about

Erik in BeijingI’m Erik Frey.  I live and work in Seattle, building systems that fish out truths from seas of information.  I’m fascinated by how we represent knowledge and derive meaning from our world.

I began this fascination with a focus in music.  I spent the last few years at last.fm‘s London headquarters, building:

  • Ways for machines to listen to and identify songs.
  • Distributed systems for recommending music in a real-time landscape, where a song could be soooo yesterday, or even soooo earlier this morning.
  • A solution to fix every misspelling in music, ever.
  • Mathematical techniques to index and search through large geometric spaces very quickly.
  • Lots of the nuts and bolts required for the above feats and stunts, including a stupid Unix trick or two.

I use this blog as a proving ground for experiments and deep-dives into topics that interest me.  Even in my particular studies I find I still have far more questions than answers, and so many of my blog entries end as a call-out for more information.  Feel free to contact me about anything you find here.

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