ISMIR 2008 Tutorial: Social Tags and Music Information Retrieval

When Paul originally asked me if I'd be interested in helping him put together a tutorial proposal for ISMIR I was a bit reluctant. I did an ISMIR tutorial a long time ago, and I didn't forget how much work it was (although it was only a one hour mini tutorial). In fact, only last year Paul and Oscar told me how much work it was to put together their recommendation tutorial (which I liked a lot).

Anyway, somehow I couldn't say no and looking back I don't regret it at all. I'm totally fascinated by social tags. There's no tutorial topic I'd rather talk about. Working together with Paul has been a great pleasure, and I've learned a lot. However, I'm very much looking forward to have a free weekend or even just a free evening again. (Free as in not-MIR-related.)

Paul and I have put together about 200 slides for our tutorial. I think we still need to figure out our time budget. Hopefully we'll have plenty of time for interesting discussions.

Btw, as part of the tutorial we started compiling a list of relevant papers. That list started to grow. Then we thought it would be a good idea to group papers into topics (e.g. autotagging). Then we realized that several papers were in several categories... which is when we moved everything to delicious. In particular, we started using the tag "SocialMusicResearch" to mark interesting things we found in the Internet. Here's a list of some of the items we have tagged. We hope that others will start using that tag as well.

Btw, if you are going to ISMIR, please say hi! If you don't know what I look like: try to spot the guy wearing a Last.fm t-shirt.