Rory Lewis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since August 2006. (help, talk)

Rory Adrian Lewis, scientist, poet and philosopher. Rory Lewis has a Bachelor of Science in Computer & Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University ('93), a Juris Doctor in Law from Syracuse University Law School (1996) and in 2007 will earn one Ph.D. in Information Technology, Knowledge-Discovery in Databases Based Audio Indexing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a second Ph.D. in Computer Science; Facial Recognition at The Institute of Computer Science at The Polish Academy of Sciences, both under the direction of Professor Zbigniew Ras D. Sc. (Habilitation), Ph.D.

Lewis research contributes to the burgeoning field of Music Information Retrieval by attempting to answer the following questions:

What algorithms and formal methods are required to have a machine teach itself to recognize whether a set of sinusoidal waves travelling through the air making sound:
- is a lullaby or blues or jazz or something else?
- is being played by a particular instrument?
- comprises certain notes?
- forms a song that will make money?
- creates particular emotions upon human beings?

Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, Lewis attended Penzance Primary and later King Edward The VIIth, in Johannesburg. After moving to Los Angeles, he ran for the Santa Monica Track team under Joe Douglas. After failing to make the 1986 Olympic Trials for the 800m, Lewis enrolled into Pierce Los Angeles Community College. He entered Montana State University in 1989 and later transferred to Syracuse University.

While at Syracuse, Lewis' musicianship made him a popular item on the NYC/Buffalo circuit. Upon graduating from law school, he moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. In the non-academic area of his life, within a year of moving to Charlotte, Clearchannel pegged Lewis to open for Jerry Lee Lewis in 1997. Soon, local radio stations and politicians invited Lewis to play at functions. Next, Billboard ranked Lewis two slots below Eminem in Rolling Stone Magazine and he topped the MySpace charts for downloads.

In 1999, Lewis ended his studies in patent law litigation and later began a Ph.D. in Computer Science after he realized his real interests were science, music and politics. Close to a million persons have read and commented on Rory's poem, The Reluctant Republican. Presently, Lewis plays on weekends and is Ph.D. student at UNCC. Rory passed his qualification exam on December 8, 2005 and is now doing research before presenting his dissertation and defense in December 2007.

Lewis has presented at the 2005 Intelligent Information Systems conference in Gdansk, Poland[1], and will present at the the 16th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems in Bari, Italy, on September 27-29, 2006[2].

[edit] Lewis' publications are to date:

"Blind Signal Separation of Similar Pitches and Instruments in a Noisy Polyphonic Domain", Lewis, R., Zhang, X., Ras, Z. W., "The 16th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems", Proceedings of ISMIS'05 Symposium, Bari, Italy, LNAI, Springer-Verlag, vol.4203, 2006.
"Creating Reliable Database for Experiments on Extracting Emotions from Music", A. Wieczorkowska, P. Synak, R.A. Lewis, Z.W. Ras, in Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining, Advances in Soft Computing, Proceedings of the IIS'2005 Symposium, Gdansk, Poland, Springer, 2005, 395-404.
"Extracting Emotions from Music Data", A. Wieczorkowska, P. Synak, R. Lewis, Z.W. Ras, in "Foundations of Intelligent Systems", Proceedings of ISMIS'05, M.-S. Hacid et al. (Eds.), Saratoga Springs, New York, LNAI, No. 3488, Springer, 2005, 456-465.
“Knowledge Discovery Based Identification of Musical Pitches and Instruments in Polyphonic Sounds”, Lewis, R., Zhang, X., Ras, Z.W., International Journal of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Elsevier, 2006.
“New methodology of facial recognition, Part I”, R. A. Lewis , Z. W. Ras, in Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining, Advances in Soft Computing, Proceedings of the IIS'2005 Symposium, Gdansk, Poland, Springer-Verlag, 2005.
“New methodology of facial recognition, Part II”, R. A. Lewis , Z. W. Ras, in Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining, Advances in Soft Computing, Proceedings of the IIS'2005 Symposium, Gdansk, Poland, Springer-Verlag, 2005.