News

Jan 24-28, 2011 - I am co-organizing a design & innovation workshop for college students in India in collaboration with the College of Engineering, Pune (CoEP) to promote hands-on learning, quick prototyping... basically the ideation-to-hacking-and-critique experience that we enjoy at the Media Lab.

Jan 23, 2011 - I have been invited to give a lecture-demonstration at the International Music Conference and Festival at the Indiranagar Sangeetha Sabha in Bengaluru, India. The topic of my presentation is “World Music Technology: Culturally Sensitive Machine Listening for the Rest of the World.”

Sep 24, 2010 - I have been invited to give a talk at the Artificial Intelligence Research Group (AIRG) seminar series at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The title of my talk is “Why Do Music Systems Need to be Intelligent?”

May 5, 2010 - I am co-organizing a symposium on computer music at the MIT Media Lab in honor of Professor Barry Vercoe — From Experimental Music Studio to Music, Mind and Machine.

May 1, 2010 - I am talking about my work at the Northeast Music Cognition Group (NEMCOG) meeting at Yale University. The title of my talk is “The role of enculturation in music listening, and some applications.”

March 16-18, 2010 - I am attending FICCI-FRAMES in Mumbai, India, for the Media Lab's India Initiatives.

March 8-9, 2010 - I am helping organize the MIT Media Lab Breakout Workshop and am leading a session on entertainment, culture, and education at the Emerging Technologies Conference (EmTech India 2010) in Bengaluru, India; I am also giving a talk titled “Beyond Music, Movies, and Games: A Technology Roadmap for Entertainment.”

November 19, 2009 - I am giving a talk on Musical Features of Intermediate Complexity for Music Recognition, and presenting a poster on A Perceptual Sound Retrieval and Synthesis Engine at the Auditory Perception, Cognition, and Action Meeting (APCAM) in Boston.

August 15, 2009 - I am playing percussions on a couple of songs at MIT's India Independence Day celebrations.

May 21, 2009 - I will be at the 157th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Portland (Oregon) to present our work on describing sounds with everyday words.

Feb. 17, 2009 - I am attending FICCI-FRAMES in Mumbai, India, for the Media Lab's India Initiatives and Center for Future Storytelling.

Feb. 2, 2009 - I have been invited for an Icore Research Residency at The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, to work on aspects of music prediction algorithms with Prof. Chris Chafe and Juan-Pablo Cáceres from Stanford University's CCRMA.

Sep. 28, 2008 - The New York Times writes about Vellai Thamarai (which means White Lotus in Tamil), the school that my parents are starting in a village near Puducherry in South India. The same article was published in the International Herald Tribune (the global version of the NYT) in August with a more extensive slideshow. Contact the organization at vellaithamarai <at> gmail <dot> com if you would like more information, to contribute, or to help out in any other way.

Sep. 2, 2008 - I have been named President of the India Initiatives group at the Media Lab: our goal is to foster collaboration between the Media Lab and Indian organizations. For more information, please contact me.

June 23, 2008 - I am attending a two-week summer workshop on Spectral and Physical Models by Perry Cook and Xavier Serra at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University in California.

Apr. 11, 2008 - I have been invited to give a talk on my Tabla-based network music performance system at the High Quality Audio over Networks Summit (ANET II) at The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada.

Feb. 4, 2008 I am a Teaching Assistant for the Spring 2008 MIT course on Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D).

Oct. 24, 2007 - I am giving a talk about my group's research at MIT's Small Talks series.

Sep. 4, 2007 - I am starting my PhD at the MIT Media Lab with Barry Vercoe.

Aug. 10, 2007 - My master's thesis is now complete!