Last week the National University of Singapore hosted the International Society for Music Information Retrieval conference in lovely Suzhou, China. It featured a ton of interesting presentations by established academics in the field including Prof. Elaine Chew (who also talked about MorpheuS), Roger Dannenberg and others; but also industry leaders such as Jeffrey C. Smith (Smule) and E. Humprey (Spotify). One of the highlights included a fabulous talk by the IT manager of Spotify (Shawn Carney ) on "Bye Bye Bias: Promoting Diverse Teams". I presented work with two master students from the University of Antwerp, on visualizing hit charts and predicting hit songs through social media listening behaviour (identifying early adopters):

Herremans D., Bergmans T.. 2017. Hit Song Prediction Based on Early Adopter Data and Audio Features. The 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) - Late Breaking Demo.
and
Herremans D., Lauwers W.. 2017. Visualizing the evolution of alternative hit charts. The 18th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR) - Late Breaking Demo.

And because music research is great, but not all there is in life, I got to enjoy an unforgettable 2 day hike and camping trip on the great wall with China Hiking.