Ajay Kapur

Ajay Kapur is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, educator and musician. He is known for his work in musical robotics and digital musical instrument design, founding Kadenze, as well as his work on massive open online courses (MOOCs), education-related machine learning, and digital arts pedagogy. Kapur is currently a professor and associate Provost at California Institute of the Arts, an advisor at Victoria University of Wellington.
Education
Kapur received a computer science undergraduate degree in 2002 from Princeton University, creating a MIDI-enabled tabla controller as a senior thesis project. Kapur completed PhD studies under Dr. George Tzanetakis at University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. He received his PhD in 2007 in an interdisciplinary study program combining electronic and computer engineering, computer science, psychology, and music. During his PhD studies, Kapur worked with sound sculptor and MacArthur Fellow Trimpin to create MahaDeviBot, a musical robot that Kapur toured with extensively in following years.
Career and research work
Following the completion of his PhD, in 2008 Kapur became program director for the Music Technology program at California Institute of the Arts. Kapur additionally serves as California Institute of the Arts' Associate Dean for Research and Development in Digital Arts. Since 2009, Kapur has also served as a lecturer and PhD supervisor at Victoria University of Wellington's New Zealand School of Music and School of Engineering and Computer Science.
In addition to pursuing academic publication of advances in musical robotics, Kapur founded KarmetiK LLC in 2006. KarmetiK focused on the commercialization of musical robotics, creating mechatronic instruments such as NotomotoN intended for sale and popular use. Through his work at KarmetiK, Kapur created the KarmetiK Machine Orchestra, an ensemble of human and robotic musicians.
Kapur has produced research focusing on the use of music information retrieval approaches to analyse user input and query music libraries. These approaches were later expanded and commercialized in Kadenze, a company that he co-founded in 2013. Kadenze provides MOOC for creative technology (including art and music), using artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically grade music and multimedia coursework. Following his role at Kadenze, Kapur founded machine learning-focused Nirveda Corporation in 2018.
Kapur has been heavily involved in the use of the ChucK programming language as a tool to teach computer programming to musicians. In 2013, Kapur co-authored Introduction to Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists, a book focusing on beginning ChucK programming that accompanied a Coursera MOOC.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu