Exciting Oppotunity

Ohayoo gozaimasu, konnichiwa, or konbanwa to translate James Randi's standard greeting on his "Randy Speaks" segments. I've been putting off making this announcement because, well, I've been very busy and exciting "of the moment" things needed comment first. I will be traveling to Japan to be a visiting student for a few weeks at Dr. Sagayama's lab at The University of Tokyo. It is a great privilage and honor to achieve this opportunity. One project I am excited about is automatic chord detection, which I have been working on for my thesis. Dr. Sagayama's group did very well in last year's MIREX competition, but my adviser and I have already noted a couple areas for improvement. I am also excited to learn about the many cool things Dr. Sagayama's lab does.

During my long stay there, I will be giving a talk on "Acoustic Segment Modeling for Music Information Retrieval" and how semi-supervised and unsupervised training can bridge the missing gap between automatic speech recognition technology and music information technology. I will briefly discribe the importance of separating the contextual and interpretive nature of music from acoustically grounded attributes when training acoustic-based systems. I am finishing up the slides now and will post them after my talk.

Anyway, during the next three weeks, you may see some pictures of Japan and Taiwain since I will be going to ICASSP to give another presentation titled "On the Importance of Modeling Temporal Information in Music Tag Annotation." Sayoonara!