Music and Exploratory Search

One of my early, longstanding information retrieval passions is Music Information Retrieval — especially content-based music IR.  I began research in MIR back in 1998 as a graduate student at UMass Amherst.  In 2000, we organized the very first ISMIR conference, in Plymouth Massachusetts.

Music IR hits a sweet spot between information retrieval, information seeking, pattern recognition, data mining and information extraction, and user information needs.  It is a field that is full of rich but solvable problems.  And it’s music.. who doesn’t like that?

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What is a “Gupf”?

The title of this blog is “Information Retrieval Gupf”.  I’ll wager that more than a few of you are wondering what a Gupf is.

Gupf is an Austrian slang/dialect form of the high German word “Gipfel”, which means “peak” or “summit”, as on a mountain.  My idea for naming the blog “Information Retrieval Gupf” was to have a place where interested researchers and search observers can gather, survey, and discuss information retrieval from a useful vantage point: somewhere tall where you can get a good overview of what is happening.

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