Tutorials

Dr Tatiana Tambouratzis, Associate Professor, Dept. of Industrial Management & Technology, University of Piraeus, Greece

Subject: Identification of Key Music Symbols for Optical Music Recognition and On-Screen Presentation

Abstract

A novel optical music recognition (OMR) system is put forward, where the custom-made on-screen presentation of the music score (MS) is promoted via the recognition of key music symbols only. The proposed system does not require perfect manuscript alignment or noise removal. Following the segmentation of each MS page into systems and, subsequently,into staves, staff lines, measures and candidate music symbols (CMS's), music symbol recognition is limited to the identification of the clefs, accidentals and time signatures. Such an implementation entails significantly less computational effort than that required by classic OMR systems, without an observable compromise in the quality of the on-screen presentation of the MS. The identification of the music symbols of interest is performed via probabilistic neural networks (PNN's), which are trained on a small set of exemplars from the MS itself. The initial results are promising in terms of efficiency, identification accuracy and quality of viewing.


Dr Costin Badica, Professor, Dept. of Software Engineering, University of Craiova, Romania

Subject: Negotiations in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

The increasing complexity of real-world problems demands special support for distributed collaborative problem solving. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are lightweight distributed systems that combine interaction, coordination and distribution of computation for collaborative problem solving. Negotiation, i.e. "the process by which a group of agents come to a mutually acceptable agreement on some matter" is very useful for managing dynamic dependencies between agents. The aim of this tutorial is to introduce the problems and challenges of applying negotiations in MAS using examples from different areas including e-business and disaster management.