Thanks to the guys of the Repository of European Association for Semantic Web Education (REASE) my talk of this years Summer School Semantic Web is online now for free access for educational purposes. If you are interested to spend 1 hour of your valuable time, go here:
Video recording about the Social Web.
It is more fun to watch than to read! The C4DM guys dont hesitate to stream and record the seminar talks. What a great service for the audience being online in the net but “kind of offline” in the real world. Follow the link to see it all, including my talk (shameless selfpromotion done!).
UPDATE: Paul commented that it would be helpful to have the Slides.pdf.
I have been visiting some friends and colleagues in London. Giving talks, having discussions, etc.
First I met the guys at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) headed by Mark Sandler: They showed me really cool things around the semantic web for music, check the blog of Yves to find the stuff about querying a musicontology with SWI-Prolog. Mark showed me his social tag-based music browser for mood-oriented seeking … and the lunch offered excellent sushi bento. Wow, what a great day!
Next day I made a stop at Goldsmiths College. My old buddy Daniel from Germany is meanwhile there and joined the group working on Computational Creativity, including especially music in the digital, too. They have less DSP and more psychological hooks, also very interesting. And Geraint Wiggins and Tim Crawford showed up! I have seen ongoing stuff about the analysis of MySpace artist relations there, cool!
And finally in the afternoon Elias invited me to have an insight look on Last.fm. My god! Approx. 70 young and addicted people in one big room take care of the social music revolution, indeed!
Damn … the UK has BIG MOMENTUM! Maybe the situation with national research funding for these issues is not so bad overthere!
Next week I talk about my ideas towards highly personlized music recommendation at the Digital Music Centre in London. The announcement is on their Website. As already posted earlier I am truely convinced that there are good chances to combine MIR techniques with Web2.0 lifestreams, incremental machine learning and prior work in music psychology from Sloboda, Gabrielsson and Schönberger.
You may claim that this sounds too much like rocket science or blue sky research?
But I think that the time is right to cope with these challenges. When I started my Ph.D about perception of music similarity 5 years ago the technological situation was quite different. No lifestreams, MIR still at the beginning, etc. I am optimistic to find a setup of crowdsourced collections of goosebump sensations plus the latest state-of-the-art in MIR and digital lifestream aggregation (maybe even Google Open Social? )!
By accident I stumbled over a brandnew book of Oliver Sacks entitled Musicophilia. He deals with the very nature of music and human mankind by giving a series of medical case studies related to processes in the brain when performing, listening to music. I just received the book this morning! I have to read it …
I have been there and it was really good and inspiring! Plenty of young and hungry coders, web designers, creatives, etc. At the warm-up event about a dozen of people where exchanging business cards with me being proud of their Web2.0 services. I really liked the straightforward atmosphere of “sounds great go ahead” rather than typical german pessimism.
Further reports: Barcamp2 Berlin.
Blogosphere: Videos at Barcamp.