email: b.fields(at)gold(dot)ac(dot)uk

office address:
Ben Fields
Department of Computing
Goldsmiths College
University of London
New Cross
London, SE14 6NW
United Kingdom

PhD

PhD Computer Science, April 2011
Goldsmiths, University of London

Thesis: Contextualize Your Listening: The Playlist as Recommendation Engine

available for download: pdf

MSc

M.S. Music Engineering Technology, May 2006

University of Miami

Thesis: On the Viability of Using Mixed Feature Extraction with Multiple Statistical Models to Categorize Music by Genre

available for download: pdf

BSc

B.S. Computer Engineering, March 2004
University of California, Santa Cruz
Senior Design Project: Securio - The Autonomous Home Security Robot, Audio Video Specialist

I started my PhD research in music similarity and organization as part of OMRAS2 in January 2007. I am currently working in the Goldsmiths Digital Studios research group, under the supervision of Dr. Christophe Rhodes and Dr. Micheal Casey.

Research Interests

• bridging the semantic gap between social networks and content based retrieval systems
• Music recommenders
• Metadata informed dynamics effects processing
• Human-like Playlist generation and playback (autoDJ)
• Song phrase segmentation
• Playlist (think DJ set, pod cast, etc.) segmentation

Program Committe Memberships/Reviewer

• ISMIR 2009, 2010
• Workshop On Music Recommendation and Discovery (WOMRAD, in conjunction with ACM RecSys 2010)
• 2nd International Workshop on Advances in Music Information Research (AdMIRe, in conjunction with IEEE ICME)
• Musicae Scientiae (journal)

Publications

• D. DeRoure, K. Page, B. Fields, T. Crawford, I. Fujinaga, S. Downie, "An e-Research Approach to Web-Scale Music Analysis", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, in press, 2011.

• B. Fields, K.Jacobson, C. Rhodes, M. d'Inverno, M. Sandler, M. Casey, "Analysis and Exploitation of Musician Social Networks for Recommendation and Discovery. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia", in press, 2011.

• B. Fields, C. Rhodes, M. d'Inverno, "Automatic Group-Interactive Radio using Social-Networks of Musicians", in International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Barcelona, Spain, July 2011.

• B. Fields, K. Page, T. Crawford, D. De Roure, "The Segment Ontology: bridging music-generic and domain-specific", in Workshop on Advances in Music Information Research (AdMIRe), co-located the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), Barcelona, Spain, July, 2011.

• K. Page, B. Fields, B. Nagel, G. O'Neill, D. De Roure and T. Crawford, "Semantics for music analysis through linked data: How country is my country?" in Proceedings of the International Conference on eScience, Brisbane, Australia, Dec, 2010.

• B. Fields, C. Rhodes, M. d'Inverno, "Using Song Social Tags and Topic Models to Describe and Compare Playlists." Workshop on Music Recommendation and Discovery, co-located with ACM Recommender Systems, Barcelona, September 2010.

• K. Jacobson, B. Fields, and M. Sandler, "Using audio analysis and network structure to identify communities of on-line social networks of artists," in Proc. of Int. Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Philadelphia, PA, USA, September 2008.

• B. Fields, K. Jacobson, C. Rhodes, and M. Casey, "Social playlists and bottleneck measurements: Exploiting musician social graphs using content-based dissimilarity and pairwise maximum flow values," in Proc. of Int. Symposium on Music Information Retrieval, Philadelphia, PA, USA, September 2008.

• B. Fields, K. Jacobson, M. Casey, and M. Sandler, "Do you sound like your friends? exploring artist similarity via artist social network relationships and audio signal processing," in Int. Computer Music Conference, August 2008.

• K. Jacobson, B. Fields, M. Sandler, M. Casey, "The Effects of Lossy Audio Encoding on Genre Classification Tasks," in Proc. Audio Engineering Society 124 Int. Conv., (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Audio Engineering Society, May 2008.

• B. Fields, M. Casey, "Using Audio Classifiers as a Mechanism for Content Based Song Similarity," in Proc. Audio Engineering Society 123 Int. Conv., (New York, NY, USA), Audio Engineering Society, October 2007

• M. Mauch, S. Dixon, C. Harte, B. Fields, M. Casey, "Discovering Chord Idioms through Beatles and Real Book Songs," in Proc. Int. Symposium on Music Information Retrieval, Vienna, Austria, Sept. 2007.

• B. Fields, “Using mixed feature extraction with multiple statistical models to achieve song categorization by genre,” in Proc. Audio Engineering Society 122nd Int. Conv., (Vienna, Austria), Audio Engineering Society, May 2007.

• B. Fields, “On the viability of using mixed feature extraction with multiple statistical models to achieve song categorization by genre,” Master’s thesis, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, May 2006.

Presentations and Talks

• Tutorial: "Finding a Path Through the Juke Box: The Playlist Tutorial," given at ISMIR 2010, 9 August 2010 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Co-presented with Paul Lamere. Slides as slideshare, pdf.

• Presenation: "Analysis and Exploitation of Musician Social Networks for Recommendation and Discovery," given at IEEE-THEMES, a workshop co-located at ICASSP 2010, 15 March 2010 in Dallas, TX, USA. Slides : Associated Journal Article

• Tutorial: "Mining the social web for music-related data," given at ISMIR 2009, 26 October 2009 in Kobe, Japan. Co-presented with Claudio Baccigalupo. Slides Resources

• Invited Talk: "The Semantic Web and Why You Should Care," given at JCDL 2009 Integrating Digital Library Content with Computational Tools and Services workshop, 19 June 2009 in Austin TX, USA. Co-presented with Kevin Page. Slides

Installations and Demonstrations

• K. Page, B. Fields, T. Crawford, D. De Roure, G. O'Neill and B. Nagel, "Semantics for Signal and Result Collections through Linked Data: How Country is my Country?," in International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Utrecht, The Netherlands, Aug, 2010.

• B. Fields, C. Rhodes, "An Audience Steerable Automatic Music Director for Online Radio Broadcast," in International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Kobe, Japan, Oct, 2009.

• R. Stewart, M. Magas, B. Fields, "decibel 151," in ACM SIGGRAPH 2009, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, Aug 2009.

• EPSRC PhD Studentship, as part of the OMRAS2 project
• Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Computing Grant for Overseas Research
• Audio Engineering Society Educational Foundation Award
• University of Miami Frost School of Music departmental scholarship
• University of California, Santa Cruz, Jack Baskin School of Engineering, Honors in the Major, Computer Engineering

Independent Consulting

• Audio Kicker, April - May 2010
  development of prototypical backend, recommender and playlist engine

Goldsmiths University of London, New Cross, London

• Visiting Tutor, courses:
  • Creative Computing 2, Practice 2, Fall 2009
  • Creative Computing 3, Practice 3, Fall 2008
• Teaching Assistance, courses:
  • Computing 3, User Interface Design and Human Factors, Spring 2010

Gables Engineering, Coral Gables, FL

• Audio Systems Engineer Intern, June 2005 - January 2006.

University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL

• Ring Theater Venue Sound Designer, December 2004 - January 2006

Raytheon, San Diego, CA

• Student Intern, Summer 2004
• Student Intern, Summer 2001

University of California, Santa Cruz

• Modified Supplemental Instruction Leader, January 2003 - March 2004
• Porter College Technical Crew Manager -- Sound, March 2002 March 2004
• Porter College Technical Crew Member, January 2000 - March 2002