Joshua L. Moore

PhD Student
Department of Computer Science
350 Gates Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
Email: jlmo at cs dot cornell dot edu

Taste Over Time: the Temporal Dynamics of User Preferences (ISMIR 2013)

About Me:
I am a fifth-year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University. I work on problems in machine learning and information retrieval, including music information retrieval and recommendation systems. In particular, my research explores the use of embedding methods for sequence modeling and data analysis in domains such as music and language. These methods can handle objects which have only contextual features, like co-occurrence statistics, that describe how they behave in sequences, even when the objects don't necessarily have easy explicit feature descriptions. As a result, we can easily form generative models of sequences of the objects, and we gain an explicit representation for the objects themselves which can then be used for data visualization and exploratory data analysis.

I am advised by Thorsten Joachims. Other members of my committee include Bobby Kleinberg in Computer Science and Wayne Harbert, the advisor for my PhD minor in Linguistics.

See http://lme.joachims.org for more information about my current work, as well as an interactive demo of our playlist generation method.

My work is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Bio:

August 2010 to present: PhD Student, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
- May 2013 to August 2013: Intern at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA (Mentor: Chris Burges).
- May 2012 to August 2012: Software Engineering Intern at Google Research in Mountain View.
- May 2011 to August 2011: Software Engineering Intern at Google's Mountain View office.
June 2010 to August 2010: Intern in Dr. Volker Tresp's group at Siemens AG Corporate Technology, Munich, Germany.
August 2006 to May 2010: B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Applied Mathematics, German minor, highest honors, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
- From August 2008 until May 2010 I worked with Prof. James M. Rehg as an undergraduate research assistant on problems in machine learning, computer vision, and robotics.
October 2007 to July 2008: Exchange student at the Technical University of Munich, Germany.
- From January 2008 until July 2008 I worked with a student in Prof. Dr. Nassir Navab's CAMPAR group implementing and testing image segmentation algorithms.
My CV

Teaching:

TA: CS 6784 - Advanced Topics in Machine Learning, Spring 2014
TA: CS 4780/5780 - Machine Learning, Fall 2012

Publications:

Taste Space Versus the World: an Embedding Analysis of Listening Habits and Geography
J. L. Moore, T. Joachims, D. Turnbull
International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, October 2014.

Best Student Paper Award
pdf
Taste Over Time: the Temporal Dynamics of User Preferences
J. L. Moore, S. Chen, T. Joachims, D. Turnbull
International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, November 2013.
pdf
Animacy Detection with Voting Models
J. L. Moore, C. J. C. Burges, E. Renshaw, W. T. Yih
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (short paper), October 2013.
pdf
Learning to Embed Songs and Tags for Playlist Prediction
J. L. Moore, S. Chen, T. Joachims, D. Turnbull
International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, October 2012.
pdf
Playlist Prediction Via Metric Embedding
S. Chen, J. L. Moore, D. Turnbull, T. Joachims
ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), August 2012.
pdf
Embedding Songs and Tags for Playlist Prediction (extended abstract)
J. L. Moore, S. Chen, T. Joachims, D. Turnbull
Workshop on Music and Machine Learning (MML) at ICML, June 2012.
Hashing Algorithms for Large-Scale Learning
P. Li, A. Shrivastava, J. L. Moore, A. C. König
Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), December 2011.
pdf
A Novel Metric for Information Retrieval in Semantic Networks
J. L. Moore, F. Steinke, V. Tresp
Third International Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning for the Semantic Web (IRMLeS), May 2011.
Learning Visual Categories for Robot Affordance Prediction
J. Sun, J. L. Moore, A. Bobick, J. M. Rehg
International Journal of Robotics Research, February 2010.

Personal Interests:
Aside from the healthy interest in math and computer science in general that one would expect from a CS grad student, I am also passionate about foreign languages and music. I've spent a total of about 14 months living in Germany and know the language quite well. I've also spent some time studying (independently or otherwise and in decreasing order of competence) Spanish, French, Dutch, and Russian.

In my undergrad years, I was a volunteer DJ at WREK Atlanta, 91.1 FM, Georgia Tech's student run radio station. In March 2007 (during my freshman year), I created a radio show called Coffee and Sushi featuring a wide range of chill music (chillout/lounge/downtempo, deep house, bossa nova, and trip-hop) which is still running today.

Unfortunately, upon graduating from Georgia Tech I had to leave my show in the care of another DJ. I've since filled the resulting creative void by honing my skills as a house DJ (check here for newer mixes and here for some older ones).

I love to travel, and I also enjoy photography as a hobby. Check out my Picasa Gallery to see some of my photos.