about
I’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.
