About
I’m a scientist (machine learning, recommendation & information retrieval) and a startup person. I really love finding gems for people automatically -- their next favorite song, artist or article. And I care about doing it right - with the most control and transparency for the fan and creator, treating their creative work, privacy and attention with respect.
I was Chief Scientist at CNN until 2022. I joined via their acqusition of my startup, Canopy, where we built a new fully private and explainable personalization stack.
Before that, I was the co-founder & CTO of music intelligence company The Echo Nest, sold to Spotify in 2014, where I was Principal Scientist until 2016. At Spotify I helped build their research team and focused on discovery of brand new music.
These days I get to work with a bunch of great people and companies, some you use every day and some brand new startups. I help with research and strategy and get teams to build amazing recommenders with music, news, the weather, creators or new AI platforms, always with the goal of surfacing creators' work to as many people as possible. You've definitely used some of our stuff online recently! If you think I can help, please reach out.
I also build synthesziers with my friend DAn! We make the Tulip Creative Computer, the distributed mesh music synthesizer, Alles, and the forthcoming modular programmable synth AMYboard.
I was an artist / musician (ex-“Blitter“) a while back and still make some music.
I received an MS in computer science at the Natural Language Processing group at Columbia University, then a PhD in machine learning and music understanding at MIT.
I live both in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and Quadra Island, BC, Canada.
You can reach me over email — brian@variogram.com