9 min about recommender systems for music and in general. Including statements of Last.fm and Pandora founders, Kathrin Passig, Forrester Research … and a few bits by Stephan Baumann.
(German only)
Elektrischer Reporter – Vorschlagsysteme: Mit den besten Empfehlungen
(Photo: Oscar at LSAS2006)
Oscar Celma has been working for a couple of years on music recommendations. I know him since ISMIR2004 and over the years we met regularly and exchanged ideas, sketches, prototypes and more “philosophically influenced thoughts about the future of music in general”. Finally he finished his Ph.D about this topic. The written dissertation gives insights into the top-notch state-of-the-art in recommender systems fusing content-based, collaborative and innovative network-centric features.
“A must read before you die!”
Check his updated website here!
Download section: O.Celma:Music Recommendation and Discovery in the Long Tail
PS I am very happy to be part of the date of defense in BCN …
Starting in November we will investigate the matter of Social Media Mining in Berlin. Therefore Kaiserslautern and the new Berlin office of DFKI will be the sites where we conduct this research. The move to Berlin helps a lot to get into closer personal contact to other scientific and commercial players over there.
We will join the 1st Open Web Meetup at Goldberg Bar co-organised by Alex Korth of DAI-Lab and Cityfinger.
The social network thing is not at all rocket science. Back in the good ol Friendster days I was seeking around this stuff for only a few weeks … and lost interest.
Some months later I joined Open BC -now XING- in order to find interesting business contacts. So far for the masterplan, but in the end after being for 1 year a frequent user I lost interest, I made no business within this community. And even worse I still receive many many request for friendship nowadays! If you look at my activity level you should no that I am not anymore interested.
In the meantime I used Flickr, YouTube and Last.fm for the pure reason of media management and feeding my 5 or so different wordpress blogs. This was efficient and FUN! But I did not really get deep into social involvement.
I missed MySpace completely because the interface was a complete desaster of design - for my very personal taste-. At least I grabbed user names for my bands. Just to be sure to be prepared for a record deal with a major label.
And now for facebook? I missed it in the beginning because I was so fed up with all this Web2.0 service overload. I still have invitations for Joost, Twitter, Pownce, etc. everything from “media-galore” to “teenage micro-blogging”. Never used them, I have no time, I have to work. BUT something happened 3 weeks ago. I got addicted again! It started when Facebook announced the great and damn smart “Open-API-Applet-Move”. I checked in with a pseudonym just to get a feeling for the technical stuff going on there. I discovered very good groups overthere by accident, joined in, pokin around … in addition to this I was part of real good event in firstlife: the summer school semantic web. I met talented and interesting people there who meet now in Facebook. The rest of the story is straightforward: I enjoyed so much the social patterns in this special interest group that I had to change from pseudonym to my real name. And then the heatwave started again. I received invitations of very very good friends, I became part of 3-4 interest groups, people gave me positive feedback on actions, walls, my photos, etc. Social gratification by people whom I trust for their own great work and passion! I explored actively further applet features, and finally I am IN! I am so facebooked!
C4 started this blog/website November 17th 2005. After such a long time we have to think about reconstruction. Taking into account internal and external feedback we hope to satisfy the needs of all stakeholders and users even better in the near future.
Lots of work ahead: Redesign, update of content, people, relations …
No time for the summer slump slowdown!
PS: feel free to send your wishlist via email or comments to this posting.
I had a talk at Re:publica about aspects of digital identity from a research point of view.
Download the pdf here: Identität im Netz.
I started to work -conceptually- on a talk about Digital Identity 2.0. Re:publica will be the event where I have the opportunity to present my view on this very very hot topic. And anyway it is more than a hot topic, identity evolves during a lifetime.
Sunshine vs. rain.
Athens(LSAS2006.SAMT2006) vs. Leeds(VirtualGoods2006.AXMEDIS2006).
The beauty of music and technology vs. the future of -if any- DRM.
I had 2 very different experiences in a very short amount of time. Nevertheless I gave 2 talks sharing 1 hope.
#1: The Beauty of the Beast: Semantic Audio.
#2: BluetunA: Sharing your taste in music with people nearby.
I was part of the SSSW’06. It was great. Why? Excellent and friendly atmosphere, inspiring students, tutors, speakers, directors! The SSSW was founded by Enrico Motta in 2003. Meanwhile Asun Gomez-Perez and John Domingue take care of the event which is part of the KnowledgeWeb Network of Excellence funded by the EU. Obivously the concept of a Summer School is a well-known instrument to heat up the next generation of Ph.D candidates in a scientific community. Away from daily business people meet like-minded experts in a social environment generating kind of a camp-atmosphere. Especially at SSSW the organizers did an excellent job to create an outstanding atmosphere. First of all, the summer school is limited to 50 people, this year the acceptance rate was about 50%. Second, the students have to prepare a poster showing-off their Ph.D projects. The posters have to be presented and the best ones receives a special award. Tutors and invited speakers give overview talks an theoretical details on the current state-of-the-art concerning Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web. Unfortunately I could not attend the entire week, therefore I had to check the materials of the other speakers at site. The selection was very well done. Jim Hendler gave the big big picture of the Semantic Web and its origins including some great reflections about what it was thought to be and were it ended up so far. Richard Benjamins had a focus on the technology transfer which is rarely found at such events but essential for the researchers to see what should or could happen with their future results. Guus Schreiber talked about multimedia and the semantic web which is one of the long-term topics having still many hard to crack topics. I was invited to give a little bit of an off-topic talk about the social aspects of the web and the implications for the semantic web research. Finally Enrico Motta gave a characterization and classification of prominent existing semantic web applications. Beside these invited talks the schedule was packed with the essential state-of-the-art topics in the area. During the last days the students have to work in teams on mini-projects to come up with interesting applications, bringing up research questions and to get a glimpse on how to work in international collaborative teams. Since the students come from all over the world (Europe, China, Korea, etc.) a lot of cultural and social issues have also been discussed. Having some beers together or hanging out at the swimming pool helped to get into contact and exchanging a multitude of opinons, experiences and hopes for the future. Conclusion: SSSW is a must if you are or supervise a semantic web Ph.D student in the early stages of her/his work!
PS: if you are interested: download my talk “Towards a Social Web?!”.pdf