Sunday 23 September 2007

One Llama, IMIRSEL, MIREX

One of the interesting things I learned in the recommendation tutorial today is that IMIRSEL launched a startup called One Llama. Seems like they have some ideas on how to make money with MIR technologies. I wonder how many of the MIREX participants were aware of this before submitting their latests implementations to IMIRSEL.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Err... sounds a bit dark, especially the start-up part.

Anonymous said...

Elias,

When I told you I worked at OneLlama - I also clearly stated that IMIRSEL did not launch OneLlama and is not affiliated with it. You asked me about this specifically and I gave you the same answer I give now.

Please do not post further lies or misinformation on this topic. If you have concerns you know how to get hold of both us and Stephen Downie and your continuing failure to do so clearly shows your intentions are not honorable or your concerns valid.

OneLlama is owned in part by its employees and the remainder by Illinois Ventures.

Elias said...

Kris,

This is the first time I hear that IMIRSEL did not launch OneLlama. I guess I missunderstood the contents on the respective slide in the ISMIR tutorial.

Let me see if I understand this correctly now: you are saying that although key people are affiliated with both IMIRSEL and OneLlama there is no link between them?

Regarding non honorable intentions and lies: are you trying to see how far you can push it? ;-)

Anonymous said...

Its not the first time you've heard that OneLlama and IMIRSEL are not affiliated. I specifically told you in both the Poster session in which you asked me about OneLlama and at the Banquet. Our exchanges have not been pleasant so I guess I can't blame you if you do not remember a key details like this - but note that I did stress it, twice.

Please do not forget that I am not affiliated with IMIRSEL nor have I ever been funded by them (plus I live on the other side of the world to their lab). I once worked there for two months in 2005 and continue to collaborate with them as I use M2K for my own research (and have contributed a large amount of its code) and get asked (as do the rest of the MIR community) to help define the tasks at MIREX. Because you once worked at a lab in Japan does not mean they are affiliated with your current employers.

David Tcheng and Michael Welge at the NCSA founded OneLlama at the request of Illinois ventures who had heard of MIR research from a talk by Stephen Downie. David, an employee of the NCSA, gave up his vacation time develop prototypes to demonstrate to our VC. Both David and Michael have collaborated with Stephen in the past and we all value Stephen's views and advice on MIR in general. Stephen recommended me to them (probably in the pub) and is ultimately how I ended up at OneLlama. However, the fact remains that they do not develop MIR systems at IMIRSEL or research the type of MIR systems that we are developing.

Regarding your final comment: There is obviously too much emotional content here. I don't think you are a liar but but would normally have expected you to check your facts. I looked up the slide from Paul/Oscar's tutorial and you are right in that it is misleading. I suspect Paul also thinks of me as part of IMIRSEL as it was again through Stephen that I ended up working with him at Sun Labs (where I did most of my work in M2K). Paul wanted to include us in the slides as proof that members of the MIR research community were now having an impact on the industrial side of MIR - and my university affiliation is not so well known (although we do hold joint copyright on M2K with UIUC and Sun).

Further, I regularly receive emails (~once a month) about getting access to MIREX datasets from all sorts of researchers (many I have never met). I promptly forward these on to Stephen's group (generally with a note that they are going to need to participate in a task at MIREX and are unlikely to be able to directly download the collection for their own research, for now at least). So once and for all - the only people I am affiliated with are OneLlama and UEA (although I now probably have to state that UEA and OneLlama are not affiliated either).

K