Going Head To Head With Genius On Playlists

brownerthanu writes "Engineers at the University of California, San Diego are developing a system to include an ignored sector of music, dubbed the 'long tail,' in music recommendations. It's well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, where the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of exposure. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified. An underground artist will never be recommended in a playlist due to insufficient data. It's an artifact of the popular collaborative filtering recommender algorithm, which Genius is based on. In order to establish a more holistic model of the music world, Luke Barrington and researchers at the Computer Audition Laboratory have created a machine learning system which classifies songs in an automated, Pandora-like, fashion. Instead of using humans to explicitly categorize individual songs, they capture the wisdom of the crowds via a Facebook game, Herd It, and use the data to train statistical models. The machine can then 'listen to,' describe and recommend any song, popular or not. As more people play the game, the machines get smarter. Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music."

Comments

Re:Someone else's money

[antirelic]

LOL. See, difference between taxes and equity venture-funded capitalism, is that in the latter, you can actually get your money back, or even get profit back, and you get to choose to put your money into a venture/equity fund.

Of course, seeing your signature, its obvious that you dislike competition and pray at the alter of big, all powerful government. Perhaps you should move to Europe. They love big unaccountable government.