Not running ISMIR in Paris

Admittedly, I slept in this morning and missed the first oral session at 2018 International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference.  This is notable because, for the past two years, I have been a program chair for the conference. This has meant that I had had to arrive early, help setup the lecture hall, meet with the session chairs, track down speakers, help setup poster boards, do sound and video checks, and put out tons of small fires. Things always ran smoothly but that was always a small amount of ambient stress during the week. 

My role this years is that of a society board member and conference attendee. It means that I am still deeply invested in the success of the conference but that I am not responsible for the minute-to-minute operation of the academic program. This has allowed me to sleep in, attend the helpful tutorials, have longer conversations with folks at coffee breaks, be fashionably late to social events, etc. That is, the ambient stress has been replaced with a sense of flexibility and freedom.  

What I am doing here is:

1. Learning more about deep learning for content-based autotagging & music similarity.
2. Exploring how deep learning can be used for playlist generation
3. Presenting a late-breaking abstract on music event recommendation
4. Running an unconference workshop session to collect feedback and generate ideas for the academic program
5. Interacting with all of my favorite friends and researcher    

Post Conference Update: The conference was a great success in terms of growth (450 participants), innovative research ideas, and community enthusiasm.  The organizers (Geoffory Peeters, Slim Essid, Gael Richard) put on a great conference with many innovations (e.g., 4-minute presentation format, industry meetup) and social events (jam session party cruise on the Seine.)  I’m already looking forward to ISMIR 2019 in the Netherlands!