ISMIR 2008: Day 1 - Tutorials

I really should get more rest before ISMIR, but even with only three hours of sleep the night before, I was rivoted by the tutorial on social tags given by Paul Lamere and Elias Pampalk.  I was a bit curious as to what the new content would be since tags was a central theme in the tutorial last year on music recommendation by Oscar Celma and Paul Lamere.  I was happy to see that Lamere and Pampalk discussed their recent findings on how tags are used in general and, in particular, demographics.  Eventually, I hope that it is possible to get more information on how tags mean different things to different groups of people.  Such findings would help in "tag adaption," where someone's tag profile will reflect their own interpretation of tags and not influenced as much by the average definition among the community.

I think the overall highlight, however, was the discussion on tags from a signal processing and machine learning perspective.  These fields can greatly help with the cold-start problem, vandalism, and popularity bias, but there are a few questions that need to be addressed.  Anyway, that is all the time I have to write on the conference tonight.  I have to get slides ready for a presentation I need to give Friday to Dr. Sagayama when he comes to visit Georgia Tech.