neurips19music

Live Music for the NeurIPS 2019 Banquet

This page contains information about the live music at the NeurIPS 2019 banquet.

Performers

Pablo Samuel Castro (Piano / Guitar)

Pablo Samuel Castro is the NeurIPS’19 Party Chair, and is happy to also be one of its performers! He has been playing music all his life, focusing mostly on piano and guitar. He has released 3 full length albums with Jai Guru (rock/funk), Ecos de Portoalegre (latin jazz), and psc trio (his current jazz trio, which you can listen to on any streaming service). In addition to playing music, he’s a staff research software developer at Google Brain in Montreal. See what he’s up to on Twitter.


Good Kid (Full band)

Good kid is band of five programmers that met at the university of Toronto while studying computer science. They have played their brand of fast paced indie rock in New York, LA, and Toronto and are super excited to play NeuRIPS! During the daytime Nick Frosst (vocals) works at Google Brain where he focuses on adversarial examples and capsule networks. He has been trying to convince the other members to abandon their respective fields to get in on the deep learning hype, but so far he has only convinced Jon (drums).

Hassan Kane (DJ)

Hassan is the NeurIPS’19 Party Co-Chair. Ivorian MIT-trained technology entrepreneur and AI researcher. I am interested in founding, leading high impact technology companies. Equally passionate about investing in startups, mentoring student founders caring about innovation + social impact and building communities.



Dhruv Karthik (Vocals)

Dhruv Karthik is an Undergraduate Junior + Masters Student at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Computer Science and Robotics. His current research interests are on using end-to-end learning to teach small autonomous racecars how to race, and learn safe policies in simulation that transfer to reality. He regularly plays acoustic performances all around campus, and the Philadelphia area. Check out his music on instagram, and find him on linkedin.



Nicolas Keriven (Piano)

Nicolas Keriven is a CNRS researcher in Grenoble, France, working on data compression and theoretical machine learning on graphs. He graduated from Ecole polytechnique and obtained Master’s degree in computer vision and machine learning (MVA) from ENS Paris Saclay. Classically trained on the piano, he used to annoy his teachers to no end because all he wanted to do is jazz. Well now he’s a grown-up, so he can do whatever he wants, so, hah. Most recently he played in a small piano/singer duet called Dao Loar (it means something in the regional language Breton but you’ll have to ask the singer about that), and he also has a personal SoundCloud that he updates far too rarely.

Saurabh Kumar (Tabla)

Saurabh Kumar plays the tabla, an Indian classical percussion instrument, and has been learning the tabla for the past 18 years. In his free time, he is a PhD student at Stanford and was a past AI Resident at Google Brain.





Charles Onu (Vocals)

Charles will be performing at NeurIPS for the second year in a row. He sings, plays the piano and the acoustic guitar. Neither of the 3 was learnt professionally but he might have learnt how to fake it. You’ll find some of his performances on his facebook page. Recently he has been learning to play the harmonica, but the tiny instrument seems to be sucking all the breath out of him. When the stars align, he usually studies as a PhD student at McGill University and Mila in Montreal. He founded Ubenwa to leverage machine learning for low-cost medical diagnosis.

Sageev Oore (Piano)

Sageev Oore has fun playing piano and working with his students on machine learning research. Sageev is a faculty member at Vector Institute, Dalhousie University, and is a CCAI Chair.

Also, this photo is neither machine-generated nor photoshopped; it’s just a photo.




Josh Payne (Drums)

Josh Payne is an undergraduate at Stanford University studying Mathematical and Computational Science. He’s released two albums with his jazz quintet, The Four O’Clock Five, and has an artist sponsorship with Soultone Cymbals. He’s performed with Darlene Love, Sō Percussion, Joshua Redman, Kenny Washington, Ingrid Jensen, Jeff Clayton, Jimmy Heath, Jim Pugh, and others.




Tina Raissi (Piano)

Tina Raissi is finishing her Master’s studies in Computer Science and working in the field of automatic speech recognition at RWTH Aachen University. In a past life, she was a professional classical pianist, performing as a soloist and chamber musician in important Italian theaters. Currently, she is exploring the open seas of context-dependent acoustic modelling for speech recognition.




Nixie Sapphira Lesmana (Vocals)

Nixie S. Lesmana is a first-year PhD student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her primary research interest is to advance understanding of technological innovation surrounding financial markets, with a current focus on RL applications to optimal control problems in finance. Nixie earned her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Sciences with Minor in Finance from NTU in 2017. More info can be found on her LinkedIn. Putting research/maths aside, she loves and has been singing for more than half her life (for some videos of her singing history, visit this link).


Matineh Shaker (Vocals)

Matineh is a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft AI & Research, working on building a machine teaching platform based on reinforcement learning. Growing up in Iran, she was interested in singing from a young age. She received voice, piano and music theory training, as well as lessons on Persian classical music (Radeef). Later, she fine-tuned her vocal skills by taking lessons with Mojgan Shajarian. Matineh joined Sayeh Ensemble in Boston in 2014. She performed as a solo and duet vocalist in numerous events across New England and New York, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard Silk Road Project, two full-feature concerts in Boston, and Floating Tower where she sang alongside musicians from middle east, improvising on Persian tunes. In 2019, she performed in Tunes Of Four Lands concert in the Bay Area as the solo vocalist singing Iranian folk music of Bakhtiari. She continues to be inspired by the music of cultures around the world to advance her vocal art.

Umut Şimşekli (Bass)

Umut Şimşekli received his PhD degree in 2015 from Bogaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey. His current research interests are in large-scale Bayesian machine learning, diffusion-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo, non-convex optimization, and audio/music processing. He is an assistant professor within the Signals, Statistics, and Machine Learning Group at Telecom ParisTech in Paris and currently a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford, Department of Statistics. He used to work as a professional bass guitar player for several years in Istanbul. Previously, he was a member of the Turkish pop/jazz band Six Pack.

Yale Song (Guitar)

Yale Song has been playing guitar for more than 20 years in different genres ranging from classic rock and blues to funk and pop music. Prior to moving to the US, he was part of a Korean indie rock band Line Shaped Circle and was performing regularly in rock clubs in Hongdae area, known for its urban arts and indie music culture. Apart from his life as a musician, he is a researcher working on computer vision and machine learning, especially on learning representations of visual data from unlabeled images and videos. He received his Ph.D. from MIT and now is a senior researcher at MSR Redmond. To learn more about his music and scholarly work, check his YouTube channel and personal website.

Hamed Tabkhivayghan (Setar)

Hamed Tabkhi is an assistant professor of Computer Engineering at the University of North Carolina. He is also the founder of Sayeh Ensamble in the US. While his research focuses on bringing recent advances of machine learning to our communities, his music passion is on introducing the beauty of Iranian Sufi music to broader international audiences.


Mélisande Teng (Vocals)

Mélisande Teng is currently working in the Climate Change AI team at Mila, and is interested in computer vision and the applications of AI for social good. She graduated from Ecole Centrale Paris in applied mathematics and ESSEC Business School in management & social entrepreneurship, and obtained a Master’s degree in computer vision and machine learning (MVA) from ENS Paris Saclay. She usually plays the piano, but is very excited (and a little terrified!) to be singing at NeurIPS. She enjoys writing songs and you can find her on LinkedIn.


Review process

We issued a call for musicians at the end of July, out of which we received 29 applicants. We had 13 reviewers who helped us pick 15 performers. Once the performers were selected, Pablo and Mohamed sorted out the schedule for the evening (which we won’t announce yet, to keep it as a surprise!).

In the end we ended up with a diverse set of performers and musical styles, which we can’t wait to share with the rest of the NeurIPS community at the banquet!

We’d like to thank our volunteer reviewers, without whom this would not have been possible:

Party on!

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