Juan Sebastián Gómez-Cañón | Challenges And Opportunities For Human-Centered Music Emotion Recognition
Music is intertwined with human emotion, memory, and identity, making it a powerful medium for affective experience and regulation.
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Music is intertwined with human emotion, memory, and identity, making it a powerful medium for affective experience and regulation.
Child labor remains prevalent in Ghana’s cocoa sector and is associated with adverse educational and health outcomes for children.

Child labor remains prevalent in Ghana’s cocoa sector and is associated with adverse educational and health outcomes for children.
What does digital inclusion look like in the age of AI? Over 6,000 of the world’s 7,000-plus living languages remain digitally disadvantaged.
What does digital inclusion look like in the age of AI? Over 6,000 of the world’s 7,000-plus living languages remain digitally disadvantaged.
Despite the rapid adoption of LLM chatbots, little is known about how they are used. We approach this question theoretically and empirically, modeling a user who chooses whether to complete a task herself, ask the chatbot for information that reduces decision noise, or delegate execution to the chatbot...
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Despite the rapid adoption of LLM chatbots, little is known about how they are used. We approach this question theoretically and empirically, modeling a user who chooses whether to complete a task herself, ask the chatbot for information that reduces decision noise, or delegate execution to the chatbot...
This has motivated decades of research in music emotion recognition (MER), aiming to model emotional responses to music using computational methods. However, emotional responses to music are not fixed properties of the signal but emerge from interactions between musical structure, listener background, cultural context, and situational factors. As a result, traditional MER approaches that rely on averaged labels or universal ground truth struggle to capture the diversity and subjectivity of emotional experiences.
This talk argues for a human-centered perspective on MER that treats subjectivity not as noise but as a core signal. I discuss methodological challenges in constructing meaningful ground truth, including inter-annotator disagreement, contextual dependence, and personalization, as well as ethical concerns related to the use of emotion in a political context, and potential misuse.