The Topology of Music Recommendation Networks

We study the topology of several music recommendation networks, which rise from relationships between artist, co-occurrence of songs in playlists or experts' recommendation. The analysis uncovers the emergence of complex network phenomena in this kind of recommendation networks, built considering artists as nodes and their resemblance as links. We observe structural properties that provide some hints on navigation and possible optimizations on the design of music recommendation systems. Finally, the analysis derived from existing music knowledge sources provides a deeper understanding of the human music similarity perceptions.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

The Social Network of Contemporary Popular Musicians

In this paper we analyze two social network datasets of contemporary musicians constructed from allmusic.com (AMG), a music and artists' information database: one is the collaboration network in which two musicians are connected if they have performed in or produced an album together, and the other is the similarity network in which they are connected if they where musically similar according to music experts. We find that, while both networks exhibit typical features of social networks such as high transitivity, several key network features, such as degree as well as betweenness distributions suggest fundamental differences in music collaborations and music similarity networks are created.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Genomic investigations of unexplained acute hepatitis in children

Since its first identification in Scotland, over 1000 cases of unexplained pediatric hepatitis in children have been reported worldwide, including 278 cases in the UK 1. Here we report investigation of 38 cases, 66 age-matched immunocompetent controls and 21 immunocompromised comparator subjects, using a combination of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and immunohistochemical methods. We detected high levels of adeno-associated virus 2 (AAV2) DNA in liver, blood, plasma or stool from 27/28 cases. We found low levels of Adenovirus (HAdV) and Human Herpesvirus 6B (HHV-6B), in 23/31 and 16/23 respectively of the cases tested. In contrast, AAV2 was infrequently detected at low titre in blood or liver from control children with HAdV, even when profoundly immunosuppressed. AAV2, HAdV and HHV-6 phylogeny excluded emergence of novel strains in cases. Histological analyses of explanted livers showed enrichment for T-cells and B-lineage cells. Proteomic comparison of liver tissue from cases and healthy controls, identified increased expression of HLA class 2, immunoglobulin variable regions and complement proteins. HAdV and AAV2 proteins were not detected in the livers. Instead, we identified AAV2 DNA complexes reflecting both HAdV and HHV-6B-mediated replication. We hypothesize that high levels of abnormal AAV2 replication products aided by HAdV and in severe cases HHV-6B, may have triggered immune-mediated hepatic disease in genetically and immunologically predisposed children

Genomic investigations of unexplained acute hepatitis in children

Since its first identification in Scotland, over 1,000 cases of unexplained paediatric hepatitis in children have been reported worldwide, including 278 cases in the UK1. Here we report an investigation of 38 cases, 66 age-matched immunocompetent controls and 21 immunocompromised comparator participants, using a combination of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and immunohistochemical methods. We detected high levels of adeno-associated virus 2 (AAV2) DNA in the liver, blood, plasma or stool from 27 of 28 cases. We found low levels of adenovirus (HAdV) and human herpesvirus 6B (HHV-6B) in 23 of 31 and 16 of 23, respectively, of the cases tested. By contrast, AAV2 was infrequently detected and at low titre in the blood or the liver from control children with HAdV, even when profoundly immunosuppressed. AAV2, HAdV and HHV-6 phylogeny excluded the emergence of novel strains in cases. Histological analyses of explanted livers showed enrichment for T cells and B lineage cells. Proteomic comparison of liver tissue from cases and healthy controls identified increased expression of HLA class 2, immunoglobulin variable regions and complement proteins. HAdV and AAV2 proteins were not detected in the livers. Instead, we identified AAV2 DNA complexes reflecting both HAdV-mediated and HHV-6B-mediated replication. We hypothesize that high levels of abnormal AAV2 replication products aided by HAdV and, in severe cases, HHV-6B may have triggered immune-mediated hepatic disease in genetically and immunologically predisposed children

An Opera Information System based on MPEG-7

We present an implementation of the MPEG-7 standard for multimedia content description of lyric opera in the context of the European IST project: OpenDrama. The project aims the definition, development and integration of a novel platform to author and to deliver rich cross-media digital objects of lyric opera. MPEG7 has been used in OpenDrama as base technology for a music information retrieval system. In addition to MPEG-7 Multimedia Description Scheme, di#erent classification schemes have been proposed to deal with operatic concepts as musical form (acts, scenes, frames, introduction, etc), musical indications (piano, forte, ritardando, etc), genre and creation roles (singers, musicians, production sta#, etc). Moreover, this project has covered the development of an authoring tool for MPEG-7 standard, namely MDTools, which includes segmentation, classification scheme generation, creation and production and media information descriptors. 1

Information spread in Recommendation Systems

Abstract In this work we introduce a novel algorithm for spreading information across a complex network. Depending on the initial conditions and on the structure of the graph, this algorithm can be applied to a great variety of problems, all of them included in the wide family of Data Mining applications. Specifically, when the network is constructed around a buyers dataset and the information represents users tastes, this strategy leads to an improvement of standard Recommendation Systems

Getting Music Recommendations and Filtering

This document proposes to use the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) definition to recommend music depending on user's musical tastes and to filter music-related newsfeeds. One of the goals of the project is to explore music content discovery, based on both user profiling ---FOAF descriptions--- and content-based descriptions ---extracted from the audio itself

Sound Effects Taxonomy

Categories or classification schemes o#er ways of navigating and higher control over the search and retrieval of audio content. The MPEG-7 standard provides description mechanisms and ontology management tools for multimedia documents. We have implemented a classification scheme for sound e#ects management inspired on the MPEG-7 standard on top of an existing lexical network, WordNet. WordNet is a semantic network that organizes over 100.000 concepts of the real world with links among them. We show how to extend WordNet with the concepts of the specific domain of sound e#ects. We review some of the taxonomies to describe acoustically sounds. Mining legacy metadata from sound e#ects libraries further supplies us with terms. The extended semantic network includes the semantic, perceptual and sound e#ects specific terms in an unambiguous way. We show the usefulness of the approach easing the task for the librarian and providing higher control on the search and retrieval for the user