iToogle.fm

Wisdom of the Crowds on House?

2009-10-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

This past week, I was watching one of my favorite TV shows House, and I was surprised when they mentioned The Wisdom of the Crowds (WOC). For the most part, the show got the main points of the theory correctly; i.e., the aggregation of knowledge from many diverse people can perform better than a single expert opinion. In the scene, the patient does not trust his doctors and posts a $25,000 reward to the person who first presents the correct diagnosis. After receiving many different opinions, he aggregates them, takes the diagnosis most often given, and demands treatment. Of course, this fails and everyone is given the impression that the theory is faulty. One problem - this is not a true example of the theory.

The problem is the style of the monetary reward - it encourages quackery opinions to stand-out more than normal. A fundamental principle that is often ignored when discussing WOC is the incentives for offering opinions are often small and are rarely monetary or form transitional wealth. An example of transitional wealth is money: I can give someone a dollar and they can now use that dollar to buy something. Non-transitional wealth only possesses value to the person who created it. An example is pride: I can create pride in myself and I may be able to find pride in the actions of others, but I cannot be proud and give that pride to someone else. Another good example is Last.fm. By labeling songs, I can recover them quicker, but someone else may find my choice in labels confusing, wrong, or meaningless. The wealth is entirely within me.

The reason it is important to monetize opinions and effort in this fashion is that it acts as a noise filter; i.e., The Wisdom of the Crowds does not mean every nut delivers an opinion. For example, if I poll the average person on the street (at least in America), I will find some very wrong answers. Most people do not know what a molecule really is. This might explain why many people have a fear of things with "chemicals," which is a rather ridiculous statement that I have previously ridiculed. Further, only 1/3 of people can state what the purpose of DNA is. In other words, the average opinion is, well, average.

We can actually think of WOC from a statistical sampling perspective. While it's true that on average the group opinion will be better than an individual, it does mean that this is occurs with probability of one. The purpose of the WOC is to remove bias, but not expertise. Or from a Bayesian perspective:

P(correct answer AND crowd) = P(answer|crowd)P(crowd)

If I have a bunch of creationists, I am not going to get the correct answer (evolution). Same for medical diagnosis. If I tell people that they'll get $25,000 if they guess the correct answer, then their monetary gain is high. Unless their monetary cost is high as well, they'll offer any crap-based solution they could get from a little bit of time on Wikipedia. Worse, in this particular example, it's the cranks and quacks who are more likely to respond. Who do you think will respond quicker to that reward, a guy going around selling reflexology out of his Winnibego or the Head of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins?

However, I must admit that my ears perked when I heard the phenomena cited on a primetime TV show.

Bill Maher and His Role in Anti-Science

2009-09-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

I recently was amazed at the amount of crap that Bill Maher stated in this video:

First off, it is not true that you go to jail in the USA if you practice alternative medicine. Rather, alternative medicine is protected. For example, anything you consume can be protected as a "dietary supplement" under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), which was pushed by the bipartisan team of Orrin Hatch (R) and Tom Harkin (D) (bipartisan does not mean good). The DSHEA states that it is up to the dietary supplement manufacturer to ensure the product is safe. There is no need to prove efficacy or safety in a controlled setting prior to marketing. Further, while it is true the manufacturer must ensure that any material on the label is true, any claim can be stated by using the catch-all phrase:

"These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent _______."

In other words, "we made all this shit up and didn't even bother to test it. Here, have seconds." The FDA only steps in if they can find evidence that it is harmful after people have been affected; e.g., Zicam. In fact, Zicam is a great example because it is even mislabeled as a homeopathic treatment, but is not one since the concentrations in Zicam are way too strong - strong enough to have any effect (whether good or bad) disqualifies it as being homeopathic. So, not only are alternative medicines not regulated as medicines, there is not a regulation on themselves.

Second, Bill Maher's statement that we have not improved in the cancer fight is a bold face lie. Cancer rates have been steadily declining for years. But why research when you can just make crap up?

Third, his statement that we have such a big health care system because "we are so sick" is absurd. I am going to refrain from the public/private debate because this blog is about science and engineering and not politics. But Maher's assertion about the size of our health care system is not correlated with any health markers. Rather, it is simply a matter of diminishing returns and efficiency. In fact, if our problem was simply tied to health, we would not be arguing over whether people are covered by insurance. Instead, we would be fighting about ways to make people healthier; e.g., tax on sugars, increased physical education in schools, anti-smoking legislation, etc. (Note: I am not giving any opinion on whether we should do any of these; I am just stating that we would probably be debating these topics.) Regardless of your stand on health insurance, this is largely absent from the debate, except as a way to raise funds for a form of public health. The reason is that our health is not tied to the increase in health care costs.

Next, Maher goes into the conspiracy theory that "Big Pharma" is only interested in treating symptoms is wrong on two fronts. First, several Western medicines and treatments are specifically designed to treat the underlying disease and not symptoms. For example, antibiotics are specifically designed to kill the bacteria causing the infection. You cannot get more offensive than that. If you have heart surgery, an improperly or non-functioning heart valve is either repaired or replaced. This is not to say that all Western medicines treat the underlying case. In some cases, there is no proven cure; therefore, we do the next best thing, which is to manage symptoms. This does not mean that research there is no research into fixing the underlying cause. For example, in 2007 we saw the first vaccine against bird-flu and in 2006 we saw Gardasil. Second, when did alternative medicines start treating diseases? For example, homeopathy was developed before Germ Theory and specifically treats symptoms. Like cures Like? That is treating symptoms. If I have a cold, homeopathy says that the cure is onion because both cause my eyes to tear and agitate my mucus membranes. These are not the cause for the cold - they are the symptoms. Not one homeopathic practitioner ever links onion to the death of viral rhinopharyngitis.

I have no idea why Maher gets a pass from the skeptical and scientific community. It's likely due to his non-religious beliefs. However, this is a gross mischaracterization. The truth is that Maher is religious, but not in the Westernized "only one God in the sky" fashion. He's religious in that he believes in unproven methodologies. Jeffrey Tobin is right: there is no such thing as alternative medicine; it's either medicine, unproven, or disproven. Acupuncture? It's not alternative; it's not medicine because it does not work any better than a placebo. Anytime you put faith in unproven methodologies, you are making a non-scientific statement about the world. Saying there is a "life force" called Qi is nothing more than a religious statement.

Even if Maher were correct about cancer rates not declining (and he clearly is wrong), it does nothing to validate his point. This is simply a straw-man argument. Just because we do not have a solution does not mean you get to make up whatever crap you want to fill in the holes. It does not work for Intelligent Design and it does not work for medicine. Of course, science does not know everything. If it did, we would not be running experiments because, we would already know the answer. But that does not mean that we do not know something. Is there a cure for all cancer? No, but that does not mean we have not found ways to cure some cancers, detect and treat earlier, and increase the life expectancy if diagnosed.

So, to sum up: Bill Maher has more in common with Creationists than he would probably like.

Alien Intelligent Design

2009-09-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

Hilarious.

Musical Training Helps The Cocktail Party Problem?

2009-09-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

There has be a lot of press about a recent article in Ear & Hearing, but I found a good bit of it misinformed, sometimes grossly. For example, here are some disturbing misinterpretations:

1) "After years of Mom telling you to turn off the music to protect your ears, there’s finally scientific evidence that music can be good for your hearing."

2) "Music training can help reorder nervous system"

3) "The findings strongly support the potential therapeutic and rehabilitation use of music training to address auditory processing and communication disorders throughout the life span."

In actuality, the paper discusses none of these. I'll take these in turn:

1) This is actually two different statements: that there is benefit to listening to music loudly and that just passively listening to music can help. The most irresponsible is the former. While I'll admit that the statement does not directly say that increasing volume is beneficial, their slight attempt at humor implies it. The study did not discuss any possible benefit about listening to music loudly. As for the later ("passive listening to music can help") is definitely not within the paper. In fact, the study compared people with extensive musical training versus those with no musical training. The amount of time listening to music passively was not a variable within the study. Further, the so called "Mozart effect" has repeatedly been shown to be false (for a some references click here; for a funny discussion, one can check Penn & Teller's Bullshit!), despite the rather silly product market. The distinction between passively learning and actively learning is significant because it is true that research indicates the musical training may increase cognitive abilities in non-musical areas (see the "article" link above), but this cannot be said for passive listening.

2) The paper does not specifically address anything about the brain being rewired. In fact, since all musicians started practicing an instrument before the age of seven, it is likely that the brain wasn't being "rewired," but rather being "developed" in a different environment. This gets into (3) because...

3) The authors do not say anything about the potential for therapeutic products. Again, since the musicians had extensive training and started before the age of seven this study cannot answer the question about whether the effect can occur if someone begins training at a later age.

So just what did the study say?

I encourage you to read it first hand, but this is effectively what it says:

1) When presented with noise from the same source, people who have received life-long musical training performed better in remembering and processing oral sentences in four-talker babble.

2) When the noise is presented from coming from the same source (i.e., loud speaker), there was no difference.

3) The processing part is important because it signifies that working memory is the determining factor.

The authors then hypothesize that because musicians are better able to pick up on low-level auditory cues, they have more resources for working memory, and, therefore, able to process oral information more efficiently.

This is yet another call to caution whenever research is being presented by the media. It's important to ask to read the final article, including the headline, before you agree to give your consent.

Last.fm Radio Station? Say it ain't so!

2009-09-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of last.fm and the work they do, but I've always been a little curious as to their role with CBS. Apparently, CBS has decided to use the online radio station for something that it is not: a terrestrial, non-personalized radio station. While it might be "neat" to use this tool to see what's popular among the specific demographic of the online station, by no means is this a great tool for recommendation - which is at the heart and core of last.fm's mission. What would such a station play anyway? Depends a lot on the type of "chart" they are using, but suffice it to stay, most plays will fairly bland in terms of their novelty factor. For example, let's look at the current Top Ten artists: (Note: This was written around September 8th and published later, so the current artists are different, but concepts are the same).

1) Radiohead
2) Beatles
3) Coldplay
4) Muse
5) Michael Jackson
6) The Killers
7) Metallica
8) Kings of Leon
9) Red Hot Chili Peppers
10) Artic Monkeys

Besides the obvious British bias, we can see that the most common artists are not exactly "strange." They are all (at least) decent, respected bands. Some have been around a while (Radiohead, Coldplay, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers) and some are staples of any music list (Beatles, Michael Jackson). However, I wouldn't exactly say that these bands are strange to radio play (yes, to some degree, Kings of Leon and Artic Monkeys are not as common, but I would hardly say that they get almost no radio play, at least in the US). (As an update, on today, September 18th, the Beatles passed Radiohead, which came out September 9th. While this does show the power of Last.fm's "buzz meter," it is hardly unforseen. Further, this is an example of already popular, known bands simply trading places.)

Also, these two bands are really in the list due to recent releases, as evident from the current Top 10 tracks:

1) Kings of Leon - "Sex on Fire"
2) Kings of Leon - "Use Somebody"
3) MGMT - "Kids"
4) Arctic Monkeys - "Crying Lightning"
5) Coldplay - "Viva La Vida"
6) Lady GaGa - "Poker Face"
7) Muse - "Supermassive Black Hole"
8) MGMT - "Time to Pretend"
9) Black Eyed Peas - "I Gotta Feeling"
10) MGMT - "Electric Feel"

Yeah, these are all very rare indeed. Hint: If the artist is being asked to play at the MTV Music awards, then it is a safe bet that the artist is not a rare find. What if I contiue farther? Well, #14 is "Wonderwall" by Oasis and thank God because I haven't heard that about a bajillion times.

About the only good list would be the "Hyped List," but this is more than likely just following new releases. Truth is that a station that would be that eclectic probably won't fair well since users would be hearing a high degree of music they don't like (i.e., people probably will not like bouncing from niche to niche).

The truth is that this violates the very nature of last.fm - personalized music discovery. Will the radio station fail? No, of course not. It will actually be interesting to see how well the record companies try to follow the Wisdom of the Crowds. This is, after all, capitalism. It was always believed that record companies tried to make people like certain bands, but in truth, the record companies just knew what most people either liked or, at least, could listen to without running from the room screaming. Truth be told, Nickelback and Creed suck, but most people can listen to them because it isn't so awful that I can't either tune it out or stop myself from sticking pencils in my ear . It's just boring rock template music. People didn't buy millions of Spice Girls albums because they had a bunch of money in their pocket, found themselves in a record store, and didn't know what else to buy. They bought it because they wanted to (and you know who you are and should be ashamed of yourself - if my sister had a webpage, I'd link to it here).

I fear this radio station will just be yet another radio stations which focuses on the rather narrow "head" of the long tail and never really gets into the niche markets. The reason? Radio execs focus on what's popular and what will be popular. They are still successful in this, but what they lack is the ability to tailor distribution channels to individual needs and wants. It is not the price of songs that is destroying the music business. If that were true, then as online marketers slashed prices, sales would increase. But this hasn't happened because, despite what Napster fans would have you believe, it was never about prices, but about finding the music that you, and only you, wanted. This is the market that sites like Last.fm are designed to infiltrate - but a radio station broadcast to millions cannot capture this ability. On the other hand, one can hope that I will be pleasantly surprised.

Terry McBride interviews with Paste

2009-09-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

Phew! It's been a while! Guess I've been busy getting a MIREX submission for chord detection completed. Anyway, news of the day: recently Terry McBride sat down with Paste Magazine for a quick "Where are we going?" interview. It's a very quick, but good view of how the music industry is finally dealing with their new role.

Cool

2009-08-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

If true.

Only $33?

2009-08-10T17:44:00.000-07:00

Wow. Imagine if you were stranded on a desert island, without a calculator, and you needed to quickly multiply two large numbers. I mean, when you are stranded on a desert island, life is fairly hectic. When you need something multiplied, you need it now!

Well, thank God, Albert Clay has found the code to mentally multiply two numbers. Actually, I should say "cracked" the code, since that is what the headline said. Funny, I do not remember anyone encrypting math. Was I given a key in third grade when I learned my multiplication table? Damnit! What did I do with that?

I think the opening line from the original article in The New & Observer was even more laughable:

"On a yellow scratch pad, Albert Clay works out a math problem that can stump a calculator -- and all of the ciphering occurs inside his white-haired head."

Wow, that's impressive if true. What was the problem? Fermant's Last Thereom? Maybe the Riemann Hypothesis? How to love? Surely, this must be difficult!

54,321 x 12,345 = ?

(Collective groan). Really? That's not special! What kind of crappy ass calculator couldn't do this? Apparently, the pocket calculator could not display enough digits. Again, not special. If you have a 10 digit display, then you can enter 10,000,000,000 x 10 and the calculator will be unable to display the result unless it can do scientific notation. And a pocket calculator!?!? Was his abacus in the repair shop? Ok, well what is the trick?

"Suffice it to say you multiply the digits on the right, cross-multiply and add the digits in the center, then multiply the digits on the left."

That's not a code! That's math! This is not a short-cut. It's just doing the problem in a different way so that you can remember the steps easier. It's almost as if you can't just create information from nothing. Damn you Shannon! But wait, this old fart will sell you his "secret" for only $33. Why? For what purpose? The only value this has is as a party trick for a really, really dull person at a really, really dull party.

"Dude, this party is so lame!"

"Not to worry braugh, I scored us some paper and #2 pencils. We can long-division the shit out of this party!"

Christ, I wish I could say that this was a just some small town paper in rural America, but this is my hometown newspaper and served the area known as The Research Triangle.

Bobby McFerrin on the Pentatonic Scale

2009-07-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

It's not news, it's CNN

2009-07-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

I love how every year, a survey comes out saying that college graduates in math and science fields earn more than other majors. What's more appalling is that some think this is news. The article here states that it is a matter of supply and demand, but this is not entirely true. However, this article inspired me to share a couple of stories from my own family and how the educational system in America is failing.

It is true that there is a "braindrain," which is largely the fault of the poor education in math and science being delivered by the public schools in The United States. Personally, my family has two stories: one from public school and the other is sadly, from private school. The public school story involves my little sister. Her calculus teacher was working through the details of a problem in class, and he must have been proud of his work because he stepped back from the board and stated, "You know, I should have taken calculus; I would have been pretty good at it!" The idea that someone can teach a subject by following along in the book or staying just a lesson ahead of the students is appalling. In order to teach a subject, you need to understand the subject on a level deeper than the book; otherwise, you will not be able to explain the subject in a different way than the book. One thing I've learned in teaching is to present the same subject material in several different ways because what works for one student may not work for another.

Another problem, which I find even worse, is that the teacher says he should have taken it solely because he would have good at it. If you only take on challenges because you are good at it, then you are not really challenging yourself. Imagine the impact of John F. Kennedy's speech if he said,

"And they may well ask why climb a small hill? Why, 35 years ago, fly from New York to Boston? Why does Rice play local high schools? Because these things are easy and we'd be really good at it!" (Original quote may be read here.)

Not exactly inspiring. Thankfully, JFK did not have such defeatist attitude, but believed we do things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal [of going to the moon] will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." I get chills every time I hear this speech. No matter how many times I hear it, I am always inspired.

The other story, and maybe more shocking, involves my little brother. At a parent-teacher conference, his teacher told my mother that my little brother needed to stop working ahead of the class because "it wasn't fair" to the rest of the students. I am still amazed that mother did not bitch slap the teacher for saying that a student needed to stop learning.

There are more reasons that math and science majors earn more than liberal arts degrees than just supply and demand. I hope to discuss other reasons in a future post.

Awesome

2009-07-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

Spotify in the US by this fall? Like I said, awesome!

Taxes for Ear Candles and Other Silly Crap

2009-07-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

Note: The intent of this article is not meant to persuade one for or against a government, single-payer health care system. Rather, it is to address the specific application of tax dollars to medical methodologies that do not hold up to the rigors of scientific testing.

When I started this blog, I made a promise not to discuss politics unless it crosses the lines of promoting woo through legislation (note: I do not care if a politician believes in crap (for this blog), but I do care if they want to force taxpayers to pay or believe crap). Dennis Kucinich has given me just such a chance with a recent blog post on the Daily Kos. Specifically, this is to address the following comment:

"One amendment brings into standard coverage for the first time complementary and alternative medicine, (integrative medicine)."

This should make anyone who has an understanding of science shudder. What is wrong with this amendment? First, in order for something to be alternative to medicine means that it either has not been shown to be medically (i.e., scientifically) effective or has been disproven to be effective under numerous rigorous test. For instance, here are some examples:

Accupuncture has been shown to have no effect on back pain. This is also an example of the media being scientifically illiterate with such ridiculous headlines such as "Even fake accupuncture helps back pain."
Ear candles. Wow, be more ridiculous.
Homeopathy. This is may be my favorite medically-based pseudoscience. Want to cure a cold? Take an a small amount of onion (because both onion and a cold cause you to tear up and affect the mucus membranes in your nose), dilute it with water to the point that you would need a container the size of the solar system to have a realistic chance of retaining just a single molecule of the onion, then ingest or drink a small amount of the diluted solution. How do the practicioners of homeopathy justify their treatment when there is zero probability that I have ingested a single molecule of the onion? Water has memory, which is strengthend by shaking the "mixture" at each stage of dilution. No joke. They really want to throw away everything we know of chemistry. Further, the more you dilute something, supposedly it gets more powerful. Take that physics!

Essentially, this legislation not only allows for any treatment to be used, but the government will now pay for it! While we are at it, why not allow for people to get energy tax benefits because they claim their car is a perpetual motion machine? Is it not bad enough that the government has spent $2.5 billion researching CAM (complimentary and alternative medicine) only to find it does not work? The only thing worse than spending this amount of money is to then ignore the findings and pay for people to get ineffective treatment!

Anyway, I encourage people to write to their congressman or congress woman to voice their concerns about any legislation that uses tax dollars to administer disproven medical methodologies.

Homeopathic A&E

2009-07-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

Just awesome...

Are recommenders reaching their limit?... No!

2009-07-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

At the recent UMAP 2009 conference, a paper raised the possibility that we are reaching the possible performance limits of recommendation systems (RS). If true, this would change the landscape for research and development in RS. In fact, some blogs discussed this paper before it was even presented! However, after reading the paper, I'm a bit inclined to disagree at the hype over this paper. It's true, the paper does point to the performance limit for RS based on the current system of obtaining recommendation data. However, it does not mean that no one can build a better RS.

First, I want to discuss what the potential impact could mean for RS if indeed, we reach a true limit of performance. As an example, assume that for a particular task (e.g., music recommendation), people have a self-agreement 0f 90%. That is, a person will agree with themselves 90 times if they rank 100 songs one day and then rank the same 100 songs two weeks later. Assume that tastes do not change, which the authors argue is the case in their setting (they make three measurements at different points in time). What does this mean? Some possible explanations:

(1) The user doesn't know if or how much he likes the movie.
(2) The user doesn't understand or can't specify the degree to what he likes the movie into discrete, deterministic categories.

(1) is, by default, the wrong option since the user's judgment is the correct answer automatically; however, (2) makes some sense. While people may have an understanding if they really like or hate something, there is a rather large ambiguous area in the middle. How many people can consistently listen to a song and say, "I like that song 40%"? What does that even mean? Does the user like it 40% of the time he hears it? Does it mean that it would be in the 40th percentile of songs if the user were to rank every song he has listened to? If he ranked every song he's heard several times, would the average rank be the 40% percentile? The authors of the paper demonstrate this when they show that the inter-subject disagreement occurs 34% between rankings 2 and 3 and 25% of the time between 3 and 4 on a 5 point scale. In other words, people aren't able to rank movies accurately if they do not have a strong opinion. Usually, it assumed that the fault lies with the user; that is, a person is confused about what the categories imply. I disagree. I believe that it's a probabilistic rating because yes, opinions constantly change. People are not machines. They have emotions. Emotional states have an impact on how we both interpret and want to interpret our environment.

Second, how can we measure the success of a RS when 100% is theoretically impossible? What does this even mean? This issue has come up several times in terms of genre recognition. Until the reprint of Scanning the Dial and the accompanying criticism directed at the MIR community, some authors have validated their algorithms by stating that it is more accurate than humans. As pointed out in a couple papers, this is nonsensical since genres are ill-defined. Ultimately, our categorical dimensions of music is largely subjective and built over a life-time of (often conflicting) feedback from society. Still, we can ask, what if a RS comes out with a better accuracy than the documented limit? Does it know what people will like more than humans? Of course not. It shows an error in the choice of evaluation criteria. Ultimately, a RS is measured at a moment in time. If a person likes something on Tuesday, but does not like it on Wednesday, it does not mean the user is confused. It means he liked it on Tuesday, but not on Wednesday. Tastes may change based on mood, evaluation of new information based on the world around us, etc. Future RS may be able to detect this information to update adaptively.

This again brings up the problem with an RS. Every RS is based on the idea that a user will like something similar to what the user liked in the past. Further, almost all RS model a user as a single entity or that the user must maintain separate profiles for different tastes. For example, Last.fm and Pandora cannot build a station or user profile that maintains two separate personalities - it's up to the user to construct this system. Netflix only allows one user profile per account. While my fiancee and I may like some of the same movies, we certainly do not like all of them. Heck, some days I want a good skeptical show like Bullshit, but on another day I may want pure magical fantasy.

Even with transparency, somethings get muddled by small clusters of users who have a very demonstrated behavior. For example, Netflix is currently telling me that I will like Wallace & Gromit because I like This is Spinal Tap. How are these two even connected? The first is in the category "Children & Family Suggestions" and the other is a movie about a fictitious failed hair-band. Granted, both are good, but the only relation here is only based on discrimination (Wallace & Gromit is a UK show and Spinal Tap is an American movie about a British band). Apparently, all British humor is the same to Netflix users. The weirdest might be that I'll like a Talking Heads concert because I like the movie Fargo. Obviously, content analysis would do a better job of filtering the nonsense predictions.

So, in conclusion, research in recommendation systems is not reaching it's limit in performance. Rather, recommendations based on the idea that a user is a simple, static classifier is limited from the start. Smarter, better recommendation systems that can understand complex user behavior such as emotional state, thoughts on quality, and incorporating content analysis will be the building blocks of the next generation of recommendation systems.

Africa

2009-06-26T08:49:00.001-07:00

Temporal Tag Information

2009-06-18T18:29:00.000-07:00

Recently, I presented a paper at ICASSP that discussed the importance of incorporating temporal information into the structure of automatic tag recommendation algorithms. Until this paper, all studies and systems designed to overcome the "cold start" problem ignored temporal information for the most part. In fact, I am aware of only three exceptions:

(1) Using derivatives of features, such as MFCCs. This incorporates temporal information on only a small scale (~50-100ms).
(2) Averaging features from multiple frames in a given temporal window (ex: averaging 100 ms frames over a duration of 1 second).
(3) Extracting song-level features, such as rhythmic features; e.g., estimated beat histograms.

The problem with the above approaches it that they incorporate information on a very small scale and do not incorporate "syntactic structure." One problem I have had with music recommendation research is that many of the systems are based on a rather faulty assumption. Researchers have taken an abstract from a presentation given by Gjerdingen and Perrot in 1999 and essentially taken the results way too far. Specifically, researchers have taken for granted the "bag-of-frames" approach, which essentially says that any small segment of a song is representative of the whole song. In other words, one can listen to 250 ms of a song and that will be representative. This is obviously a faulty assumption and it has been discussed here and here. Originally, this assumption was used in studies on genre classification. Since genre is an ill-defined concept anyway, it is difficult to verify this assumption. However, even if this assumption is true, it does not make sense to translate this to tags, which have a better defined meaning. For example, the Pandora tags of "repetative melodic phrasing" and "extensive vamping" have obvious acoustic semantic structure.

So how does our study contrast with previous approaches?

In the paper, we build a vocabulary of acoustic tokens, which can be seen as acoustic generalizations of phonemes in automatic speech recognition (or musiphones as Doug Turnbull called them - yes, Doug, I consider this your terminology). Not only are the musiphones represented by a temporal model (i.e., a multi-state HMM), but syntax is also considered through the use of unigram and bigram counts. Compared to the baseline (Turnbull, Barrington, Torres, and Lanckriel), our algorithm performance substantially better; especially for tags which are considered to be temporal in nature (i.e., melody, solos, etc.). While this paper mirrors the implementation we proposed for genre detection in 2006, the results are more informative in the 2009 ICASSP paper.

Note: The Gjerdingen and Perrot presentation has finally been published so that people can read the study in its entirety. Two things to note in addition to the papers linked above:

(1) Gjerdingen and Perrot performed a task of discriminating genres (i.e., a closed, forced choice) and not identification (i.e., an open, forced or unforced choice).
(2) Only 10 genres were used and most where fairly easy to discriminate.

Context and song appeal

2009-05-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I mentioned that it is a bit early to state that the success of Pandora and Last.fm is purely based on the strengths of their recommender algorithms. The newest copy of Psychology of Music contains an article by Silva and Silva on how successful various methods of increasing a unknown song compare. I should caution this is a preliminary study and all conclusions should be taken in this light.

Anyway, the authors had students listen and judge an unknown song in various contexts. Their findings were that the students gave the unknown song higher ratings if the students read an article about the artist of the unknown song, if a well-known and positively liked song followed the unknown song, or if a music critic praised the song prior to its playing. The authors also argue that repeated exposure to a song does not increase a song's appeal, which is a stark contrast to the most common method employed by radio stations (ahem, Payola). However, I think the argument is a little weak, since (as the authors note), they repeated the song six times in a row. Their premise behind the "repeated exposure is beneficial" hypothesis was based on the Pavlovian condition, but I disagree. The Pavlovian effect works by associating an emotional neutral action (ringing a bell around a dog) to a positive or negative association by pairing the two together (ringing a bell around a dog and then feeding him). Done correctly, the subject will associate the neutral action positively (dog salivates when the bell is rung, regardless if food is around). For starters, they did not test the premise since they gave repeated exposure without any pairing of a positive or negative stimulus.

However, we can ask what if some these are true? How does this change how we view recommenders like Pandora and Last.fm? First, comparing radio stations is problematic if done in series because if there is a truly positive song, then songs around it would be viewed positively. In other words, the rich get richer. In order to remove the music critic affect, one needs to establish "placebos" so that users cannot infer a playlist is better than another for reasons other than the audio. For example, if users know that their ratings are taken into consideration (Last.fm) or that experts labeled the music (Pandora), the users may rate the playlist higher than it would under neutral conditions. Also, user should know little about the bands, which is difficult to ensure. Finding an unknown jam band might be difficult to accomplish for that frat guy sitting in class with an old set of Bercinstocks, Grateful Dead T-shirt, and messed-up hair.

This is not to say that previous approaches to compare playlists are worthless - it's just that they need to be considered knowing all the above factors.

Pandora's Profit

2009-05-19T11:14:00.000-07:00

Wired had a little blurb about Pandora finally turning a profit in 2010. This can be attributed to many things, such as the growing fan base, the iPhone application, and the addition of commercials. What's more interesting is that Pandora is essentially becoming the same thing as radio in doing so with a small quirk. First, the addition of audio commercials was a major step, not just in the profitability, but also in the precedent. If viewers continue to listen, it's very likely ads will increase in frequency. It appears that listeners are not against advertisements in general, but no one has come up with a limit before users turn away en mass.

Also, the iPhone application is essentially the same in functionality as a personal portable radio. The only real difference is that you are streaming radio from the web to your phone. However, you have marginal control over the content. Yes, you pick the artist and you can assign "thumbs up" and "thumbs down," but I would not say that this radio is truly personal. You have no direct control on novelty, artist frequency, repeats, etc.

I think what has worked best for Pandora is the perceived personalization. Essentially, users do not want to be dictated listening habits. There's also an inherit confirmation bias in any recommender system. I'll remember the hits and forget the misses or explain it away. Also, people tend to respond positively when someone says, "you'll like this." It's incredibly hard to come up with a controled test to measure effectiveness. Some researchers have tried, such as comparing lists of recommendations and asking which is man-made or machine-made. However, the goal of a recommendation engine is to build the one with the best recommendations, not to mimick humans. At best, we can compare how two engines perform by comparing the number of skips.

For example, we could compare Pandora and Last.fm in a large-scale listening test. Again, we need controls. Pandora and Last.fm differ in the amount of perceived control. Both Pandora and Last.fm do not give a lot of control on how music is played, but Last.fm allows more feedback. Both Pandora and Last.fm have access to a positive/negative vote for each song and initial seed song selection. However, Last.fm also allows for tagging individual songs in an effort to improve selection. Of course, this is legitiatimate; however, a real test would let users tag songs for Pandora, but then Pandora would just ignore the tags. In addition, users need to be blinded on how the process works. It's not a fair comparison if someone tells you that a system is based on machine interpretations of expert or wisdom-of-the-crowd ratings.

I'm glad that Internet radio stations that thrive on "personalized" recommendations are beginning to make a profit. However, it's a bit early to say that a new dawn of music has emerged. Promising, absolutely; but more research is needed.

Best PhD comic ever

2009-05-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

Hilarious, yet so true.

Jenny McCarthy Is a Plague

2009-05-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine recently had twins. He now has to tell one of his in-laws that they are no longer welcome to their house because they refused to get their kids vaccinated. Why? Because Jenny McCarthy became an expert because... um...

Anyway, here's to you, McCarthy and your ever increasing body count.

Naked CIO surprisingly low-tech

2009-05-12T05:50:00.000-07:00

I'm busy getting ready for the ISMIR deadline, but it was extended so I can take a few minutes to write. Yesterday, the Naked CIO posted an anti-social networking column. To his credit, he says that he likes increased social connectivity; however, this could be similar to when a Creationist says they are not religious and then spend the next few paragraphs arguing for the existance of a designer. The Naked CIO's main problem is how social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook, will impact the work place (Note: I'm on Twitter now). Simple: people will learn how to use the technology.

I have a few problems with some specific arguments he makes. He starts by stating that email and instant messenging have blurred the line between formal communication between discussions on work-related matters and regular social interaction. One problem with this argument is his hidden premise that formality is more productive and healthy to the work environment. In reality, there are plenty of reasons to believe this is not true. Email, local wikis, and instant messenging have allowed for a lot of wasteful formal structures to be eliminated. It is no longer necessary to have a formal board meeting on every topic. I'm reminded of my first job out of college as a great example. The organizer started the meeting by saying that we had a meeting next month to plan a project and he wanted to get together to plan for the meeting. I'm not kidding. After 5 minutes I got up and left. He sent someone after to me when I didn't return and asked what I was doing. I had set up a project mailing list with an archive. Second, it is not fair to say that email and other technologies are the reason for decreased formality. Formality may have degraded for the simple reason that it is not necessary for increased productivity and can even become a negative by wasting time and making people remain silent because it would be rude to speak. As an example, overall attire has progressively moved from a coat and tie environment to khakis and polo shirts as the social norm. Why? Comfort.

He then goes through some scenarios that he feels may impact businesses. Here are the problems and my solutions:

1) Is a tweet from a company executive an official statement? Response: Depends. It's called a disclaimer. Columnists use this all the time so that the media outlet is not held responsible for opinion.

2) What if a friend mentions the possibility of layoffs on a social networking site and that negatively impacts the company, even if there are no layoffs coming? Response: Yes, new technologies make our jobs easier, even the job of being stupid. Social networking sites make it easier for young women to become targets of pediophiles, but it does not change the problem that teenagers are irresponsible and nieve. Most social networking sites have an option to send a private message versus posting to the known universe. The non-digital anology would be something like this: imagine you are sitting at a coffee shop near Wall Street with a friend. You are talking about potential layoffs with your company and you know this is sensitive information. You can either whisper it quitely or yell at him through a bullhorn. Yes, there might be an occasional idiot that unknowningly betrays his company, but there are idiots everywhere. We should not stop progressing as a culture because idiots cannot take care of themselves.

3) How do we resolve the issue of privacy when people can "Google" one another. Is it right for a company to do this type of background check on a potential employee? Reply: Is it right for a potential employee to lie or withhold information that may negatively impact his ability to work? Why should companies assume that everyone who applies for a job is trustworthy? People lie on resumes. People lie in interviews. Here's an example: an interviewer asks a candidate "What's your biggest weakness?" The candidate pauses, glances to the side, and replies, "Probably that I work to hard." Seriously? That's your weakness? The Naked CIO uses his brother as an example and questions what would happen if a company saw that his brother is a musician. Well, if he tours a lot and will miss work, then I fault your brother for withholding that information. The company should know if he's going to be missing work to tour or at least, be tired all day because he's playing music at a local club until 2 AM. Companies should know if you have another job. Heck, it's probably illegal not to tell them if you have to sign a disclosure agreement and your other job or hobby is in a related area. If your brother is an amature and maybe only has a couple gigs a month, your company will not care. Hell, it's better than what 90% of men do, which is sit on the couch and drink beer while watching football.

I'll never understand these nostalogic "those kids today" thoughts. Society evolves as technology evolves. You either learn to use it or end up complaining about the good ole' days.

Doggie Pseudoscience

2009-05-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

I recently got an email about the frequency of washing my dog from the kennel where I board my dog, Marley. Needless to say, the brought in some naturalist veterinarian, to recommend shampoos and gave the standard crap advice. I'll forgo my rant on the obvious appeal to nature logical fallacy and go to my response to their call to avoid "chemicals." Here is the letter:

Dear Wag-A-Lot,

In your recent e-letter, you mentioned an article about the proper frequency we should wash our dog. In addition, you mentioned that we should use natural shampoos and "avoid artificially produced shampoos that contain chemicals as their major ingredients." I have had a hard time finding a shampoo that fits your description. The problem is that every natural or artificial shampoo has some form of chemical as a major ingredient. For example, most shampoos, such as the ones you mentioned (Spa and Earthbath), contain water, which is a chemical. Specifically, this is a molecule and all molecules are chemicals, so I originally filtered the list to only elements. However, I then did a little more research and found out that elements are also chemicals! In fact, since chemistry is the study of matter and its interactions with other matter, a chemical substance is any piece of matter which can be described by an empirical formula which expresses the relative numbers of each type of atom in it. Since finding this out, I have tried various forms of energy to clean my dog. First, I tried radiant energy in the form of light. I tried several types of lights from strobe lights to flashlights at various intensities, but this just seemed to make my dog excited and not any cleaner. I could try other forms such as X-rays, but I am not sure of places that offer X-ray dog cleaning. Do you know of any? Next, I tried potential energy by balancing my dog on top of a tall ledge. Not only did my dog stay filthy, but he also seemed rather uncomfortable. Fortunately, my dog was in a perfect setup to try the next form of energy - kinetic energy. Let's just say that the fall made my dog leery of going near me and he was actually dirtier.

Magnetism was my next energy type to try. After giving my dog a few treats so he would trust me again, I waved kitchen magnets over him. Maybe they are not strong enough to clean effectively. Can you suggest some effective magnets that might help clean my dog? He's getting very filthy and annoyed. In the meantime, maybe you can suggest some improvements on some other approaches. Heat - how long and hot do I need to cook my dog? Also, I never thought of hot dogs as being particularly clean. Electricity - I'm not a fan of shocking my dog, but if you guys know of an effective voltage and amperage I'll try it. I am an electrical engineer by trade and I feel I can administer this effectively on my own. Nuclear - are there nuclear power companies that offer dog cleaning? The ones I've contacted thought I was crazy.

I realize that I could also maybe try dark matter and dark energy, but if I'm not mistaken, scientists are still trying to detect these and there have been no attempts to harness them or put them into a dog shampoo. Please, let me know of any advice you can give me. My neighbors are complaining about my dogs stench and his howling over my treatments.

Jeremy

Great Music Tag Comic

2009-04-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, a human can do more than any automatic recommender.

Life's a little sadder in Asia...

2009-04-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

Well, at least Last.fm allows a brief free trial. One can only hope it's temporary and international copyright issues get resolved. It's a good thing I have only one more day! But this leaves an interesting question: if I were to stay here, how would I get my multimedia needs fulfilled?

Spotify? Nope.

Pandora? Nope.

iTunes? NOPE! See the picture to the left.

Last.fm? For a price. But will that stay?

I even went to a couple brick and mortar store in Taipei. My choices in the developed parts of the city were the Christinas and the Justins of Western music or I could get the Tawainese version. In the undeveloped area, I could find music I might want to listen to - on cassette tapes! I haven't been able to play a cassette since 1998! So I ask, what legal means can I get music? Maybe we need to let the Far East actually be able to get the music they want before we criticize them for downloading music illegaly...

Yet another missing link

2009-04-22T18:23:00.000-07:00

Note: Evolution is always a sensitive issue in the US. I am clearly on the science side of things. This may be offensive, but to be honest, it's offensive that a non-scientist would dictate science to a scientist. This would be like a bunch of lawyers dictating what medical procedures should be performed... wait, strike that.

Texas, have fun with this one!

"I don't see how we can say there is no disagreement about evolution. There is disagreement," [Board member Ken Mercer] said."

Actually Ken Mercer's right. There is a disagreement between people of science and those who do not understand science. But maybe it's best to have scientists determine how to study science and not ministers, priests, etc. Notice that Stephen Hawking is not telling Pope Benedict how to teach Christ's message. The truth is that there is no disagreement over whether evolution occurred, but rather a disagreement on how evolution occurred. That is, the specific historical path. One that drives me crazy is when people will use the "evolution is just a theory" argument. This is nonsense. Everything in science is a theory. This just shows a clear misunderstanding of what it theory means in a scientific context. Creationists would have you believe that a scientific theory is the same as a hypothesis, which is not true. A hypothesis is a guess for which there is little to no experimental validation (yet). To be a scientific theory, you must have performed experiments, done analysis, verified predictions, etc.

Plus, let's be honest, this debate in Texas has nothing to do with providing children with a better, more "open" version of science. If so, where are the works debating the round-earth theory (yes, this is a theory and there exist those who dispute it). Creationists would make great lawyers because they have a way of combating logic with nonsensical crap to the point your brain wants to explode. For example, I'm often told that there is not one thing that I can do to disprove creationism and prove evolution. Well, duh. Science doesn't work that way. However, I can easily point to many observations that suggest that evolution explains the observations we've made. I can also easily point out that creationism is NOT a science. Here goes: design a test to disprove God. Can't do it? Then it's not science and does not belong in science class.

British Music Experience

2009-04-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

When is ISMIR going back to London?

ICASSP Day 2

2009-04-22T00:45:00.000-07:00

Today was a much more interesting day in terms of technical content (at least, to me). In the morning I went to Content-based Audio Processing session (at least the first half). All the presentations were good, but I liked "Interpolating Hidden Markov Model and its Application to Automatic Instrument Recognition" by Tumoas Virtanen and Toni Heittola the best. Essentially, the motivation is that hidden Markov models (HMMs) make an assumption that an audio element is decomposed into discrete states. In reality, there would be a smoother transition between states and while one can add states to the model to reduce the error, it requires a lot more data since there are more parameters. Their suggestion is to create auxillary states by using interpolation methods on the HMM parameters. They demonstrated a 5% absolute improvement over the baseline (no interpolation). However, their test database was isolated instrument recognition and I would have liked to see how their approach behaved in the presence of different noises and levels. Using discrete states can help with noise reduction by vector quantizing the state space. It's possibe that the presence of noise could take the state trajectory down an erroneous path. For the afternoon, I went to the poster sessions and there's plenty I could say, but I'd miss the rest of the conference. Instead I took pictures of the posters and they are presented below.

This is a plug for Emiru Tsunoo's paper titled "Rhythm Map: Extraction of Unit Rhythmic Patterns and Alanysis of Rhythmic Structure from Music Acoustic Signals." I've read the paper and it's very good work. I like the search for new and better features.

Emiru presenting his poster. He was crowded the entire time.

Dr. Sagayama explaining RhythmMap to Malcolm Slaney of Yahoo! and Stanford.

ICASSP Day 1

2009-04-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

The ICASSP technical sessions started today. They had a cool intro with an authentic Taiwanese singer/drum pair. This time I thought ahead and brought my camera.

There was a demo for a voice-activated music player with an emotion-based display by Chungwa Telecom. It's always cool to see new music retrieval products; however, it there did not appear to be a lot of novelty in either the processing or visualization. Essentially, you spoke the name of the artist and brought up some of their songs and locations in the arousal-valence emotional plane. There was no discovery involved. Anyway, today was a popular day for sight seeing among the speech and music part of the conference. Tomorrow should be a better day for technical content.

ICASSP!

2009-04-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

From Japan to Taipei! I have a back catalog of pictures to post from my visit in Japan, but I figured that I should cover ICASSP in "real time." Yesterday was the opening ceremony, which was actually quite nice. I forgot my camera, so I'll have to track down pictures of the opening musical act, which contained live authentic Tawainese music. I'll try to post everyday, but no promises. The ISMIR deadline is soon afterwards and I may submit a couple of papers, which means that ICASSP is a working conference. However, I will take a minute to say that I liked the proceedings.

ICASSP presentations not versatile

2009-04-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

My fiancee bought me a new laptop before I left for Japan and Taipei (ICASSP), but rather than pay $100-150 for MS Office, I decided to try Open Office because I think it's easier to have the application on my machine versus having to synchronize Google Docs if I want to work on a flight or something. I'm a huge fan of Open Office so far since it seems to have all the power of MS Office with no real cost. However, ICASSP doesn't feel that way. First, you are supposed to use their laptops. Fair enough, but why this:

The ICASSP laptops are equipped with:
--Windows XP sp3
--WirelessLAN connection, USB port, DVD Player
--Office 2003 and Office 2007
--Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Media Player (Microsoft/real/Quicktime)

Ugh!  Apparently if you use free software, you're screwed.  I've tried to take my slides and save it as MS Powerpoint, but that didn't work because all the animations and MS Visio drawings I made didn't go through the transition.  I have MS Office, but it's on my computer back at Georgia Tech, so I have to remote connect and fix my slides.  It's an incredibly slow process!  Anyway, for shame on ICASSP for no embracing open source.

The REALLY Long Tail

2009-04-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

For once, just once, a reality show did something good.

And just think, some record producer would have called security if she came walking through the door.

Nerd Humor

2009-04-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

Now, if only we could have gotten him to use j instead of i for current.

Sensoji Temple

2009-04-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

Since it was Saturday, I decided to do some sight-seeing and went to the Sensoji Temple, which is pretty close to the university. I'm not going to bore you with all the history because quite frankly, you can read a lot more about it some place else.

The gate is almost on top of the street. It's kind of amazing how close historic and cultural sites can be to modern society.

There are statues on all sides of the temple.

From the gate to the temple, the whole street is lined with various shops.

Some sell food.

I'm thinking about buying this for Jenny.

Oh, hell ya... octopus balls! I've been craving some octopus balls since I got here. Now if only I could find the crab juice stand...

The actual temple is being renovated, so I could not get any good pictures, but this was a pretty cool one.

Leading into the temples are these smoke pits. People wave the smoke over to them before the enter.

The inside of the temple was actually a little disappointing because we could only go in half of it (there was a religious service going on), but there were some pretty good painting on the ceiling. Take that Michelangelo.

Well, all in all, a good day... I'm getting hungry. Good thing my iPod is loaded because I'll bet there's a line at the octopus balls stand.

My Fiancee is really f'in smart

2009-04-03T03:57:00.000-07:00

From time to time, I mention cool research being done at Georgia Tech. Today, I'm taking the pleasure of talking about my fiancee. Her name is Jenny Matthews and she's mentioned towards the bottom under a section titled "New Insights into Tornadoes." Here's an abstract from one of her papers. I guess I miss her today!

EchoNest pulling an April Fool's joke!

2009-04-01T19:15:00.001-07:00

It's amazing how being a "day ahead" the rest of the world can completely catch you off-guard. This morning, I found articles about the Echo Nest's new "goodness" measure API. I'm in Japan, so it's April 2, so it took me a couple minutes to realize this whole thing was a joke (I actually got started to get angry). Anyway, fun with the system (higher score is better):

Twisted Sister 0.81
N-sync: 0.74
The Raconteurs 0.42
Bob Dylan 0.31
Nickelback: 0.13
Rush: 0.09 (Them's fighten' words)
Coldplay 0.02
Warrant 0.01 (Actually, this makes sense)

Great joke guys!

Birds of a feather

2009-03-31T20:26:00.001-07:00

六義園

2009-03-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

Dr. Sagayama took me to the Rikugien Gardens today (Japanese is the title of the post). It is a pretty popular time to visit the gardens right now because the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. In about a week all the flowers will disappear and the Japanese celebrate this time by having cherry blossom parties. I got several cools pics and learned a lot about the link between Japanese gardens and poetry. I even got to take part in a traditional Japanese tea party.

We started out looking at the cherry blossom trees on campus. It's actually really hard to get a good picture since the flowers are so bright.

Even the signs in Tokyo tell where to watch the cherry blossoms.

The main grove in the park is crowded with people. I had to wait a while to get a good shot.

The park reminded me of Central Park in New York. Just beyond the park are skyscrapers.

Dr. Sagayama has been really kind and his students have been great to work with.

This is called "Sleeping Dragon Rock."

Entertainment at Lunch

2009-03-25T23:05:00.000-07:00

Maybe tomorrow the students will eat swords of fire!

My new diggs (for about a month)

2009-03-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

Finally settled here in Tokyo. Here is my new home away from home. Definitely sparse, but hey, I really just need a laptop with Internet. The people here have been incredibly nice and have been very patient with my terrible impression of someone trying to speak Japanese. Yes, I'm that bad that it would even be bad if I was trying to speak it poorly.

It was definetly one of the worst plane rides I've ever had. As soon as we got in the air, we were told that we had to land in Denver because of a medical emergancy. We didn't get back in the air until many hours later. Special tip for anyone: if you feel like you are having problems breathing on the ground, it's not going to be better 5000+ feet in the air. Special thanks to Uchiyama Yuki for staying awake to get me to the hotel.

I have tons of work to do here, but it should still be a fun and very rewarding trip. More tomorrow.

Exciting Oppotunity

2009-03-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

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!

Malcolm Slaney Talk On Friday

2009-03-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

Malcolm Slaney will be giving a talk in the TSRB building at Georgia Tech on Friday. Unfortunately, I may be out of town since my soon-to-be sister-in-law is getting married the week, but I'm trying to talk my fiancee into going. So if you are in the Atlanta area, check out the talk and give me some notes!

Details:

"We're drowning in Multimedia. Hurray!!!!"
Malcolm Slaney
Yahoo! Research and Stanford CCRMA

Friday, March 13th, 11 am
TSRB 132

The wealth of data available on the Internet changes the way we think about multimedia. Never before has there been so much multimedia data available for training models and answering questions. But these new riches bring with it a change in the problems we must think about. The data is noisy and largely unlabeled --- we must make sense of it, often returning an answer in hundreds of milliseconds. How do we understand the user's environment, especially when it extends across the world? How do we take into account context and do it at the scale of the
Internet? In this talk I'd like to share with you Yahoo's experiences in this brave new world of multimedia everywhere, describe promising new technologies, and discuss open research directions. I will describe the need for better user and multimedia models, the kinds of algorithms needed for today's large databases, and how the Internet is changing multimedia retrieval.

Biography

Malcolm Slaney is a principal scientist at Yahoo! Research Laboratory. He received his PhD from Purdue University for his work on computed imaging. He is a coauthor, with A. C. Kak, of the IEEE book "Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging." This book was recently republished by SIAM in their "Classics in Applied Mathematics" Series. He is coeditor, with Steven Greenberg, of the book "Computational Models of Auditory Function."

Before Yahoo!, Dr. Slaney has worked at Bell Laboratory, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, Apple Computer, Interval Research and IBM's Almaden Research Center. He is also a (consulting) Professor at Stanford's CCRMA where he organizes and teaches the Hearing Seminar. His research interests include auditory modeling and perception, multimedia analysis and synthesis, compressed-domain processing, music similarity and audio search, and machine learning. For the last several years he has lead the auditory group at the Telluride Neuromorphic Worksho.

Those Crazy Beatles

2009-03-05T16:31:00.000-08:00

I have not used this blog to criticize many of the worthless or harmful causes of musical artists, actors, and other celebrities because, well, I would never get any work done. However, I could not resist this. That's right, The Bee-At-els have decided that a worthwhile cause is to teach meditation to stressful children through transcendental meditation with the help of the David Lynch Foundation. On the surface, this seems harmless enough. How can one be against teaching stressed-out kids a way to relax?

The problem is that transcendental meditation (TM) is pure pseudo-scientific nonsense. I want to distinguish it against the regular idea of meditation, which is basically a "deep" form of relaxation. Transcendental meditation is supposedly hundreds of years old, but there is little evidence to support this. It was "introduced" to the Western world about 50 years ago by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It has spawned many ridiculous and unfounded claims such as levitation and The Maharishi Effect, where it said that if just 1% of a population is practicing TM, then crops will improve, the area will become a haven from crime, and automobile accidents will decrease to abnormally low levels. Further, this effect is supposed to be scientifically proven. However, all of these claims have been debunked by James Randi in his book, Flim-Flam! Further, the evidence of this effect comes from the most dubious of source - The Maharishi International University and these claims have been further disproven or found to be poor science. My favorite example in the link is the study that did not have a control group because "not one person was willing to be part of the control group." The whole point of the control group is to account for the placebo effect where people will believe they are better just because they feel they have gotten treatment.

Simply put, TM reduces stress as much as any other relaxing activity and is by no means special. Again, I have no problem with teaching children ways to cope with stress, but let's be honest, that's not what the David Lynch foundation is really doing. The reality is that they are using the "think of the children" argument to indoctrinate children into an illogical belief and promoting bad science. If it's stress reduction they are after, then they should be open to any types - sports, reading, talking, going for a walk, etc. My problem with this is the same as if Creed taught religion and prayer behind the disguise that this would prevent kids from hanging out on the streets and developing drug habits. It might, but so would an afterschool basketball league.

Note: Creed is an example since they are the most famous religious group I can think of. As far as I know, their humanitarian efforts are as successful and spirited as their music.

ICASSP Multimedia Search and Retrieval Symposium

2009-03-03T16:39:00.000-08:00

ICASSP is grouping all the tutorials, papers, panels, etc. on multimedia search and retrieval into a thematic symposium with a guided program flow. Included is a series of overview talks which are to "enhance cross-disciplinary interaction and broaden education by bringing together the diverse innovations and discoveries" of the field. This may sound familiar to many of the readers, since this is one of the goals of ISMIR. Some program highlights:

Malcolm Slaney is to give an overview talk on "Music Retrieval at the Scale of the Internet".
Meinard Mueller is hosting a tutorial on "Analysis and Retrieval Techniques for Music and Motion Data"
A panel discussion on whether media search has found its optimal platform
Special session on the challenges and opportunities with unlimited data for signal processing
A series of presentations on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
Another series of presentations on Multimedia Databases

This technical symposium should give the conference a neat side story.

Oh, thank God! A new physical media format!

2009-02-23T13:35:00.000-08:00

I saw this today and just had one question: WHY?!?!

I wonder what's new in 8-track technology? Just when I think the record industry has joined the 21st century, they pull something like this. Jeez!

Wikipedia Lecture 2/13/2009

2009-02-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

The lecture by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was very cool, especially in his discussion of what the goals of Wikipedia are and what they are not. Briefly, Wikipedia is based on the principles of Richard Stallman; that is, open source means the right to copy, modify, and redistribute. It is most of all, an encyclopedia, not a data dump, library, or textbook. This point is often forgotten by many members of the media and society in general. Even in regards to scientific articles, no one should ever point to a particular Wikipedia article for their factual basis. It is only meant to give an overview and any specifics should be fact-checked (Wikipedia even gives people a head start). Simply put, Wikipedia can, has, and will be wrong at times.

This gets into a huge problem in our society: kids are not taught how to research. It is not enough to find one source and declare this as a true statement. Another silly example. Blaming Wikipedia would be like blaming Britannica, which themselves are not experts on everything they write about.

However, Mr. Wales said that there is not enough academic information on Wikipedia and social sites in general, but he wants more. He said such information would help imporve Wikipedia, but he adds, the press should not be driving such research. What's even more exciting is that we can still learn about how Wikipedia started by looking at the 100 or so languages with fewer than 10,000 articles. Mr. Wales points out that most of these groups really do have a goal-oriented focus in that they talk about what will get their language noticed.

Secret Science Agendas in Headlines

2009-02-12T05:50:00.001-08:00

My fiancee and I both think the coolest science story as of late is the Large Hydrogen Collider (LHC), even though neither of us are physictists. That's why I was a little discouraged to see this obviously biased science press release. Just from the headline and first sentence, I thought, "Uh-oh, they are spending money on unnecessary safety measure just to please the scientific-illiterate."

For those who may not know, the LHC is a giant particle smasher, which scientist hope will answer many pressing questions, such as the existance of the Higgs boson, many particles predicted by supersymmetry, and how dark matter and dark energy work. However, many people are frieghtened over essentially ignorance because they fear the LHC will produce stable micro black holes and strangelets (and I'm sure many other things). Safety studies were conducted and stated that there was no danger. You can read more on this here. Fox News even goes so far as to show an artist's illustration of a black hole (note: they don't even show a micro black hole since there are galaxies swirling around the black hole... which is weirder still black holes are generally in galaxies).

So, when I saw that the LHC was being delayed due to "safety," naturally I thought this meant that they were going to devise someway to stop something that wouldn't happen anyway. It's kind of like Lisa Simpson's tiger repellant rock. Anyway, after reading the article, I found out that "safety" was in regards to the EQUIPMENT. It had nothing to do with any type of safety for humans!!! Of course, you wouldn't know this unless you read the whole article, but most people only read, especially when posted online.

And this is not to fault FoxNews, since the story came from the Associated Press. So what are the morals of this tale:

All reporting is biased, even if unintenionaly.
You really do have to read the whole article.
Scientists need to be careful about the words they use. They never should have used the word "safety." Instead, they should have said something along the lines of "taking measures to protect equipment."

Attending a lecture can cause controversy?!?!

2009-02-11T07:45:00.001-08:00

I recently got a comment from the founder of MyWikiBiz.com, Gregory Kohs, which appears to be a Wikipedia-style host for those who want to escape the Wisdom of the Crowds and also, a place for companies and non-profits to set up defacto advertisments and corporate websites. I browsed the supporting blog, but find that the author has no clear understanding of what Wikipedia really is. You can usually spot a crank when they start using loaded questions and other logical fallicies.

Today, I'll talk about just one part in his blog that really got me. When Wikipedia says that it is "not a tool to support commerce," Mr. Kohs responds:

"Would we say that "Wikipedia is not a tool to support education"? Of course not, because hundreds of thousands, if not millions of students regularly use it as a basic primer on any academic topic under the sun.

Would we say that "Wikipedia is not a tool to support medicine"? Again, of course not, because hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people suffering from various ailments probably turn to Wikipedia as a first-line source of remedy and cure."

Wow. Just wow. Equating commerce to education and medicine is a weak anology (a logical fallicy). A Wikipedia article detailing the Pythogrean Theorem is not the same as a Pepsi advertisement. The difference? Who profits from a student learning a key element of understanding geometry? The student (the reader) and no-one else! A webpage detailing how wonderful Pepsi is generates profit to Pepsi (the probably writer or third-party). Same thing for medicine. On the other hand, if a link on this Wikipedia article points to a chiropractor, then it would be deleted once found.

That's not to say that Pepsi cannot have a site on Wikipedia, and indeed, they do. It details the history of the company, their marketing approaches, the rivalry with Coke, etc. What you do not find is "Oh this stuff is awesome. And if you drink it, maybe Angelina Jolie will think you're hot!"

Anyway, I can't wait for the lecture on Friday, even if some people hold sour grapes.

Jimmy Wales here Friday!

2009-02-10T08:51:00.000-08:00

I already know what I'm doing Friday afternoon. Jimmy Wales is talking at Georgia Tech on Friday!

A Pet Project

2009-01-13T12:17:00.001-08:00

Some people at Georgia Tech just do some really cool stuff.

(Pun intended).

Just beginning to mourn

2009-01-12T10:44:00.000-08:00

My new fiancee's first words to me this morning: "You look like someone just died."

Not someone, but something. My iPod is no longer for this world. Won't turn on, won't charge. It's a poor excuse for a paperweight now. Hmm, what's my next mp3 player?

Digital Music Leads the Way

2009-01-02T06:02:00.000-08:00

Total music sales grew 10% this year, which is a positive trend the music industry has not seen in a long time. More interesting is that digital sales led the way, with a 27% increase in digital track sold and a 32% increase in digital album sales. However, the number of physical albums sold is down 14%, including an 8.6% decrease in physical albums sold by e-commerce sites. I'm sure that many will point to the irony of this being revealed around the same time the RIAA announced it was going to stop sueing their constumers for digital file sharing. Before anyone does this, I will disagree since the RIAA was never against digital downloads, but illegal digital downloads since they receive no profit.

Rather, I want to comment on the idea that people still prefer albums over singles. While it's true that album sales are still growing faster than digital tracks, it would be wrong to conclude that people still prefer albums. All that we can say is that it is plausible. However, some necessary controls need to be accounted for before this conclusion can be drawn. For example, the success of AC/DC's Black Ice suffers from the same problem as In Rainbows by Radiohead. Both are by very successful bands and would do well regardless of format and distribution. That's like drowning a salad in ranch dressing and claiming you are being health-conscious since you are having a lot of veggies. One trumps the other.

Second, it is not really fair to compare albums to a group of singles, since their cost structure is different. Most online retailers charge a standard cost to a single track (e.g., $0.99) and then a standard cost to an album (e.g., $9.99). The problem is that the album cost is regardless of the number of tracks. This changes the worth of an individual track. For example, say there are 15 songs on the album and I really like 7 songs. The real cost of the remaining songs is not eight dollars, but $3. While I would never buy one of these songs for $0.99, they might be worth $0.38. This is a variable that needs to be accounted for.

Third, a more important point is that iPod is the place where music dies since 64% of songs are never played. It would be unwise of the music industry to ignore this problem, since they need satisified customers to continue buying music. Two possible ways to increase the "playrate" is through a new pricing strucutre and recommendation technology. The former can be solved by bundle rates. As I mentioned above, one possible reason for the continued success of digital albums sales is the different pricing structure of an album vs. a set of singles. This leads to a lot of songs being bought, but never really played. By allowing users to mix and match to make their own "album bundle" could greatly increase customer satisification. For example, 1 song for $0.99, 10 songs for $8.99, 15 songs for $10.99, etc. There would be no requirements on which songs are selected in the bundle. Related is the need to improve and implement recommendation technology. Often ignored in economic analysis is the cost of time spent on the consumer. Searching for music is a laborious task without recommendation and discovery tools. Even iTunes only recently launched Genius.

In conclusion, the claim from artists (especially) that people still prefer albums is still undecided. There is reason to believe this is plausible, but there are still some questions that need to be addressed.

No kidding

2008-12-24T20:21:00.000-08:00

From the DUH pile. Up next, college students still drink beer and Baywatch was never watched for its plot lines.

NY Governor abuses science

2008-12-19T05:22:00.000-08:00

In arguing for a soda tax, the NY Governor, David Patterson, borrowed a page from defendents of alternative medicine, by saying:

"A study by Harvard researchers found that each additional 12-ounce soft drink consumed per day increases the risk of a child becoming obese by 60 percent. For adults, the association is similar."

The study the NY Governor cites is by Dr. David Ludwig, which by his own admission has limited statistical power. Larger, better studies have come out documenting that snack foods and soda are not linked to obesity. Rather, it appears that physical inactivity is to blame. This is straight out of the alternative medicine playbook: find some small study which validates your claim and then ignore any larger, blinded studies that disprove your claim.

To quote Homer Simpson, "Oh, people can come up with anything. 14% of people know that."

MIR Student Researcher in Press!

2008-12-16T05:37:00.001-08:00

Congrats, Anita on the excellent CrunchGear writeup! It appears that MIR research is starting to pick up steam in terms of popular opinion. Don't forget to read the comments of the article. Now, get back to work! The people want more!

Old Copyright Laws Hurt Research

2008-11-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

Note: Thanks to my brother, Josh, for his comments. Josh is an IP lawyer in Chicago, IL.

Recently, a question was phrased on a research mailing list, that more or less went as follows: the researcher was conducting a listening experiment and there was a potential that the subjects could potentially find and keep the 15-second excerpts for personal use. The author was worried that this constituted a copyright violation. I pointed out that more than likely this falls under fair use. However, reading this gives one clear impression: the law itself is rather meaningless. First, the law only stipulates what needs to be considered in evaluating fair use, without giving guidelines or specifics. The webpage states "There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission," and that it is best to obtain permission from the copyright holder. Further, the precedent given only gives a partial list of examples that was relevant in 1961.

These points are key to researchers in information retrieval (and in particular, music information retrieval) because these laws were based on the 1960's technology. Simply put, exchanging songs, text, images, etc., was a rather involved task. Today, the exchange and storage can be conducted on a massive scale, unforeseen by the lawmakers fifty years ago. With this increased capacity for storage, researchers can now test large-scale IR algorithms and the need for a (relatively) free, large scale database is needed. However, in the case of music, such large scale databases are impossible to find or have severe restrictions on them. Every year, I see experiment after experiment of promising algorithms, but results must be taken only so far because of the size and scope of the testing database. Even though some schools have access to a large library archive of recordings, researchers at other institutions are unable to duplicate their results because the data is not freely available.

Some researchers have found "loopholes" that allow them to share features extracted from audio, which cannot be used to recreate the audio (e.g., Mel-cepstral coefficients). This is still not a viable solution because no-one can a priori determine the best features for all IR experiments and experimentation with new features is impossible. Also, potentially, a set of features, which in combination may be reversible could lead to the best results, but this is impossible to test if only a limited set of features is ever distributed.

A very interesting solution comes in the form of MIREX, where a TREC-like evaluation is conducted by having researchers send in algorithms to various competitions. However, there are a few drawbacks. First, it is an enormous burden on the sponsoring institution, IMERSIL at The University of Illinois. The livelihood is also completely depended on the program's funding, which is fine for the next few years, but the long-term stability is not guaranteed. Second, the evaluation is carried out once a year, but there was talk of extending this to a rolling model. A third problem is that tasks are largely fixed and a new task is only considered if it has broad approval. New and interesting tasks are still subject to small, private databases before their inclusion in the task.

I applaud those at IMERSIL for coming up with the proposed solution and also those that supply databases in some form or another, but these are patches to the main problem, which, as I have stated, is that copyright regulations are severely out-of-date. Simply put, when today's regulations were implemented, no one imagined the scalablity of today's information age. Regulations are not only needed for the public sector to address today's file-sharing "problem," but also, better regulations are needed for today's researchers.

The problem ultimately stems from the current practice of common law. Simply put, our current laws are written as loose guidelines and the specifics are left open to the courts. Despite what you learned in history class, our laws are not actually written by legislatures, but rather by those on the bench. Look at The Sherman Act: a single sentence determines when the law is applicable; however, courts have expanded and contracted this law as they see fit. Instead of a coherent, well-structured law that anyone can follow, one needs a swarm of lawyers to get through any issue. Worse, many people are completely unaware that they may be breaking copyright law. Many researchers wrongly assume that if they use less than 30 seconds, then they are legally safe, but this is untrue. It is purely dependent on whether the recording industry chooses to go after you and how good your defense team is.

So what would a good solution look like? I have thought of one that is actually rather easy and is found in other research fields. Handling of nuclear, biological, and chemical materials contains a strict set of guidelines for researchers to follow in obtaining, handling, and destroying potentially dangerous chemicals. I'm actually a little surprised that a similar structure has not been suggested for the use of copyright materials. Such guidelines could allow researchers access to large amounts of complete, unaltered data (i.e., full songs, raw audio), while still ensuring the rights of the copyright holders.

I can already address the objection that will be raised by the copyright holders: "But very few researchers will want to take home nuclear, biological, and chemical materials." This is just untrue. Many research labs conduct studies on illegal drugs, such as marijuana. Are you telling me that no researcher would want to take home a little stash? Again, strict guidelines are in place to ensure that researchers use these illegal substances in an ethical and legal manner while also ensuring that necessary research can be conducted (http://www.safeaccessnow.org/article.php?id=5183). This is definitely possible in terms of music, text, and other multi-media.

Science Reporting, Data-Mining, and Terrorism

2008-11-06T09:56:00.001-08:00

Disclaimer: This blog is non-political, but can discuss how science, journalism, and politics interact. I will try my best to simply state the facts and point to where I see a misinterpretation or omission of scienctific principles. As such, I intentionally did not post this until after the election.

Recently, I wrote about the new responsibilities engineers have when describing technical findings with science journalists. Shortly after my post, I began to see many articles stating that a committee put together by The Department of Homeland Security found that data-mining technology should not be used to track or identify terrorists because the technology would not work and privacy-rights would be violated due to false-positives. At first, I did not pay attention to this story, but I started to see more and more stories saying that ultimately, this task is futile.

Futile? Really? This implies that we know the limits of data-mining as a science. I guess we can cancel all those conferences next year. Unlike many of the journalists, I chose to actually read the report beyond the Executive Summary and found the comittee's objectives and conclusions were mischaracterized. First, the committee said that such technologies should not be used right now "given the present state of the science" (italics added) and should never be trusted in a fully automatic sense. The report also says (in a few places), that research should continue.

Second, this report is mostly a legal report and only uses the technological aspects as background. One common theme in the report is that false positives will occur, which results in privacy violations. However, the report fails to give the conditions under which a particular invasion may be justified. Clearly, the answer is not all or none, since privacy violations occur legally in non-terrorism contexts. For example, many common law-enforcement techniques such as DNA testing, witness accounts, and even confessions have a false-positive rate. Where are the calls to dismiss these technologies or to stop investigating crimes in general?

So what were the real conclusions in the report in regards to using data mining techniques for counter-terrorism efforts?

1. No fully automatic data-mining technique should be used.

Specifically, the document says that since there is always the possibility of false-positives, data-mining techniques can only be used to identify subjects for further investigation. This is not really new.

2. Technology can be used to reduce the risk of privacy intrusion.

Specifically, the technology can be used as a filter. The report gives an example, where only images with guns detected automatically are seen by humans for further investigation.

3. "Because data mining has proven to be valueable in private-sector applications... there is reason to explore its potential uses in countering terrorism.

Once again, proving my point that engineers and scientists need to be careful about how they describe their research and findings to journalists.

4. Programs need to be developed with specific goals and legal limitations in mind. In addition, programs must be subject to continual review.

The truth is that many of laws or legal understandings are based on judicial precidents and are rarely cleaned up by Congress. This becomes an issue when technologies change and new laws are not written. Any legal decision is largely based on the facts in the particular case and will not encompass the facts to apply a law in a broader context. A similar problem is seen in our obsolete copyright laws.

For what it's worth, I do not blame the reporters entirely. Reading a 372-page document is a lot to accomplish with a ever-shrinking new cycle. But this does demonstrate that engineers and scientists need to be careful about how they state their finding, since public perception and even legal policies can be altered by their mischaracterization in the media

Pandora Video Series

2008-11-06T06:35:00.001-08:00

Even after laying off a significant portion of its workforce, Pandora is continuing to look for ways to expand their business. One such avenue is the start of video series format of their musicology podcast series (another favorite). Personally, I love this and wonder if Pandora might one day expand or split off a business into the area of popular music education. One can only hope this (and other music-based educational technologies) might be a way to offer music education to public and private schools under the threat of budget cuts.

FASTLIB/MLPACK

2008-11-03T08:35:00.000-08:00

I talked to a couple people at ISMIR about a new machine learning toolbox, called FASTLIB (although, it appears to be called both FASTLIB or MLPACK). This toolbox was developed by Alexander Gray's lab in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and I used this extensively in Alexander Gray's class. I highly recommend that anyone try this toolbox for their machine learning needs. Programming within the guidelines greatly reduces the programming time (almost to the simplicity of MATLAB), while retaining computational speed and memory capacity. If you are like me, how have had to make the judgement call between programming something in MATLAB and having it run a long time, or spending a long time writing and debugging C++ code so that the algorithm runs quicker.

The official place to download the package seems to be here; however, I found some issues (expected with a version 1.0). The stripped down package on an old class website seemed easier to install. The individual built-in algorithms can be added manually later. I hope to have a small series of posts demonstrating the ease of programming style.

MIR and The Media: How do we interface?

2008-10-06T06:14:00.000-07:00

The music information retrieval (MIR) community has seen an increasing amount of press time in the past couple weeks (see here and here). As this type of research gets more press coverage, an important issue is how the researchers interact with the press. Recently, my favorite podcast, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe interviewed Sharon Begley, the Senior Science Editor at Newsweek, about how science and media interact (podcast #166).

First, she discussing that relying on journalists to get the word out is sure-fire way to never get any press. Surprisingly, for someone in "Big Media," she applauds The New Media paradigm. Self-promotion, however, raises many ethical considerations since a few researchers are apt to over-publicize their results and well before any peer-review process has taken place. I think it is key that researchers limit their publicity until after some form of peer-review. For example, you will not hear any results about my research on this blog until it has been approved for publication.

Second, the press is a profit-making machine. Therefore, the fantastical will always get more press than the consensus. The same pressures that apply to other media types, especially in the face of The New Media. Generating readers will be the main point of any major media outlet. Generally, the story will be modified to be mostly true, but the key point may still be lost. It is up to the researchers to keep their message intact.

Third, researchers cannot expect the press to understand everything in their. At best, you can hope for some amount of scientific knowledge from the press, but they will always trust a Ph.D. in some science, even if the guy is crank (e.g., creationists, homeopathy, etc.). Being able to describe research in comfortable layman's terms is an essential skill for any scientist/engineer.

Noel Gallagher Could Run For Office

2008-10-01T15:04:00.000-07:00

Only a politician could say something absolute like Oasis will never give away a record like Radiohead did and then do something that's almost like he said he wouldn't do. But Noel Gallagher did that since Oasis will now stream their new album for free. True, they aren't giving it away, but it's at least 80% hypocrisy. I can understand Noel's point: a band needs to be paid. But maybe ownership of music is not the way to go. Certainly, there are other ways to raise captial. Selling music to sites that distribute it for free and then show advertisements is one way. Encouraging ticket sales is another. For a 90's alternative band, Oasis sure is stuck... in the 90s.

Anyway, off to see the Raconteurs.

The First Sound

2008-09-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

Professor Whittle at the University of Virginia has put together the first sound every created: that of the Big Bang. The sound file and a very full and insightful description can be found here.

YouTube and New Music: Not a Solution

2008-09-21T05:02:00.000-07:00

I did not blog too much after the first day at ISMIR because Paul Lamere was doing a very good job, so you can check out his details here. However, there was one article I saw on CNN during the conference on YouTube being the next showcase for new music. Personally, I hope not. True, millions of people use the site daily and it is a great resource in trying to find music if you know exactly what you are looking for. However, try using YouTube to discover new music, especially if you are also discovering new bands. Currently, you'll have to enter in the artist name or song title to find anything. But what if I want to find something that's like something else, but that I've never heard before?

The difference between the two concepts is ultimately the difference between retrieval, recommendation, and discovery. The old "Google search bar" paradigm is great for retrieving something if I have a general idea of what I'd like. However, it's still very object based. By this, I mean that I need to know the thing I am looking for. In recommendation, the focus is on the idea of what I might like. For example, collaborative filtering notices that I've bought Carl Sagin's A Demon-Haunted World and will recommend James Randi's Flim-Flam! since people that buy Sagin's book also buy Randi's. Currently, YouTube does have both, but their discovery technology is a lacking. A great quick look at the difference between discovery and recommendation can be gained here, but ultimately discovery is learning why I like something, which is actually much harder to do. What is it that I like Sagan's book? Is it because he's a great science writer? Is it his research? Is it his involvement in the skeptical movement? The three have dramatically different answers. If it's writing, then I'll probably want Dawkin's book on scientific writing. If it's his research, then I'll probably want another book by Sagan about astronomy. If it's the skeptical movement, then Randi's just one of many great selections.

Currently, YouTube does not really support discovery and would probably need to be redesigned to get it right. I've literally listened to hundreds of artists on YouTube since I use it to play guitar. However, there is no recommendations for new music based on what I've listened to in the past. If I want something, I've got to first find an artist I know, and then continue to click "related" videos until I finally find something cool. The process is long and there is a good chance that I'll get stuck in a cycle or worse, get way off target. For the artist, this means that generating new listeners will be difficult and still have to come by word-of-mouth rather than automatic recommendation.

Unable to get outlet

2008-09-16T07:56:00.001-07:00

I was unable to get an outlet until after the panel discussion, so there was no live blogging during the panel. Sorry about that, but I guess that kind of speaks against live blogging, doesn't it?

ISMIR 2008: Day 1 - Tutorials

2008-09-14T18:40:00.000-07:00

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.

More Cowbell!!!

2008-09-11T07:32:00.000-07:00

While waiting for final simulations to run before I write up a paper, I saw the most awesomest website ever: Cowbell.dj. Sounds like they are using some kind of beat tracking and music segmentation program. Not sure what algorithm they use, but it does a fairly good job. The transitions are very good. I have included a couple songs below:


	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj


	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

Signal Processing Series!!!

2008-09-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

I do not know if any of my former students read this blog or if there are any new students who come across this, but I found a blog on MATLAB pointers. Currently, they are doing a series on signal processing, and even though I have only read today's post on sampling, it seems to do a pretty good job describing the sampling theorem.

This does raise up the good point of teaching in the 21st century. I had a teacher last fall that stated in his syllabus that we were not allowed to use materials outside of class. Why? The point should be whether or not I retained the information in class. Hearing him talk about the "evils" of the internet made me wonder if he was going to yell at me to get of his lawn. Ugh, maybe I'll write a blog post on the way teaching should change while I'm at ISMIR next week.

Anyway, to my former students: follow your teachers' rules, but after the class, please go back and try to understand the material. A grade only helps in that first job and after that, it's recommendations and professional accomplishments. These entirely depend on your knowledge base.

Technology Causing IP Problems Everywhere

2008-09-04T13:24:00.001-07:00

As someone engaged in music recommendation research, I am constantly hearing about the latest arguments from both sides over music intellectual property (IP) rights. I was a little surprised that college football is currently having issues over IP rights. Specifically, the issue seems to stem from live blogging, which is a very inefficient way to give live updates. It seems the NCAA views bloggers as a threat to TV and Internet coverage rights. It also appears that since the NCAA rents venues for private events, First Amendment Right issues may not come into play. Yes, it is true that the First Amendment is a protection from the government, not other people or organizations (at least, the way it is written).

However, I have hard time believing that live blogging is a threat to TV and Internet coverage revenue. Who really says, "hey, I could watch(or listen to) the game, but I would rather continually hit refresh on my browser and read what is going on!"? The truth is that live blogging is more than likely going to enhance people's enjoyment of the event. Apparently, the NCAA is against the idea of interactive media and (like the music industry) prays we stay in the 20th century.

Even more importantly, how in the heck is this going to be enforced? As I said, pulling out a laptop and posting to a blog repeatedly throughout a game is inefficient. I could do the same with my phone using Twitter's services, and I have the cheap-o free Samsung that I got for renewing my contract with my cell provider! Technically, anyone can microblog about the game. Is the NCAA really going to stand around every section in the stadium and look for people texting? They cannot even stop the frats from sneaking liquor into the stadium and get blind, stinking drunk!

Maybe, just maybe, we should really evaluate whether a new technology indeed trully is an infridgment on IP rights and whether that will translate into an actual revenue loss before we start over-reacting.

Feeding popularity or getting paid to buy

2008-09-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

I just saw that a new website, Popcuts, is paying users to buy albums. Well, not quite. Basically, you pay 99 cents, like iTunes, to buy a song. However, if more people buy the song AFTER you purchase your copy, then you get paid (currently by credit to future purchases). The goal is to encourage people to buy music quicker.

Overall, I think this is a failed business model because it encourages people to buy before really evaluating music. This reminds me of a used car dealership distracting the customer with a lot of gimmicks so the customer does not focus on whether the car meets his/her demand. After the user feels pressured to buy a song they grow to dislike, I doubt they will return for more of the same.

One of the hopes that Popcuts has is that people will "invest" in experimental purchases and that independent bands will have a forum to increase listenership. I remain skeptical. Overall, people are likely to learn what makes a succesful hit to increase their revenue and still largely purchase that. For example, let's say I see that new Fall Out Boy song that is so catchy that it is probably one of the few videos that MTV will actually show. Even if I hate that song (and I most certainly will), I am probably guaranteed that I'll get over 99 cents in credit and be able to get more songs for free. Even if I am not one of the first, I will still make a good bit of money since hits can remain hits for quite a while. For example, Back in Black by AC/DC came out in 1980, going platinum. In 1990, the album was 10.00x MULTI PLATINUM and by 2007 was 22.00x MULTI PLATINUM.

Potentially, they could put a cap on the amount that people get for a certain purchase, but this limits the overall "investment" feel that the creators are hoping for. Another point is that this type of behavior would contribute to more sales anyway. That is, until users become dissatisified and eventually leave as I stated earlier.

However, this would be interesting to see how the long tail and short head wage war for area under the curve.

Preparing for ISMIR

2008-08-30T05:29:00.000-07:00

I am getting excited about ISMIR in a couple weeks. As many people suggested to me last year, I am going to ISMIR with (almost) nothing to do but take it all in. I do have a late breaking session poster, but that is on the very last session on Thursday. I do not anticipate many people attending the session since most will be trying to make flights back home. To be honest, I think they should scrap the last day or make it a full day with the dinner to end everything.

I have even started reading some of the proceedings as Elias pointed out that they are up for everyone to see. So far I have read about five papers. I have to admit, I was a little fearful about the focus of interdisciplinary research being incorporated into every individual paper. This is largely subjective and I feared that people would apply too broad of a focus and the papers would not get into technical detail in any one area. While I am sure some of this is true, I was happy to find a couple papers that were really good. I liked the paper by Moh and Buhmann about adaptive kernels and would like to see it applied to something other than artist classification, which does not necessarily translate into general similarity as Elias pointed out in his thesis. Matthew Riley, et. al., was good too. It is great to see that people are tokenizing songs to incorporate dynamics better. I think they could get more modeling power if they added HMMs and did something closer to the acoustic segment modeling approach that my adviser and I did at ISMIR a couple years ago. I really like Kurt Jacobson's paper on identifying artist communities in social communities, especially the attempt to incorporate audio analysis into the design. I am definitely going to discuss this with him at the conference.

If I have not mentioned your paper, then I probably have not read it yet, so do not take offense. I will get to it and I am sure I will like it, even if I do not post about this in the future.

Radio killed the radio star

2008-08-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite Internet radio stations, Pandora, may finally be shutting down thanks to the recent hike in royalty fees. I think the only way that people may start to notice is if an Internet radio giant takes the fall. No one ever notices a problem until a staple goes down. One wonders just how record companies plan on making a profit in the future. CDs are not selling and everyone is praying for its demise. Digital distributers of music are closing shop, causing people to fear downloading anything having to do with DRM.

I guess this quote signifies how little record companies understand capitalism: "SoundExchange officials argue that because different media have different profit margins, it is appropriate to set different royalty rates." Really? Do record companies pay more for the raw materials to make CDs? If Jack White and I walk into a guitar store and purchase the same guitar, does he pay more? Surely, he will make a lot more money with that guitar than I will ever make. If I'm not mistaken, isn't charging two different people for the same product illegal when it results in decreasing competition?

Closed-set vs Open-set Tags

2008-08-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

Ugh. The cluster is still down. I was hoping to get something together for MIREX's tag annotation contest, but there is no way I can get to it with everything else I have going on. Oh well, maybe next year. Anyway, on to the subject.

I have been examining playlist prediction using Last.fm and Pandora tags. Not surprisingly, I got this result:

This was a real simple nearest-neighbor search. While this gives evidence to (part of) my hypothesis that Last.fm's "anything goes" open tag set will perform better than Pandora's expert-assigned closed tag set, I need to eliminate some other variables before any final conclusions are made. Most noteably, Pandora's tag set has a size of around 500 tags, while Last.fm's tag set is (at least) on the order 10,000. In fact, on just a subset of the USPop set, I found over 20,000 tags. I need to reduce the dimensions so they are comparable, but still maintain the flavor of Last.fm's set.

Occum's Razor and the "Rap Problem"

2008-08-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I briefly described the "Rap problem," which is where artists names appear several times in a database because they feature other artists. It's probably unfair to "pick" on rap after looking at the greatest violators, but there is a clear trend that rap is a fairly big violator. Note: I'm not saying rap sucks or anything like that. I'm just saying that this presents a problem for researchers dealing in search technology. In fact, as I'll show, people who feature lots of guest artists make a pretty impressive list of musicians and performers.

At first, I thought I would have to do an extensive literary search for an efficient solution to this problem, but my girlfriend proposed a quick solution. She suggest that I just look to see if the artists' names are the first ones listed. At the surface this seemed reasonable, except that some artists have names that are sub-sequences of other artists (e.g., "Joe", "Pink"). But this lead to an efficient solution to the problem: look for names that are equal or that have a special formatting. For example, most of the feature problems can be dealt with by looking for the regular expression /^artistsName_feat_/ or /^artistName_&_/ (underscores and ampersand are not wildcards).

This actually worked fairly well since I am only looking for a group of users that listened to songs from my dataset. This is not a solution to the misspelling problem, but it's a fair assumption that most people will listen to correct spellings when using a well-established site like Last.fm. This greatly saved some time and proved once again that one should always try something quick and dirty first.

Looking at the top 20, there is a definite pattern:

mariah_carey:	135
busta_rhymes:	105
usher:	54
nelly:	52
madonna:	48
ludacris:	42
wyclef_jean:	40
santana:	39
michael_jackson:	37
bob_marley:	37
david_bowie:	35
ja_rule:	32
dmx:	31
nelly_furtado:	31
ricky_martin:	29
frank_sinatra:	29
sting:	28
cypress_hill:	27
elton_john:	27
outkast:	25

One should note that artists like Mariah Carey and Busta Rhymes have not necessarily played with over a hundred different artists because those artists can have different spellings, which I did not correct for (e.g., "mariah_carey_feat_boys_2_men" vs "mariah_carey_feat_boys_ii_men). However, the likelihood of mispelling of the featured artists is probably not an inherint trait of the first artists, so we can treat it as noise. I don't think Mariah Carey has a particular fondness of easily mispelled or varied names.

One can also divide this group into about 3 groups (some overlap depending on personal genre definitions): hip-hop, rap, and old and established rock/pop artists. So, the "rap" problem may not be such a problem in terms of taste given the list above. Also, voice and style are very central to the "musicalness" of rap and hip-hop, so using a different artist is probably the same as a rock musician using an orchestra or a different instrument than normal.

The Continued Popularity of USPop2002

2008-08-06T10:29:00.000-07:00

In order to gather some useful training data for my thesis, I need to get some preference rankings for music recommendation. It is also necessary for there to exist tag information as well, such as Last.fm and Pandora. Further, I must be able to obtain audio (or some acoustic features) rather cheaply. The best data I have found is LabROSA's USPop2002. It's much larger than RWC Database and because the songs are based on popularity in 2002, it is much more likely to have tags than Magnatunes. The downside is that I'm limited to Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients.

While, LabROSA also has playlis ts from OpenNap, there are no preferences given; a song is either on a person's playlist or not on a person's playlist. I've been using Last.fm's API to try to remedy this situation. First, I gathered the top listeners for each of the 400 artists in the USPop2002 set. Over the past couple weeks I have been extracting the total combined weekly chart lists to get the number of plays of a particular song for each listener. While number of plays may not be a direct measure of preference (or rating), it is reasonable to assume that people will listen to song they like more than the ones they do not like. At the moment, I have only downloaded about 4000 listeners (I have to download several pages per listener and Last.fm requests a 1 second wait between requests). Also, artist names appear in several different varieties. Rap and hip-hop seem to be exceptionaly bad since they are unable to do any song without a guest star.

There's tons of data to play with, but for now, let's look into what artists are popular. Note: there are still thousands of users to download and some artists' top 50 listeners have not been reached yet. These results should be taken with precaution so that we don't leap to Montauk monster conclusions (it's a racoon, let it go people).

This kind of continued success is what I would expect to see: superstars make up the vast majority of hits and the short-lived fame of others dies out. However, one should note the artists appearing at the bottom may have more plays due to the "rap problem" described above. I also wanted to see if the data was consistent with Zipf's Law, but it is not (the bend is not deep enough).

One neat thing occurred in the top 5 artists: Beatles, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Queen. Only the Beatles and possibly David Bowie have had enough users from their lists to explain such high results. Indeed, it appears that the other artists would be just as popular if I had taken a random group of users (note: I'm sure the Beatles will also have this once I extract more pages).

I'll have more later.

X-cluster down

2008-08-04T07:37:00.000-07:00

The X-cluster was taken down today for summer maintenance. Looks like it may be two weeks, but hopefully the file server gets back on-line soon. I'll probably post some preliminary results on a couple of experiments during this time.

How labels could profit from Radiohead and NIN 'experiment'

2008-08-01T10:36:00.000-07:00

I just got done reading an interesting economic article by Will Page and Eric Garland on whether Radiohead's "pay what you want" experiment was successful in attracting usual torrent users to the band's website. I'm a little cautious of the conclusions by Page and Garland of "yes, but with a twist" because ultimately, this is a very small sample size and because the novelty might have changed user behavior.

But the author's have a fantastic analysis in the form of a table comparing InRainbows.com, theslip.nin.com, and torrent sites. The author make note of the various invisible costs to the users such as "attention costs", "privacy costs", and "quality of product". What if record labels viewed torrent sites, not as competition, but rather as base designs that could be improved upon?

As the authors' note, a large number of people still went to torrent sites for illegal downloads even though InRainbows.com offered the same thing, but free and legal. They conclude this is because people will ultimately keep their buying habits steady unless they have a benefit to gain from switching (clearly, legality alone is not enough). Why can't labels cash in on this?

Why could labels not offer similar sites and offer additional content? Imagine a completely different type of business model: instead of collecting money from consumers, collect them from the artists. One of the problems with a future like the one InRainbows.com advocates is that I would have to go to a bunch of different sites (one for each artist) to obtain music. Labels could offer an "online free supermarket" of music. In addition, targeted advertisement could be done in a similar way as iLike and Amazon (e.g., "we've noticed that you like Band X, did you know that Band X has a show scheduled near you? Here are some T-shirts you can buy"). Artists would pay to have their music on these sites, sell shirts, etc. Recommendations would be made in addition. One day, oh one day, we'll have iToogle.fm.

Fun with Venn

2008-07-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

I've been extremely busy the past couple of weeks between a language identification project, a music tag annotation project, and like Elias, trying to improve on my weak areas (although with me, I feel optimization and real analysis are my areas to improve on - good news is that my girlfriend is an unknowing math goddess). Probably did not help that I had to read every researcher's experience in booking at the conference hotel for ISMIR on the Music-IR mailing list. (Side note: why is this conference always at expensive hotels? Thank you, Sun Microsystems!).

Anyway, came across a funny site with Venn diagram and function cartoons. Hilarious. I am such a dork.

NPR API

2008-07-25T16:56:00.001-07:00

National Public Radio has released its API. It already looks to be a tremendous research because they have audio content. I'm new to APIs so I'm pretty jazzed about this. I've only gotten to play with it for about 5 minutes, but I have verified that the audio is great. One potential application I foresee is music/speech detection and segmentation. Also, on the speech side, this data is great for topic identification. I'll hopefully have more to say on this later, but for now, I've got to go. It's 8PM on a Friday and my girlfriend is telling me I have to stop working.

Absolute pitch

2008-07-20T04:48:00.000-07:00

I'm sure that a few of the readers have seen Yoo Ye Eun. From what I can tell, this does not appear to be a fraud.

Of course, David Huron points out in his book, Sweet Anticipation, that absolute pitch has its disadvantages such as difficulty in judging intervals.

Still, very cool.

MIR Group on CiteULike

2008-07-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

I have started a group on CiteULike for music information retrieval researchers focusing on similarity and retrieval from audio. This is to allow us to see what papers others are reading on the subject. The focus is on using non-symbolic audio as the original format. For example, using MFCCs to build genre-level Gaussian mixture models is relevant. Using DTW on MIDI signals is not relevant unless the MIDI signal is a mid-level representation (ex. "Specmurt analysis"). Onset detection is not relevant; however, using onset features to classify dance music is relevant.

I greatly encourage other fields to start their own groups (I may also start more if others join). I felt restrictions on the scope of the group was important because MIR is becoming too broad of a field. I expect that many researchers may be in several groups, which is great and there may be a lot of overlap in the papers appearing in these groups. However, in our "Everything is Miscellaneous" world, this is not a bad thing.

I've restricted that new users must be approved, but this is simply to generate a list of who's who. Anyone that wants to get in will be accepted. I am also willing to free up restrictions on anyomous postings if people want, but I want to prevent abuse since this supposed to be useful and non-combative.

The Wisdom of One

2008-06-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

I've written a couple of blog posts on The Wisdom of the Crowd in the past, but The Economists notes a study about how asking a single person for different answers can yield better answers than asking just once. The results are better if the time between answers is longer. I'm not sure why this is all that surprising. The researchers, Edward Vul and Harold Pashler believe this phenomena may be that the brain is making hypothesis and then updating ones that are incorrect. This is probably true to some degree. But another possible reason may come from the field of machine learning.

Fundamentaly, the memory is simply a feature extracture and like all feature extraction techniques they can be quiet noisy. For example, it has been shown that doctoring images can make people remember events differently, even if they were at the event in question. In effect, by asking many people or asking the same person multiple times is taking a statistical sample, for which the mean is a better indicator on average (minimizes the square error loss). Another effect seen here is that better answers are gained by lengthing the time between questioning. This can be explained by Monte-Carlo Maximum Likelihood (MCML). One noted effect in MCML is that neighboring samples are correlated, but by taking samples spaced farther apart, the correlation decreases and closer to being independent and identically distributed.

I wonder if this could be an explanation considering something missing in the hypothesis by Vul and Pashler: what feedback was given to people to say their first answer was wrong? True, simply asking a question again probably makes the person question is correctness, but a control study group would be needed. One example is to tell people upfront that they will be given two guesses, but they will be rewarded inversely proportional to the combined answer. For example, if the correct answer in "guess a number I am thinking" is four, but one person bets four and nine, while the other person bets three and five, then the second person gets the reward.

Where's the RIAA on this one?

2008-06-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

The earliest form of a computer playing music is discovered. One wonders when the RIAA will sue...

Dragons and psuedoscience

2008-06-17T09:21:00.001-07:00

Brian Dunning has a must-see movie about critical thinking and the fallacy of pseudoscience. Also, on the subject are perpetual-motion and free energy machines that violate thermodynamics.

If you can't beat them, join them

2008-06-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to be the EU of music, Merlin, tries to "to turn indie bands and labels into a loose, decentralized version of the major label." Recently, they are trying to prove their worth in a deal with online sites much like what major labels have. Of course there are two issues at play. The first is the continual instance of the major labels (and multimedia distributers in general) that everyone is out to get them and that they carry no fault. It amazes me how unaware the industry is about the fact that hits have fallen faster than the industry as a whole. The bottom line is that controlling the distribution channels ultimately chokes competition and ruins quality. Call me a skeptic, but I find it hard to believe the deal between MySpace and the major labels is anything but a plot to ration music on the internet. Are we headed for Radio 2.0?

The second issue is whether Merlin actually stays true to its message. As these major labels try ration music on the internet, will Merlin not be pulled by the appeal of control and power? Sure, there is a ton of revenue in The Long Tail, but it also involves a lot of work. What is the revenue generated from investment in a new band? As a band gets bigger, it's costs go up, but the rate of return is higher (and probably, more secure - when will U2 or Coldplay not sell out?). Also, you need fewer bands to make the equivalent revenue. Things are even more appealing if you can control the distribution channels. Will Merlin be able to pass this up and stay not-for-profit? Probably, but more likely, Merlin's Indie bands will jump ship if they start becoming a hit, ensuring Merlin will not eat up "too much" of the market.

So we are left with the status quo. A new distribution channel will open, independent bands will flock to it to get their message out, the record labels will sue, but eventually sign a deal which chokes competition, and repeat.

The Filter

2008-06-03T06:24:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around with The Filter this morning, which is yet another recommender site. This one is a little different than Pandora or Last.fm for two reasons. First, it recommends music, movies, and web-based videos. Second, it has a more involved enrollment stage. The approach starts by asking you what 3 genres you like out of a list of about 13. However, the genres are typical genre labels and I found myself unhappy with the selection. For starters, there is Rock/Pop as a single selection and no sub-genres under this category. Given my particular tastes, they might have well have asked, "Hey, do you like music?" Anyway, I picked three genres ("Rock/Pop", "Blues", and "Jazz"... oh did I mention that Classical is not even a choice?).

The next page gives me a list 3 "prototypical" artists for each of the three genres I picked. I will give The Filter credit, in that they allow the user to listen to a sample selection from each artist. They use a slider scale to pick a rating. There are a few problems with the choices because they are largely generic and do not encompass the range of each genre. For example, under the "Rock" category, I was given the bands "Green Day", "Blink 182", and "U2." I did this three times and got the same bands twice, so there is probably a short list. I hardly think this represents the Rock and Pop universe. For starters, Green Day and Blink 182 are both considered to be Punk bands, albeit at different times. U2 is so generic that I doubt that anyone truly hates them. They might as well have The Beatles or Led Zeppelin. The other genres were not better with choices like Ray Charles, B.B. King, and Miles Davis. There is a selection for "More artists," but you must change at least one of the sliders under the genre to get it to change. What if I don't know or are unfamiliar with the particular band? Further, what if I think that these choices are OK, but are not representative enough of my particular interests?

The movies section was the same thing: pick three genres and then a list of choices under these. I picked Action, Comedy, and Drama. For Drama I was given the 1940's version of "The Grapes of Wrath", "Casablanca", and "Mildred Place". I have heard of these, but I haven't seen them... these movies are well before my time. For action, there was John Woo's 1989 "The Killer" (I haven't heard of this before" and Goldfinger (again, who doesn't like James Bond?!?). For Comedy, I had the cartoon version of "The Grinch", "The Bank Dick" (never heard of this... a porno for rich people?), and "The Honeymooners [TV Series]", which is again, long before my time. I skipped this, since I'm not familiar enough and was more interested in music anyway.

When I finally got to the recommendations page, I was pissed. Most were bands that I would never listen to, much less buy their stuff... (e.g., Usher). The ones I had heard of where the exact ones they asked me to rate. "You like B.B. King, so you might like B.B. King." Ugh! Things got a little bit better after I incorporated my Last.fm data in that the recommendations made more sense. However, one wonders why the enrollment phase is necessary. It's a time waster.

One very useful feature are the sliders. When you select a recommended track, there are two sliders. One is for the "familiarity" of the track so that users can select how much they would like to explore The Long Tail. Another is based on newness so a user can select if they only want music made recently or if they don't care.

The Filter also has an application to download that will interface with iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player. I tried with iTunes and it crashed. I'm not sure if that was a problem related to iTunes, the Filter, or something else. I'll try again later with iTunes and see what happens. I tried it with Winamp and played a song. One thing I like is that you must play a specified length of the song (you decide) before it's supposed to scrobble the track. I played a single song and awaited my recommendations. However, there seems to be issues because it says that it can't because either the playing track was not recognized or there is not any related music in the library. However, when I went to the website, my recommendations where more or less what I would expect from any recommendation service. It would probably be good to have some sort of message saying "We are sending this information".

There was one major problem in that the application was supposed to scan my library and send that information to The Filter's servers so that they would not recommend music I already have. However, this appeared not to happen based on the recommendations I received. I reinstalled the application again, but this did not help things. I'll keep The Filter open for a couple days and report back if this gets fixed.

All in all, The Filter is probably a handy little tool, depending on how recommendations are done. The FAQ site says that it uses "Bayesian mathematics" and "artificial intelligence" to make the recommendations and that these are based on items bought or listened. However, I have no idea if these recommendations are given by collaborative filtering, similarity by tag data from Last.fm (or something similar), or by data mining sites like allmusic.com (or some combination). The enrollment question phase should be skipped all together. Almost any user will have some music locally stored or have a profile at Last.fm. Second, it needs to made obvious to the user that data is being sent immediately when the application starts. Also, I wonder if it's possible to use the percentage of times that I've skipped or played a song in my iTunes profile? This would generate recommendations immediately instead of in a couple days after installation. Anyway, follow-up in a couple days.

A how to for myspace bands

2008-06-02T18:37:00.001-07:00

Wired has a wiki page with a "how to" for promoting your band on myspace. I am a facebook guy, but still, pretty cool reference. Although, there are some rather obvious tips... like how attractive people are more photogenic.

Blaming the Internet

2008-05-28T12:06:00.000-07:00

John C. Dvorak, recently wrote that everyone is losing perspective, in large part, because of the Internet. I found it hard to believe that someone as knowledgeable about technology would be so mislead as to fear it. He writes that there is a "decline in general perspective," which he defines "generalized or common knowledge." Further, this is due to the explosion of the Internet contributing bloggers, podcasts, etc. Mr. Dvorak leads us to believe that because of the Internet, people only read the news they want to read and fail to get a general, standard perspective.

However, there are a few problems with this theory. First, at no time was there ever a general, standard perspective. Everyone has their own perspective, which may be similar to others' perspective, but is still wholly unique. The idea that there ever was a single, unique interpretation speaks of thought control (cue Pink Floyd... "Teacher leave them kids alone").

Second, how was this general perspective even decided? Majority vote? Nope. By a handful of "middle-aged white men [sitting] around a table in a room" (quote from Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger). It's not general knowledge that Dvorak is begging to return, but the knowledge deemed important by a small group of people from a limited demography. Further, there has always been bias in reporting. It has only been recently that it has come to the spotlight. Despite Fox New's stance, there is no such thing as "fair and balanced" (ask any liberal). In fact, Mr. Dvorak's example of The New York Times is hardly bias-free (ask any conservative).

Mr. Dvorak believes that custom newspapers, which tailor to a reader's interests, makes people only read news they want. While this is potentially possible, newspapers have never exactly been a solution to this either. How many people read the newspaper from front to back, never missing an article? From experience, I can safely say that my Mom read the sports about as much as I read the Home and Garden section, which was... never!

Another cause for concern according to Mr. Dvorak is that those "gosh darn kids today" do not read newspapers and are the ones who really fail to get the "general perspective" (quotes are added to this from now on because the thought is complete rubbish). Maybe when Mr. Dvorak gets back from yelling at the kids to get off his lawn he'll ask himself a few questions such as:

How many kids where reading the newspaper before the Internet?
How many kids just read the sections that interested them (e.g., Sports, Comics, etc.)?
How many kids now have replaced reading those sections with similar sites on the Internet (e.g., ESPN.com, CNN.com, Comics.com)?

Sadly, Mr. Dvorak gives no data on any of this or any of his other claims. The truth is that we have a wealth of resources available to us. True, some are fictitious and utter nonsense, but it is not like these viewpoints only came about with the rise of the Internet or blogs. There were idiots in the past, there are idiots now, and there will continue to be idiots in the future. The Internet is a medium and nothing more. In fact, I couldn't be happier that these people have found a medium on the Internet because I can now board a plane without being harassed.

I think that Mr. Dvorak assumes that a newspaper is akin to an Encyclopedia, but again, even an Encyclopedia may have an implicit bias. As Mr. Weinberger points out in Everything is Miscellaneous, the wisdom of the crowds as lead to a truly consensus view (e.g., Wikipedia). Further, Mr. Weinberger states that one can actually view the degree to which consensus has been reached by looking at the history of pages. This allows for one to see if the post is new, is being changed a lot, or has settled into a stable state (i.e., consensus has been reached).

I am not really sure if it was Mr. Dvorak's hope of looking like someone who is afraid of technology or someone who is nostalgic for the "old ways," but he succeeded in both. The true cause of the decline in traditional media is that it is too static and mankind has evolved. Simply put, traditional media is just not enough anymore and is no longer a "good thing".

Science to the Rescue!

2008-05-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

This isn't intended to have a political side, but it was just a cool example of how science can ultimately solve a problem. A teenager finds out how to decompose a plastic bag in months. Note: I have only seen news articles on this and as far as I know, it's not been tried by others yet. However, if this is true, it's kind of cool. This is also a lot more promising than praying that no more plastic bags are made.

A rare agreement

2008-05-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

For once I agree with the record labels. Capitalism is cool.

Sounds familiar

2008-05-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

The Leading Question and Music Ally have teamed up to state the five ways the music industry can save its sorry a$$. Of course, this is just a repeat from what other have said (recycled isn't just left for RSS feeds). For instance:

1) Gerd Leonhard already stated the need to bundle music into other products.

3) Kurtis Jacobson already stated that freeing music will lead to increased revenues.

4) and 5) David Jennings stated in his book, that charts are vastly out-dated because they "lost their 'water cooler' effect". Also, half his book is on the need for more power to be given to Savants.

Even point 2) could be seen as a part of the solution proposed by David Weinberger. Judging from the speed that companies and the government seem to work, one wonders if its a good idea to listen to the consumer.

Multi-tag search

2008-05-14T18:13:00.000-07:00

Elias demonstrates the new Last.fm playground. I love the multi-tag search. I wonder if after 10-20 years of music sites like Last.fm and Pandora, which cater to individual taste, might start to change the vocabulary we use to describe music. Specifically, will genre labels go the way of the 8-track? Too vague and highly variable. Thinking about, genre was a product of record companies. Makes sense that as record companies are forced to change their structure that the vocabulary would go with it.

Science Fiction movies that do it right

2008-05-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of a science fiction fan, but I did like that none of the five science fiction movies that get the science right mentioned neural networks. We've all heard the plot line: engineers develop a neural network, it becomes "aware," and then decides that the most logical thing to do is to go on a massive killing spree (of course!). For all of those who worry about technological advances and specifically the dangers of neural networks: there is NOTHING to worry about. This is not how they work and it is not even close. True, they are "inspired" by the early ideas of how neurons work, but of course, the 1950s science is outdated. The brain is much more complex than anything built with neural networks. Sorry, but I always have to roll my eyes whenever I watch Terminator. I now know how my parents feel when they watch ER. (Case in point, on TV, a person who needs CPR in the hospital will survive on Chicago Hope with a 64% of the time, but real-life the highest number is 40% and the long-term survival rate is no more than 30%).

Piracy hurts public health?

2008-05-11T05:53:00.000-07:00

It seems I can always count on California to overreact and come to some illogical conclusions. While music and video piracy is still a problem for the major record labels, I find it hard to believe that there is any detriment to public health. I have never heard of anyone being physically or even emotionally hurt by such a crime. There has never been anyone dragged to the emergency room due to an illegal download. In fact, unless you are traveling around the coastal waters of Somalia and other parts of the Indian Ocean, I would have to say your chances of being hurt by anyone engaged in piracy is minimal. I'm starting to wonder if those running the Los Angeles government have confused The Pirates of the Caribbean with the nightly news. They even go to say the welfare of the country's citizens are at stake. I know the RIAA believes that dead people and pre-teens are a horrible aggitators and need to be stopped, I have never been in any immediate threat because on of my neighbors may have obtained the newest Sun Kil Moon album illegally. This whole statement screams of such ridiculous overstatements that it should trigger one's skeptic sense.

Rap may not be music

2008-04-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, this isn't a serious post. I've often claimed that rap is not music because what determines a good rap from a bad rap is too heavily skewed to lyrics, so I identify it as a type of poetry. Rhyme and meter are way more important than harmony or melody. They still have an importance, but the importance is greatly attenuated. Basically, if that's music, then so is what William Shatner does and no one seriously thinks this counts as music.

To further my argument, here is a rap video by a couple of management majors, which is actually decent in terms of melody, harmony, and even production value. The only limiting factor is that the subject matter is a little dumb (for those who are unfamiliar with Georgia Tech lingo, the M-train refers to changing majors to management, which is considered to be the easy joke major). Bottom line, if these count as music, then everyone has issues.

New Project

2008-04-24T13:28:00.001-07:00

I'm working on a new project in language identification. Specifically, we are looking into using speech attribute detectors to enhance phonetic transcriptions. From there, supervectors are created by creating phone document vectors for each language. Moreover, we are using TempoRAI Patterns (TRAPs) as features. These have been shown to be superior to using MFCC + velocity + acceleration vectors. I would be interested to see how these perform on music, especially since incorporating dynamic features have had only limited effect. I think part of the problem is that music is (generally) slower than speech, so incorporating longer windows might be better. TRAPs are also different from texture windows because texture windows are simply first and second order statistics from the frames within the window, whereas the original frames are concatenated in TRAPs. However, since I'm limited to using USPop's feature set (MFCC), I'm not sure I'll get to see the effect any time soon.

Searching, a skill?

2008-04-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

I told my girlfriend in a joking manner that I was better at "Googling." I'm not really, but I think I'm more likely to use Google than she is (actually, she is a Yahoo! person... we are so different). She's also more likely to ask someone else, but I'm lazy and if it involves me leaving my desk, I'd rather go another route. Anyway, she said that "Googling" was hardly a skill. To prove her wrong (for once), I found a few websites that discuss search strategies and found one that describes the weakness of tags. The reality is that tags only provide some information because there is a structure to it. That is; tags are not completely miscellaneous because tags are ultimately categorical (sorry, Mr. Weinberger).

Using "wisdom of the crowds" to find information still requires effort on the user to learn how the population generally tags items. For example, users of last.fm know that there are many tags that are generally too vague to be of value, like "rock" and "pop." More importantly, there is an entire language of tags. True, new tags can always be created, but in order
to be useful, tags need to be used by the crowds. The most successful tags are one that have a standard definition and are discriminatory. For example, if I wanted to find my sister's favorite band, I can type "female vocalist" and "goth", which brings me to Evanescence and similar bands. However, if I were to choose two other tags on Evanescence's page I'm not going to get the same result, even if I take the most popular ones ("rock" and "female vocalist"). I think Mr. Weinberger's real focus was not just on the miscellany of the internet, but rather the personalization which can be derived from miscellany. Rather than pre-structure, adaptive-structure strategies are needed for information content.

Name this tune...

2008-04-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

An interesting paper appeared in Psychology of Music, titled "Memory and metamemory for songs: the relative effectiveness of titles, lyrics, and melodies as cues for each other" by Pyrnircioglu, Rabinaovitz, and Thompson. There findings indicate that while people cannot remember lyrics well when given a title or melody, lyrics are better to remember titles or melodies than using titles or melodies to remember the other. However, if someone couldn't remember the target with certainty, they were asked to pick one of four choices and then asked how sure they were. In this case, lyrics were seen as not much help when used to try to remember a melody or title, even though they scored best when used. Also, even though lyrics were the never really remembered given a melody or title, people picked their choices with more certainty.

I find this pretty fascinating, but it would be interesting to see an additional study: the roles of tags and non-acoustic information. Many content-based retrieval algorithms are bootstrapping their acoustic classifiers with textual descriptions (e.g., tags). The basic idea stems from websites such as last.fm. However, I've never seen that these tags remain universal in meaning. For example, given that a song is listed with the tag "grunge," can we safely assume that everyone would understand this? Or are tags only valuable to the person that assigned them? It's probably somewhere in the middle, like genres. However, give enough tags, we can get a good "picture" of what the song contains.

Using an HMM != ASR

2008-03-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

As I said yesterday, many MIR researchers have tried to copy the usual automatic speech recognition (ASR) paradigm by using hidden Markov models (HMMs). However, almost all of these approaches have not correctly used HMMs... at least, if their goal was to mirror what is done in ASR research. Most MIR researchers have modeled an entire song with an HMM with the number of states varying between 3 to 10. Usually, it's been noted that these approaches fair no better than using a GMM for the entire song. The conclusion for a long time has been that dynamic information is not important for music similarity.

The problem I have is in the model itself. Using an HMM for an entire song (or even worse, genre) is NOT the same paradigm in ASR. A song is typically 3 minutes in length, but HMMs in speech are rarely larger than a single word or phone, so the length of time for an HMM is typically on the order of milliseconds. The reality is that HMMs in speech are shared among different utterances. If one wants to copy this for MIR, then HMMs need to be shared across songs. Of course, no one has come up with a good way to provide music transcriptions from which to train HMMs in this way.

Christopher Raphael presented a paper that did try to provide transcriptions to monophonic melodies using HMMs, but no one has really stated how this would apply to polyphonic music. Imagine a slow-moving bass line with a very fast staccato melody on top. Does one start a model each time a new sound starts? Doing so would mean that there would be a very high number of models because every possible combination of notes from every voice would have to have its own model. What about only modeling the lowest note? The problem is that the densities under each state would need a very high number of mixtures to account for the different notes that may be played on top (even more still if one includes different instruments). This means tons of data.

In reality, until something better comes along, using unsupervised HMM tokenization is the best chance for modeling music in the same fashion as speech. The downside is that no one has a direct interpretation for what these models mean. However, there are language identification papers where phone models trained in one language are modeled on another language, even if one language has sounds that are not modeled in the other. This gives hope for those studying music similarity and classification.

Cepstral mean subtraction worthless?

2008-03-18T11:29:00.000-07:00

It has been cited in several research papers (most notably, Aucouturier and Pachet 2006), that performing cepstral mean subtraction (CMS) is damaging to music information retrieval. However, such an approach is common place in automatic speech recognition. I've noticed this with any algorithm that models global timbre. For example, Aucouturier and Pachet modeled each song with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and then compared distances with an estimated Kullback-Leibler divergence and noticed a detrimental effect with CMS. This result has been verified by other researchers as well (as well as me). However, there is an important point: the model is built at the global song level. When models are shared among several songs, like acoustic segment modeling (ASM) (Reed and Lee, 2006), it is not only useful to perform CMS, but necessary. If one does not perform CMS, the ASM approach does not work. In fact, most songs sent through the Viterbi decoder will not have surviving paths and even if the paths do survive, it is most often only going to produce a couple of "musiphones."

It should be remembered that CMS discards information (e.g., recording equipment), which is definitely useful for similarity. Obviously, people who record similar types of music are going to use similar types of equipment. However, if one performs CMS on a global model there is no gain to be had by discarding this information. On the other hand, if one wants to use dynamic information, then discarding information by using CMS is necessary. I think a lot of researchers have been citing the conclusions by Aucouturier and Pachet a little unfairly. Their paper was based on global timbre models and results are not applicable to approaches which take dynamics into account.

However, it should be noted that just using HMMs does not necessarily bring useful dynamic information, either. One needs to use these intelligently, which will be the subject of tomorrow's post.