Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

The organizers for ISMIR 2008 have just posted the schedule for tutorials for this year's conference. Among them is a tutorial that will be presented by Jean-Julien Aucouturier, Elias Pampalk and myself entitled Social Tags and Music Information Retrieval. Here are the details:

Social Tags are free text labels that are applied to items such as artists, playlists and songs. These tags have the potential to have a positive impact on music information retrieval research. In this tutorial we describe the state of the art in commercial and research social tagging systems for music. We explore some of the motivations for tagging. We describe the factors that affect the quantity and quality of collected tags. We present a toolkit that MIR researchers can use to harvest and process tags. We look at how tags are collected and used in current commercial and research systems. We explore some of the issues and problems that are encountered when using tags. We present current MIR-related research centered on social tags and suggest possible areas of exploration for future research.

I am really excited about working on this tutorial with Elias and JJ. One of the highlights of 2007 for me was presenting a tutorial on music recommendation with Oscar Celma. I learned so much about the subject matter while preparing the tutorial, and it was great fun to work with someone as smart as Oscar. I am really looking forward to repeating the experience.