Preparing for ISMIR

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.