this end, we provide participants with metadata on the systems' content as well as candidate lists with the task to rank the most relevant candidate to the top. Using the STELLA-infrastructure, we allow participants to easily integrate their approaches into the real-world systems and provide the possibility to compare different approaches at the same time.Comment: 8 pages. Advances in Information Retrieval - 43rd European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2021, Virtual Event, March 28 - April 1, 202

The Guitar as a Laboratory for Experimentation

In this article, I will discuss the role of the electric guitar in the conception, development and composition of three recent works: Recessional Motion, Flexidra IV, and Volpi/Formentera. In Recessional Motion, I will address compositional, technical and notational issues to explain the underlying creative process. In Flexidra IV, all the pre-compositional materials were the result of extensive experimentation sessions with electric guitars, pedals and found objects that subsequently were extrapolated to other instruments to generate the instrumental textures. In Volpi/Formentera, the electric guitar is at the centre of the compositional processes and all the musical parameters orbit around it. I will examine in detail how the different preparations and instrumental textures were derived from my own "˜exploratory sessions' presenting possible solutions to notate the necessary actions to produce the sounds in the guitar

A Multimodal Approach for Semantic Patent Image Retrieval

Patent images such as technical drawings contain valuable information and are frequently used by experts to compare patents. However, current approaches to patent information retrieval are largely focused on textual information. Consequently, we review previous work on patent retrieval with a focus on illustrations in figures. In this paper, we report on work in progress for a novel approach for patent image retrieval that uses deep multimodal features. Scene text spotting and optical character recognition are employed to extract numerals from an image to subsequently identify references to corresponding sentences in the patent document. Furthermore, we use a neural state-of-the-art CLIP model to extract structural features from illustrations and additionally derive textual features from the related patent text using a sentence transformer model. To fuse our multimodal features for similarity search we apply re-ranking according to averaged or maximum scores. In our experiments, we compare the impact of different modalities on the task of similarity search for patent images. The experimental results suggest that patent image retrieval can be successfully performed using the proposed feature sets, while the best results are achieved when combining the features of both modalities