Fabien Gouyon, from INESC-Porto, will give a seminar on thursday April 25th 2013 at 3:30pm in room 55.321 on "Are we there yet?! A critical take on some Music Information Retrieval technologies."

Abstract: The amount and availability of professionally-produced or user-generated media is continuously increasing; the ways we interact with media today and how we expect to do it tomorrow are profoundly changing. In order to empower these changes, Information Technologies deal to a large extent with tackling new issues emerging in media processing. For instance, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a fast-paced multidisciplinary research community focusing on the processing of an ubiquitous, yet particularly challenging type of media: Music. Typical MIR tasks include e.g. automatic music genre recognition, inferring "tags" or tracking beats from audio signals, and applications range from playlist generation to personalized music recommendation. Scientific publications regularly report improvements in such tasks, and for a number of those, reported results appear to be reaching very high performances. In this talk, I will focus on a critical overview of some results reported in the MIR community, and argue that there is still much road ahead of us until MIR technologies will be truly useful in reliable, large-scale IT systems.

Fabien Gouyon's website