This paper presents AutoDJ: a system for automatically generating music playlistsbased on one or more seed songs selected by a user. AutoDJ uses Gaussian Process Regression to learn a user preference function over songs. This function takes music metadata as inputs. This paper further introduces Kernel Meta-Training, which is a method of learning a Gaussian Process kernel from a distribution of functions that generates the learned function. For playlist generation, AutoDJ learns a kernel from a large set of albums. This learned kernel is shown to be more effective at predicting users' playlists than a reasonable hand-designed kernel.

We introduce a new type of Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to navigate in the Semantic Space of large text collections. We propose a "hyperbolic SOM"(HSOM) based on a regular tesselation of the hyperbolic plane, which is a non-euclidean space characterized by constant negative gaussian curvature. The exponentially increasing size of a neighborhood around a point in hyperbolic space provides more freedom to map the complex information space arising from language into spatial relations. We describe experiments, showing that the HSOM can successfully be applied to text categorization tasks and yields results comparable to other state-of-the-art methods.

When designing a two-alternative classifier, one ordinarily aims to maximize the classifier's ability to discriminate between members of the two classes. We describe a situation in a real-world business application of machine-learning prediction in which an additional constraint is placed on the nature of the solution: thatthe classifier achieve a specified correct acceptance or correct rejection rate (i.e., that it achieve a fixed accuracy on members of one class or the other). Our domain is predicting churn in the telecommunications industry. Churn refers to customers who switch from one service provider to another. We propose fouralgorithms for training a classifier subject to this domain constraint, and present results showing that each algorithm yields a reliable improvement in performance.

Recent approaches have used uncertainty over the vocabulary of symbols in a multinomial distribution as a means of accounting for sparsity. We present a Bayesian approach that allows weak prior knowledge, in the form of a small set of approximate candidate vocabularies, to be used to dramatically improve the resulting estimates. We demonstrate these improvements in applications to text compression andestimating distributions over words in newsgroup data. 1 Introduction Sparse multinomial distributions arise in many statistical domains, including natural languageprocessing and graphical models. Consequently, a number of approaches toparameter estimation for sparse multinomial distributions have been suggested [3]. These approaches tend to be domain-independent: they make little use of prior knowledge about a specific domain. In many domains where multinomial distributionsare estimated there is often at least weak prior knowledge about' the potential structure of distributions, such as a set of hypotheses about restricted vocabularies from which the symbols might be generated. Such knowledge can be solicited from experts or obtained from unlabeled data. We present a method for Bayesian_parameter estimation in sparse discrete domains that exploits this weak form of prior knowledge to improve estimates over knowledge-free approaches.

This article presents a 2-phase computational learning model and application. Asa demonstration, a system has been built, called CHIME for Computer Human Interacting Musical Entity. In phase 1 of training, recurrent back-propagationtrains the machine to reproduce 3 jazz melodies. The recurrent network is expanded and is further trained in phase 2 with a reinforcement learning algorithm and a critique produced by a set of basic rules for jazz improvisation.

This conditional expected claim amount is called the pure premium and it is the basis of the gross premium charged to the insured. This expected value is conditionned on information available about the insured and about the contract, which we call input profile here. This regression problem is difficult for several reasons: large number of examples, -large number variables (most of which are discrete and multi-valued), non-stationarity of the distribution, and a conditional distribution of the dependent variable which is very different from those usually encountered in typical applications .of

We present a probabilistic generative model for timing deviations in expressive music. The structure of the proposed model is equivalent to a switching state space model. We formulate twowell known music recognition problems, namely tempo tracking and automatic transcription (rhythm quantization) as filtering andmaximum a posteriori (MAP) state estimation tasks. The inferences are carried out using sequential Monte Carlo integration (particlefiltering) techniques. For this purpose, we have derived a novel Viterbi algorithm for Rao-Blackwellized particle filters, wherea subset of the hidden variables is integrated out.

In packet switches, packets queue at switch inputs and contend for outputs. Thecontention arbitration policy directly affects switch performance. Thebest policy depends on the current state of the switch and current traffic patterns. This problem is hard because the state space, possible transitions, and set of actions all grow exponentially with the size of the switch. We present a reinforcement learning formulation of the problem that decomposes the value function into many small independent valuefunctions and enables an efficient action selection.

We describe a neural network which enhances and completes salient closed contours. Our work is different from all previous work in three important ways. First, like the input provided to V1 by LGN, the input toour computation is isotropic. That is, the input is composed of spots not edges. Second, our network computes a well defined function of the input based on a distribution of closed contours characterized by a random process. Third, even though our computation is implemented in a discrete network, its output is invariant to continuous rotations and translations of the input pattern.

In such approaches, an object is defined by means of local features.