Hello! I’m Brian. In varying degrees I’m
- a scientist (machine learning, music understanding, recommendation, information retrieval)
- a startup person (co-founder & CTO of the Echo Nest, sold to Spotify, where I was Principal Scientist for a few years until very recently, mostly focusing on discovery of brand new music) — now founder & CEO of Canopy.
- artist / musician (ex-“Blitter“)
- creator-type person working with a lot of electronics & software, mostly centered around audio, speech and machine learning, food devices
I received a masters degree in computer science focusing on Natural Language Processing from Columbia University in 2000, then a PhD in music understanding at the MIT Media Lab in 2005. After that I co-founded The Echo Nest, which grew to 70 employees before the acquisition by Spotify in early 2014. I left Spotify in late 2016 (but most of the Echo Nest team is still there making amazing discovery products.) In late 2017 I started Canopy to focus on privacy and control of algorithmic decisions and personalization. We’re already up to 16 people across NYC, Boston and Oakland, CA.
I live in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, but travel around a bit regularly.
You can reach me over email — brian@variogr.am
You can also follow me on Twitter.
