Research Seminars

Poolcasting - a Social Web Radio for Group Customisation

Claudio Baccigalupo
Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), Barcelona (Spain)

16:15 Wednesday 27 February 2008

Abstract

Poolcasting is a social Web radio architecture where the group of listeners is able to influence in real time the music played on each channel. Participants contribute to the radio with songs they own, create radio channels and evaluate the proposed music, while an automatic intelligent technique is in charge of scheduling each channel with a group-customised smooth sequence of songs.

One issue Poolcasting has to deal with is musical: how to generate "smooth" sequences, in which each song is musically associated with the song it follows, as it normally occurs in terrestrial radio programs. For this purpose, Poolcasting employs musical knowledge coming from the analysis of playlists retrieved from the Web.

Another issue Poolcasting faces is social: how to aggregate the preferences of different listeners and make everyone satisfied on the long run. For this purpose, Poolcasting opts for an approach that promotes fairness among listeners with diverging preferences.