I’m going to take an extra month or two to finish my thesis. I’m now aiming to turn in the final draft, signed by my readers, around late June or early July.
I decided to take more time because I realized that the pressure of my current schedule was leading me to make poor design decisions, and to lose focus of the big picture of my thesis work. Hopefully I can do a better job than that.
Here is the (not quite complete) browser for last.fm users’ listening prefs and friends, that I wrote for Tod’s class last term. It shows the focal user’s friends, scaled in size by musical taste compatibility, along with the top tags for the top artists listened to by the focal user. The goal of this was to focus on what types of music each user listens to, instead of the particular artists, and to look at last.fm as a social cloud of music listeners. It’s my first project in Flash, and uses the flare visualization toolkit.
(Click on any last.fm username to move about in the clouds. Note: it’s a little slow; lots of downloading of RSS feeds going on in the background here.)
I’m in a bit of a holding pattern on my thesis for the next 2-3 weeks, because I am finishing up the semester, and my classes have become more busy. This weekend I am off to Vancouver/Whistler for the “Music, Brain, and Cognition” Workshop at NIPS 2007. I return with a problem set due and a final exam for my signal processing class. And the following week I spend on my project for Tod’s class, which will be a (simple) visualization of a user’s music preferences based off of last.fm data feeds.
I’ll finally be free from school work on December 19th, so I hope to make some headway at that point.
Accessible here. (Current version listed in “Links” at right.)