I recently completed a PhD (dissertation over this way) with the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. This work focused on merging social and acoustic similarity spaces and using these notions of similarity to drive playlist creation and related user facing systems, principally autonomous group-request radio. My current research interests are in large (music) collection navigation, (music) recommenders, playlist construction and social music in general. I am an administrator of the MyPySpace open source project to create translation layers and interesting navigation tools to social networks in general and myspace in particular. I also DJ, mostly Drum and Bass, a bit of breaks and other things. I am currently working as the Data Chef over at Musicmetric wrangling some sanity into an internet's worth of music data.
Various virtual instances/means to contact:
- email: me(at)benfields(dot)net or gearmonkey(at)gmail(dot)com
- twitter: @alsothings
- skype: gearmonkey
- Mastodon
- SoundCloud
- last.fm
- ex.fm
- grooveshark
- Myspace[rather neglected], Myspace[as Gearmonkey]