Last Tuesday the first UK Hadoop user group meeting took place in London. Johan did a great job in organizing it and speakers included Doug Cutting from Yahoo! (who leads the Hadoop project).
Here's are some links:
Yahoo! developer network blog mentioning the event. (Includes a video of interviews with some of the presenters.)
Seems like the interesting talk by Miles Osborne on "Using Nutch and Hadoop for Natural Language Processing" is still missing on skills matter's website. I'll update this blog post when the talk is added.
I've been using Matlab extensively for probably almost 10 years. I have written more lines of code in Matlab than in any other language. I always have at least one Matlab application window open. I've probably generated at least a few million Matlab figures (one of my most favorite Matlab functions is close all). I've written three small toolboxes in Matlab (and all of them have actually been used by people other than me). I've told anyone who was willing to listen that I couldn't have gotten even a fraction of my work done without Matlab. In fact, 3 times in a row I convinced the places I've been working at that I needed a (non-academic) license for Matlab and several of its toolboxes. I even had a Matlab sticker on my old laptop for a long time. I frequently visited the Matlab news group and I'm subscribed to several Matlab related blogs. If I would have needed to take a single tool with me on a remote island it would have been Matlab. I guess it's fair to say I was in love with Matlab.
However, I always felt that it wasn't a perfect relationship. Matlab is expensive. Matlab is not pre-installed on the Linux machines I remotely connect to. In fact, installing Matlab on Linux is a pain (compared to how easy it is to install it on Windows). Furthermore, not everyone has access to Matlab making it harder to share code. Finally, Matlab can be rather useless when it comes to things that are not best described in terms of matrices that fit into memory, and I can't easily run Matlab code on Hadoop.
I had been playing with Python out of curiosity (wondering why everyone was liking it so much) but I guess I was too happy with Matlab to seriously consider alternatives. But then Klaas showed me how to use Python with Hadoop. Within a very short time I've started to use Python more and more for things I usually would have done in Matlab. Now I write more Python code a day than Matlab code. I still use Matlab on a daily basis, but if I had to choose between Matlab and Python, it would be a very easy choice. SciPy and related modules are wonderful. If I'd redo my PhD thesis, it wouldn't include a single line of Matlab code and instead lot's of Python code :-)
Btw, James pointed me to the following visualization showing activities and shared code of Python developers over time. This is by far the best information visualization I have seen in a very long time. I really like the idea and implementation. I wonder if something similar could be done for a piece of music where the coders are replaced with instruments, and the files are replaced with sounds.
At Last.fm we launched a public version of our playground. One of the motivations has been to be able to gather more user feedback on some of the ideas we have. In particular, to find out if ideas we have are sticky or if they are just nice ideas. Eventually, all sticky ideas will (hopefully) find their way into the main site.
I'm very excited that we now have this platform. So far we've been running most of our experiments and evaluations in the background but now we can directly interact with users and expose possibilities we have even if there is no straight forward way to integrate them into the main site.
Special thanks to Klaas Bosteels who's done some amazing work during his 3 month internship at Last.fm building up playground. Btw, if you know someone who might be a good fit for an internship at Last.fm, let me know! (Java/Hadoop, PHP, Python, and being able to work efficiently on Linux systems is more or less a requirement.)
Btw, from a MIR research perspective I believe the multi tag search is the most interesting. Primarily because it indicates how much potential tags have.
As usual after an ISMIR I’m totally burnt out. The program was intense. My brain is still trying to absorb all the interesting conversations, ideas, results, and theories that are echoing in my ears. Some of the things I saw made me realize how close we are to reach some of the scenarios we’ve been talking about in the last 5 years (for example, Klaas Bosteels demonstrated a content-based playlist generator that learns from user feedback which he implemented on his tiny MP3 player). Other things made me reconsider assumptions I’ve made in the past (for example Hamish Allan et al. presented interesting work on music similarity: "Methodological Considerations in Studies of Musical Similarity").
It was also wonderful to have the opportunity to spend time with people that seem very familiar although I only see them once every one or two years. It’s strange how reading papers can make the authors seem so familiar.
One of the many highlights of ISMIR 2007 was when Don Byrd announced the locations of future ISMIRs. I was particularly happy to hear that ISMIR 2009 will be organized by Masataka Goto et al. (in Japan!). However, ISMIR 2008 organized by Youngmoo Kim, Dan Ellis, and Juan Bello et al. (US) and ISMIR 2010 organized by Frans Wiering et al. (Netherlands) will surely be great, too. It’s good to see ISMIR, for the first time in its history (afaik), planed out for 3 years in advance. And I heard some rumors that ISMIR 2011 will be held in Vienna again because it was such a huge success ;-)
