August 2008
KDD talk on the Future of Image Search →
Jitendra Malik from UC Berkeley gave an enjoyable and often quite amusing invited talk at KDD 2008 on “The Future of Image Search” where he argued that “shape-based object recognition is the key.”
ISMIR Proceedings are available for download →
As Elias has pointed out, the ISMIR proceedings are online. If you don’t want to download the nearly 700(!) pages, you can go to the program page on the ISMIR site to select the papers and…
Hit Song Science - not yet a science →
Last year I posted about my skepticism about the “hit predictors” that claim that they can use machine learning algorithms to predict which songs will be hits. So when the proceedings for ISMIR…
YouTube and Copyright →
Interesting article on Read/WriteWeb about how YouTube is thriving despite the fact that much of its content is copyrighted by others. The basic business model is simple: if a content owner finds…
Still looking for a PhD student for LiveMemories... →
There is the opportunity for a 3-years PhD scholarship at the University of Trento working with my group (SoNet) on Web2.0 and social networking at Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento. Please,…
Still looking for a PhD student for LiveMemories... →
There is the opportunity for a 3-years PhD scholarship at the University of Trento working with my group (SoNet) on Web2.0 and social networking at Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento. Please,…
Still looking for a PhD student for LiveMemories... →
There is the opportunity for a 3-years PhD scholarship at the University of Trento working with my group (SoNet) on Web2.0 and social networking at Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento. Please,…
Still looking for a PhD student for LiveMemories... →
There is the opportunity for a 3-years PhD scholarship at the University of Trento working with my group (SoNet) on Web2.0 and social networking at Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento. Please,…
What is APML? →
Saved By: Chris Saad | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: dataportability, apml
School’s in →
I continue to neglect you, blog family, because I am in the final (I hope) throes of editing the book and school just began. I spoke to the new class yesterday in the start of the interactive…
RjDj - interactive music for the iPhone →
This looks real fun. RjDj is a music application for the iPhone. It uses sensory input to generate and control the music you are listening to. It is not released yet .. but there’s a private beta…
Amazon, Shelfari and Last.fm →
Amazon just purchased Shelfari - a social website for book lovers (it’s like Last.fm for books). This makes sense since Amazon has had a hard time getting their users to contribute social data…
If you claim high scalability… →
I just reviewed a paper where the authors come up with a nice highly scalable algorithm. And it is scalable too! But to prove just how fast it is, they process 2,000 data points.
This is correct,…
The insane world of academic publishing →
Stephen Few few wrote a post on how insane academic publishing is. If you publish academic papers, his post is worth your time. Don’t miss the comments!
Stephen is not in academia. From his point…
Proceedings of the Large-Scale Recommender Systems... →
We have made available a PDF copy of the proceedings for the second Netflix/Large-Scale KDD Recommender workshop. It includes the following papers:
Jinlong Wu and Tiejun Li. A Modified Fuzzy…
An anthropological introduction to YouTube →
By Mike Welsh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
Watch it, it’s worth your time!
presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008….
An anthropological introduction to YouTube →
By Mike Welsh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
Watch it, it’s worth your time!
presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008….
An anthropological introduction to YouTube →
By Mike Welsh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
Watch it, it’s worth your time!
presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008….
An anthropological introduction to YouTube →
By Mike Welsh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
Watch it, it’s worth your time!
presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008….
Peer review is an honor-based system →
It would take too long to expose all of the flaws of peer review, here are some:
some work is just flat wrong because the reviewers cannot analyze all of the mathematical results, and because they…
Quick CSS quiz →
Given these CSS instructions,
z[x] > a[i] {color: blue;}
z z[x] a {text-decoration: underline;}
z > z a , z z z + a { color: red ;}
what will be the color of the text in the following XML…
How to select even or odd rows in a table using... →
CSS 3 is around the corner. Already we are seeing some benefits. The latest versions of Safari and Opera, as well as the beta version of Firefox allow you to select even or odd rows in a table using…
Cool software design insight #4 →
Mathematicians and philosophers often make terrible programmers. They also tend to write gibberish even in English. (Ok, I do not know if it is a fact, but stay with me.)
A terrible way of…
Cool software design insight #4 →
Mathematicians and philosophers often make terrible programmers. They also tend to write gibberish even in English. (Ok, I do not know if it is a fact, but stay with me.)
A terrible way of…
How to select even or odd rows in a table using... →
CSS 3 is around the corner. Already we are seeing some benefits. The latest versions of Safari and Opera, as well as the beta version of Firefox allow you to select even or odd rows in a table using…
Column versus row stores →
Daniel Abadi, Samuel Madden, and Nabil Hachem had a paper at SIGMOD 2008, “Column-Stores vs. Row-Stores: How Different Are They Really?” (PDF), with a fascinating discussion of what optimizations…
Going to KDD 2008 →
I’ll be at KDD 2008 next week. If you make it there, please say hello!
Soccer is a Google beta. Football is a Microsoft... →
I’m an ignoramus about sports so take that dose of salt first. But while watching Olympic soccer, it occurred me to that the sport never took off in America because we prefer results to process.
I…
Quick CSS quiz →
Given these CSS instructions,
z[x] > a[i] {color: blue;}
z z[x] a {text-decoration: underline;}
z > z a , z z z + a { color: red ;}
what will be the color of the text in the following XML…
Strands Community Blog, YourStrands, Strandups →
Some new great things for the Strands community. An awesome new community blog, the YourStrands show, and Strandups!
We just started a community blog, community.strands.com, where we’ll talk…
Peer review is an honor-based system →
It would take too long to expose all of the flaws of peer review, here are some:
some work is just flat wrong because the reviewers cannot analyze all of the mathematical results, and because they…
Eating one’s own dogfood →
Steve Baker’s book, The Numerati, is about tracking and predicting people’s behavior based on their data, and so he and his publisher are taking a page from the book to try to target advertising…
APML 1.0 Initial Draft →
The APML community has been itching for the APML 1.0 Specification for a little while now, and Paul, our resident genius; has spec’d out the initial draft for community discussion. You can find the…
Strands opens new office in Finland →
After almost a year of permanent presence in Finland thanks to our VP of Mobile Oliver Bremer, and several years of many many trips across the Atlantic, Strands has finally opened an office in…
The mythical bitmap index →
A bitmap index is a popular data structure to speed up the retrieval of matching rows in a table. (It is also used in Information Retrieval, to retrieve matching words.)
Building a bitmap index…
Sponsors for books, continued →
For those who were interested in this post asking about sponsorship for my book, please see the discussion there and Rick Smolan’s answers to some of their questions and concerns.
The secret to intellectual productivity →
I have written a lot about productivity in research and academia on this blog. As recent examples, see my posts Scientific productivity tips from Hartley and Branthwaite Rigor or relevance:…
Back from vacations →
I took some time off this year. No, we did not go anywhere specific. I just took two weeks off with my two sons. We had fun.
It has been years since I took time totally off. For irrational…
Guardian column: Do we need editors? →
This week’s Guardian column asks whether editors are a luxury we can afford. (There’s a separate version online here where comments can and I suspect will be made.)
Playing with Last.fm tags →
Anthony Liekens has put together a few web tools that do fun things with Last.fm tags. One tool is Compare User Tag Clouds. This tool takes two last.fm users calculates a tag cloud for each…
Media on media →
I’m set to be on Howie Kurtz’ Reliable Sources at 10a EDT today to talk about the waste and hubris of sending 15,000 journalists to the political conventions and how we over-report politics and…
Y Combinator's list of startup ideas →
Paul Graham at Y Combinator posts an interesting list of “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund”. My favorites are Fix Advertising, Fixing E-mail Overload, and New News. Found via John Cook, who…
Cassandra data store at Facebook →
Avinash Lakshman, Prashant Malik, and Karthik Ranganathan presented a talk at SIGMOD 2008, “Cassandra: Structured Storage System over a P2P Network”, that describes a Google Bigtable-like data…
How to build a network →
I was talking with a media exec who started a blog ad network — bless him — but who I thought was taking too high a share of the revenue: at least half. That’s a natural reflex, perfectly…
If you like Jimi Hendrix you might like .. →
Here’s a recommendation from AmazonMp3.com that registers high on the relevance scale but a bit low on the novelty and serendipity scale.
This is not necessarily a bad…
What is your late breaking ISMIR demo? →
There’s a thread over on the Facebook ISMIR group where people are posting the title and abstract of their late breaking demo session. If you are going to be showing a demo at ISMIR next month then…
ISMIR Conference Program →
The detailed conference program for ISMIR 2008 has been posted. It is pretty interesting to see all of the sessions for the week laid out. If you are speaking you can find out if you lucky enough…
Covering conventions is an waste →
USA Today reports that the number of journalists covering the conventions this fall will remain at the same level as 2004 and 2000: 15,000 of them. What a waste. The outcome of the conventions is…
Googlebits →
A few fascinating tidbits from Jim Cramer’s interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt today:
* Google accounts for 0.7 percent of GDP, according to Goldman Sachs.
* Cramer says the ad market is $600…
Having fun with ChucK →
I couldn’t wait until Rebecca’s ISMIR tutorial on ChucK - so I downloaded the latest ChucK distribution, fired it up and worked through the reference guide. It’s a lot of fun. ChucK is a…