Upcoming talks and travels

I'm going to be up to a number of things that may be of interest to the readers of this (rather sparse) blog.

Quick summary

• Co-chairing The Workshop on Music Recommendation and Discovery (WOMRAD) Oct 23rd, Chicago
• Presenting some new Musicmetric API features during ISMIR, Oct 24-28 (demo on the 28th), Miami
• Giving a talk about beer and critical tasting at Ignite London 5, Nov 8th, London

WOMRAD

Our workshop (other co-chairs are Amélie Anglade, Òscar Celma, Paul Lamere, and Brian McFee) will cover a diverse array of approaches and angles for music recommendation and discovery. The workshop is runs the full and is part of RecSys 2011, though I sadly can't stay for most of the conference aside from our workshop (see below). It should prove to be an interesting day of research. Are you planning on attending? Let us know.

ISMIR

I'll be dashing off from Chicago to Miami to attend ISMIR, and to present some new (not-yet-released) API features from Musicmetric. While things aren't quite live yet, I can say that in addition to our artist based endpoints, we'll be offering track-based endpoints soon as well, and aligning them with an I-bet-you-can-guess-which large public audio feature test set. More detail on this one to come.

Ignite London 5

Ignite is a series of lightning talks that have taken place in cities all over the world, unified not by a common theme, but a common format: all talks last five minutes, contain 20 slides, and the slides are automatically advanced every 15 seconds. The matching ethos of this structure is perhaps best seen in the Ignite slogan, "Enlighten us, but make it quick." I'll be speaking about beer, style and critical tasting in a talk titled "Ale or Lager and Other False Choices." Here's a brief description:

In a word, my talk is about beer. In a few more words, the driving narrative behind the talk is a crash course in beer styles and more generally, critical tasting. After an extraordinarily brief description of beer, broad ideas of style and the critical tasting process, the core of the talk will be made up of live lightning tastes of commercial examples of various styles of beer (one slide per style, 12 styles covered with one commercial example each). For coherence these tasting slides will grouped into broader styles, with aim toward width, rather than depth of coverage. The styles will be approximately based on those from the BJCP and the Brewer's Association.

I still haven't sorted out the exact spread of beers or how they will be grouped, though I'm leaning toward something simple and obviously ingredient tied (something like -- Lagers, ales:yeast driven, ales:malt forward, ales:hop heavy, with 3 beers each from a different recognized style in each). If anyone has any thoughts about style divisions or specific examples do let me know. If you'd like to go to ignite (and you know you would) the tickets will be available over this way later this week.

So, lots of things going on. Plus there's this other thing I've been working on.

Right, back to it.