All posts by Christos Plachouras

AIM PhD student Alexander Williams recently completed a 3-month research fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) following a successful application to the UKRI Policy Internship Scheme.

POST is an impartial research and knowledge exchange service based in the UK Parliament. They work to ensure cutting-edge research evidence and expertise is available to members of both houses of parliament (House of Commons and House of Lords), covering emerging and complex science and social science topics.

During the fellowship, Alex worked closely with POST’s Physical Sciences and Digital Lead, Simon Brawley, to research and write a POSTnote—an impartial, accurate, and peer-reviewed briefing tailored for UK parliamentarians—on data centres and their sustainability.

Data centres are crucial infrastructure that underpin many aspects of modern life, including artificial intelligence. The POSTnote, titled What are data centres and how sustainable are they?, discusses what data centres are, their presence in the UK, and their impact on different aspects of sustainability. This briefing was produced in consultation with experts and stakeholders from academia, industry, government, and beyond, including interviews with Google, techUK and academics from University of Oxford, Loughborough University, and University of Manchester.

The POSTnote can be read in full here.

Well done Alex!

On 2-7 December, AIM researchers will participate at the 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025), taking place in San Diego, USA. NeurIPS is a prestigious annual academic conference and non-profit foundation that fosters the exchange of research in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and computational neuroscience.

The following papers from AIM members will be presented at the Datasets and Benchmarks track of NeurIPS 2025:

• OmniBench: Towards The Future of Universal Omni-Language Models by Yizhi Li, Ge Zhang, Yinghao Ma, Ruibin Yuan, King Zhu, Hangyu Guo, Yiming Liang, Jiaheng Liu, Zekun Moore Wang, Jian Yang, Siwei Wu, Xingwei Qu, Jinjie Shi, Xinyue Zhang, Zhenzhu Yang, Yidan WEN, Yanghai Wang, Shihao Li, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Ruibo Liu, Emmanouil Benetos, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin
• MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mix by Ziyang Ma, Yinghao Ma, Yanqiao Zhu, Chen Yang, Yi-Wen Chao, Ruiyang Xu, Wenxi Chen, Yuanzhe Chen, Zhuo Chen, Jian Cong, Kai Li, Keliang Li, Siyou Li, Xinfeng Li, Xiquan Li, Zheng Lian, Yuzhe Liang, Minghao Liu, Zhikang Niu, tianrui wang, Yuping Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Yihao Wu, Guanrou Yang, Jianwei Yu, Ruibin Yuan, Zhisheng Zheng, Ziya Zhou, Haina Zhu, Wei Xue, Emmanouil Benetos, Kai Yu, EngSiong Chng, Xie Chen

The following paper will be presented at the Creative AI track of NeurIPS 2025:

• The Ghost in the Keys: A Disklavier Demo for Human-AI Musical Co-Creativity by Louis Bradshaw, Alexander Spangher, Stella Biderman, Simon Colton

The following papers will be presented at the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on AI for Music:

• The Ghost in the Keys: A Disklavier Demo for Human-AI Musical Co-Creativity by Louis Bradshaw, Alexander Spangher, Stella Biderman, Simon Colton
• Perceptually Aligning Representations of Music via Noise-Augmented Autoencoders by Mathias Rose Bjare, Giorgia Cantisani, Marco Pasini, Stefan Lattner, Gerhard Widmer

Finally, the following paper will be presented at the Differentiable Systems and Scientific Machine Learning workshop of EurIPS:

• Accelerating Automatic Differentiation of Direct Form Digital Filters by Chin-Yun Yu, George Fazekas

See you all at NeurIPS!

On 12-15 October, several AIM researchers will participate in the 2025 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, taking place at the Granlibakken Tahoe Resort near Lake Tahoe, in Tahoe City, CA, USA. WASPAA is a premier event in the field of audio signal processing, organised by the IEEE’s Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) technical committee, with a strong focus on music signal processing and computational sound scene analysis.

AIM, as in previous years, will have a strong presence at WASPAA 2025.

In the Technical Programme, the following papers are authored by AIM members:

• Modulation Discovery with Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (Christopher Mitcheltree, Hao Hao Tan, Joshua D. Reiss)
• Beyond Architecture: The Critical Impact of Inference Overlap on Music Source Separation Benchmarks (Harnick Khera, Johan Pauwels, Alan W. Archer-Boyd, Mark B. Sandler)
• Improving Inference-Time Optimisation for Vocal Effects Style Transfer with a Gaussian Prior (Chin-Yun Yu, Marco A. Martínez-Ramírez, Junghyun Koo, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Yuki Mitsufuji, George Fazekas)
• Self-Supervised Representation Learning with a JEPA Framework for Multi-instrument Music Transcription (Mary Pilataki, Matthias Mauch, Simon Dixon)

In the Demo Session, the following demos will be presented by AIM members:

• Neural Audio Synthesis for Non-Keyboard Instruments (Franco Caspe, Andrew McPherson, Mark Sandler)
• PCA-DiffVox: Augmenting Vocal Effects Tweakability With a Bijective Latent Space (Chin-Yun Yu, Marco A. Martínez-Ramírez, Junghyun Koo, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Yuki Mitsufuji, George Fazekas)

See you at WASPAA!