Exciting news - starting this week, Brain Jam will be followed by a "Social Jam" - an unstructured social time where you can chat and hang out with fellow researchers, designers, engineers or friendly dictators. Refreshments will be served!

(still looking for interns for spring/summer, by the way).

This week in Yahoo Research Berkeley Brain Jam:
Jon Foote
Analyzing Music and Audio by Self-Similarity

Friday, Jan 12th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.
http://upcoming.org/event/133461/

Abstract:
I will present ways to analyze music and audio based on self-resemblance, using a "similarity matrix" representation inter-frame spectral similarity. Besides yielding an engaging visualization of musical structure, this approach can be used to segment and index audio by content. I will present the fundamental ideas, musical examples, and some interesting applications and offshoots, including the "beat spectrum," a novel way to characterize musical rhythm. I will also present a system for retrieving music by rhythmic similarity, and discuss applications such as audio abstracting and automatic podcast indexing. If time permits I will present some "minute madness" of other work such as VideoBots?, FlyAbout, and some current speculative projects.

Bio:
Jonathan T. Foote was born in 1963 in Hollywood. He attended public schools in Santa Monica, California, somehow without learning how to surf. He received a BS (Electrical Engineering) degree in 1985 and a ME (Electrical) degree in 1986, both from Cornell University. From 1986 to 1988 he worked as a development engineer for Teradyne, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1993 he received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, where he also received a Brown Presidential Teaching Award and an Outstanding Research Award from the Brown University Chapter of Sigma Xi. He did postdoctoral research at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom from 1993 to 1996, and was a 1997 Fulbright Fellow at the Institute of Systems Science (now A*STAR) in Singapore. From 1997 to 2005 he was a Senior Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. Currently he is a freelance consultant, as well as working on a manuscript and several speculative projects. Dr. Foote's research interests include speech recognition, audio analysis and retrieval, multimedia signal processing, and panoramic video. Dr. Foote has published more than 60 papers in these areas and has received Best Paper Awards at the ACM Multimedia and ACM SIGIR international conferences. Dr. Foote has been awarded eighteen US patents and has many more pending. He is also active in the arts, and enjoys not surfing in his free time.

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Upcoming Brain Jams:
19 Jan 2007 – Scott Golder - Digitizing Friendship: Learning from and about Massive Online Social Networks  
26 Jan 2007 – Qingfeng Huang - Spatiotemporal Information Dissemination and Beyond  
2 Feb 2007 – Elin Pederson - TBD

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Yahoo Research Berkeley
http://whyrb.com