Academic Cloud Computing Research: Five Pitfalls and Five Opportunities

This discussion paper argues that there are five fundamental pitfalls, which can restrict academics from conducting cloud computing research at the infrastructure level, which is currently where the vast majority of academic research lies. Instead academics should be conducting higher risk research, in order to gain understanding and open up entirely new areas. We call for a renewed mindset and argue that academic research should focus less upon physical infrastructure and embrace the abstractions provided by clouds through five opportunities: user driven research, new programming models, PaaS environments, and improved tools to support elasticity and large-scale debugging. The objective of this paper is to foster discussion, and to define a roadmap forward, which will allow academia to make longer-term impacts to the cloud computing community.Comment: Accepted and presented at the 6th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'14

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Ten years of MIREX: reflections, challenges and opportunities

The Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX) has been run annually since 2005, with the October 2014 plenary marking its tenth iteration. By 2013, MIREX has evaluated approximately 2000 individual music information retrieval (MIR) algorithms for a wide range of tasks over 37 different test collections. MIREX has involved researchers from over 29 different contrives with a median of 109 individual participants per year. This pater summarizes the history of MIREX form its earliest planning meeting in 2001 to the present. It reflects upon the administrative, financial, and technological challenges MIREX has faced and describes how those challenges have been surmounted. We propose new funding models, a distributed evaluation framework, and more holistic user experience evaluation tasks-some evolutionary, some revolutionary-for the continued success of MIREX. We hope that this paper will inspire MIR community members to contribute their ideas so MIREX can have many more successful years to come