Title – Data Science + (Or how data science intersects with music, the humanities, and cultural analytics)
Speaker – Dr. Katherine Kinnaird, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistical & Data Sciences, Smith College
Date/Time – Monday, 22 May 2023, 2pm
Location – Nash Lecture Theatre, King’s College London
Abstract – Data science seems to be everywhere these days. This talk will discuss examples of data science being applied to music and TED talks, as well as introducing publicly available resources for exploring culturally motivated data. This talk will delve deeply into the multidisciplinary field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) motivated by the comparisons that we, as humans, make about music and the various contexts of these comparisons. By defining tasks such as building better song recommendation systems or finding structural information in a given recording, MIR seeks to algorithmically make these musical comparisons in the same manner that a human being would, but on a much larger scale. In this talk, we will introduce the field of MIR, including popular tasks and cutting-edge techniques, and present the aligned hierarchies, a structure-based representation that can be used for comparing songs, and new extensions of aligned hierarchies that leverage ideas from topological data analysis. Finally, we’ll turn to new work examining TED talk transcripts.
Bio – Katherine M. Kinnaird, Visiting Senior Lecturer, works at the intersection of machine learning and cultural analytics, specifically concerning music information retrieval and text analysis. Broadly, she researches the dimension reduction problem, representing high-dimensional and noisy sequential data as a low-dimensional object that encodes relevant information. Katherine earned her PhD at Dartmouth College (Hanover NH, USA) in mathematics and proposed the Aligned-Hierarchies for representing all possible musical structure hierarchies aligned on a common-time axis. She held postdoctoral appointments at Macalester College (St. Paul MN, USA) and Brown University (Providence RI, USA). Currently she is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistical & Data Sciences at Smith College (Northampton MA, USA).
