EchoNest pulling an April Fool's joke!

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

六義園

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

Maybe tomorrow the students will eat swords of fire!

My new diggs (for about a month)

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

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

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.