Francisco Bernardo

Francisco Bernardo

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Driving Chaos: My talk at Audio Developer Conference 2025

Driving Chaos: My talk at Audio Developer Conference 2025

I recently gave a talk at the Audio Developer Conference (ADC) 2025 titled "Virtual Analog Modelling of a Chaotic Circuit with Wave Digital Filters". "What happens when analog circuits behave unpredictably—even chaotically? This beginner-friendly talk dives into the fascinating world of non-linear dynamical systems and their

Interview featured at Jornal Comunidades Lusófonas

I was invited to give an interview to the Jornal Comunidades Lusófonas. You can read the original interview here. In the interview, I reflect on my academic journey, which began in Portugal and led me to an international research career in the UK, and now at Imperial College London. I

Uri Alon's “How to Choose a Good Scientific Problem” review

“How to Choose a Good Scientific Problem” by Uri Alon presents a rather enlightening analysis and very good advice to both students and supervisors. The premise of the article is that choosing a scientific problem is closely related to nurturing, in that when choosing a problem, either for a PhD

Christopher Frayling’s "Research in Art and Design" review

Recently, I’ve decided to revisit a foundational paper on research through design. In “Research in Art and Design”, Frayling attempts to unpack what research is in the context of arts and design. He starts by differentiating between ‘research’ and ‘Research’; while he links the usage of the former term

A Concept Map for AI-based Music Generation Techniques

Last February the 25th, I gave a talk about ‘Making Music & Art with Machine Intelligence’ in the AI+JavaScript London meetup. I prepared a slide for that talk with a concept map that I designed and that abstracted some of the main AI-based techniques recently surveyed by Lopez-Lopez-Rincon, Starostenko

Dan Olsen’s “Evaluating User Interface Systems Research” review

“Evaluating User Interface Systems Research” (Olsen, 2002) is a paper that I consider fundamental for critique of HCI evaluation, despite its longevity. It highlights the evaluation caveats of interactive systems, and the claims that can be made for complex systems and interactive innovations. They stand across and are applicable as

User-Centred Design and Evaluation of Infrastructural Software

This is a review of two publications about user-centred design (UCD) and evaluation of infrastructural software (also known as middleware)—the 2002 technical report “Stuck in the Middle: Bridging the Gap Between Design, Evaluation, and Middleware” and the follow-on CHI 2003 paper “Stuck in the Middle: The Challenges of User-Centered

Advait Sarkar’s “Constructivist Design for Interactive Machine Learning” review

In “Constructivist Design for Interactive Machine Learning”, Advait Sarkar argues that the Interactive Machine Learning (IML) loop facilitates constructivist learning, as it maximises the interaction between end-users’ experience of the Machine Learning (ML) model and their ideas about the status of the ML model. Sarkar proposes a set of objectives

Simard et al. “Machine Teaching: A New Paradigm for Building Machine Learning Systems” review

Another review in my Human-Centred Machine Learning review series, authored by Simard et al. from Microsoft Research, “Machine Teaching: A New Paradigm for Building Machine Learning Systems” is a position paper and manifesto for Machine Teaching. Simard et al. propose Machine Teaching as a new discipline that is much related

From User-Centered to Adoption-Centered Design: When HCI Research Becomes a Product

Fresh out of CHI 2015, I came across a paper that tackles a problem many HCI researchers quietly wrestle with: how (and whether) our research prototypes actually make it into the world as products. In “From User-Centered to Adoption-Centered Design: A Case Study of an HCI Research Innovation Becoming a

A memorable birthday lunch…

Last year I had a very special and memorable birthday lunch. It was a saturday and I had Phd classes and there was this incredible gathering of people there, between high profile composers, performers, electronic music scientists, interactive artists and my PhD colleagues… Thank you all for the great time!

Presenting my paper on using "Music Video Games in Live Performance" at Videojogos 2014

In this paper I argued that music videogames, given the characteristics of the genre, may constitute an alternative and viable approach to music and audiovisual performance. Building on a music performance in 2013, in which I participated and used a videogame as a musical instrument, I analysed some of the