Work on Srikanth Cherla

Completed Generative AI with LLMs Course on Coursera

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently completed a Coursera foundation course on Large Language Models — my first structured learning in a while. The gap was mostly down to becoming a parent, which makes carving out time for professional development and blogging considerably harder.

Since April 2023 I’ve been working on Muse at Unity — an LLM-driven AI assistant for Unity developers that has evolved from a web-based chat interface into a deeply integrated Editor tool capable of analysing your project and performing contextual tasks.

Unity Muse at the Microsoft Build Conference

Sat, 25 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been building Unity’s AI assistant — Muse — since April 2023, and it recently got a moment in the spotlight: Microsoft featured it at their Build conference as a customer success story.

A film crew came to Copenhagen to record the team, and the resulting video was shown during a live Muse demonstration at the conference. I’m in it, talking about both the product and my contributions to it. A good reminder of how far the project has come from its early days as a simple chat interface.

Completed Game Design Foundations on LinkedIn Learning

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

After joining Unity I needed to get up to speed on game design. I’d moved away from gaming as a consumer over the years to focus on ML and music technology, so coming in fresh to the industry I wanted a solid foundation.

I found a three-part course called Game Design Foundations taught by Brenda Romero on LinkedIn Learning and completed it over about two and a half weeks. It gave me the vocabulary — terms like “core loop” and “lootbox” that colleagues were using — and helped me start to see how my ML background could contribute to game design problems.

Hello, Unity!

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m very pleased to announce that, starting today, I will be a Senior Machine Learning Developer at Unity Labs in Copenhagen. Its parent company - Unity Technologies, is well-known for having produced one of the most widely used gaming engines - Unity. I’m super-excited about this change of focus in my work from music to gaming, and really look forward to getting started!

At Unity Labs, I will be creating Machine Learning solutions in technology for use by Game Designers. This is about all I know for now, and hope that I can share more updates as time passes.

Goodbye, Moodagent!

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today I handed in my resignation at Moodagent. It’s been a great year and some months working in this fast and ambitious company! I will associate this experience most with the great friends I’ve made here, my focus on data preparation, Apache Spark, Collaborative Filtering and a feeling that I’ve really improved my programming abilities thanks to some excellent Coursera courses (this one, and this one) I completed while working here.

Attending ISMIR 2019

Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Four of us from Moodagent — Reinier de Valk, Pierre Lafitte, Tomas Gajarsky, and myself — are attending ISMIR 2019 in Delft, Netherlands.

Two presentations from the team:

Reinier de Valk: “JosquIntab: A Dataset for Content-based Computational Analysis of Music in Lute Tablature” (main conference)
Tomas Gajarsky: “Reinforcement Learning Recommender System for Modelling Listening Sessions” (late-breaking session)

Come find us at the posters if you’re attending.

Hello, Moodagent!

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been about four months since I wrote here about leaving Jukedeck. So after a nice long break, I’m very pleased to share that I’ll be joining Danish music streaming startup Moodagent on the 17th of July, 2019. While the streaming service itself is new and hasn’t been launched yet, the company Moodagent A/S that owns it has been around for nearly two decades having built several products around their core technology for analysing musical content. You may have even come across their first music app on your Nokia phone back in the day! You can read all about them on Wikipedia, and find out more about the Moodagent streaming service on their website. I hear they’ll be launching it very soon!

A New Blog Series on the Music Tech Community – India Website

Fri, 24 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been volunteering with peers in India to promote awareness of music technology through the Music Tech Community – India initiative. We’re launching a blog series featuring interviews with people working in the field — to showcase what’s possible and offer career inspiration.

The first post features an interview with Ajay Srinivasamurthy, a researcher applying Information Retrieval techniques to Indian classical music. Great start — looking forward to more conversations like this.

Goodbye, Jukedeck!

Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that I have decided to leave Jukedeck. It’s been a unique and fascinating journey the past three or so years with a flexible and forward-thinking company, and a stimulating work environment. I couldn’t have asked for a more apt transition into employment after my PhD than the one that led me to Jukedeck and I’m really grateful for all that I have learned here, the people I’ve had the opportunity to work with and everything the company has done for me during this period. This also means that I’m no longer going to be living or working in the UK, and my wife Nina and I have some new and exciting plans for the future that I’m really looking forward to.

Remote Talk at Event Organised by Music Tech Community – India

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was invited by Music Tech Community – India to speak at an event in Bengaluru on December 29th, focused on “Machine Learning for Art & Music Generation.” Since Nina and I were on holiday in Mararikulam, Kerala at the time, I delivered it remotely via Skype.

The organisers — Albin Correya, Manaswi Mishra, and Siddharth Bharadwaj — made sure everything ran smoothly. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity, and it worked out well. Other speakers included Harshit Agarwal and two of the organisers.

Oral Presentation at ISMIR 2018

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I attended ISMIR 2018 in Paris with colleagues from Jukedeck to present our StructureNet paper. This year’s format gave every accepted paper both an oral and a poster slot — a nice change from the traditional division.

I gave the oral presentation; colleagues Gabriele and Marco handled the poster. The talk was recorded and is on YouTube. Gabriele also wrote up a post on the Jukedeck R&D Team’s Medium page.

A highlight was the jam session organised by Uri Nieto from Pandora — I played bass with fellow attendees on two songs, alongside music ranging from AI-composed pieces to jazz, blues, rock, and heavy metal. I also played guitar for a cover of Blackest Eyes by Porcupine Tree, recorded on the boat cruise on the Seine. Also great to reconnect with people from the Music Informatics Research Group at City and to finally get a photo with both my master’s supervisor Hendrik and my PhD supervisor Tillman.

Invited Talks at IIIT-Bangalore and Robert Bosch

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m on a break from Jukedeck until September 22nd, visiting Bangalore. Past mentors invited me to present at two organisations.

Today I gave a talk at IIIT-Bangalore covering my PhD work on sequence modelling in music — RBMs and Recurrent RBMs. A similar talk is scheduled at Robert Bosch on September 18th. Slides are available as a PDF if anyone is interested.

Participating in CSMC 2017 Panel Discussion

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion titled “Applying Musical Patterns in Generation” at the 2nd Conference on Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity (CSMC), September 11–13, 2017, in Milton Keynes, UK.

Fellow panellists: Elaine Chew, Roger Dean, Steven Jan, David Meredith, and Tillman Weyde. Organised by Iris Yuping Ren. Looking forward to it.

Reflections on Three Months of Remote Work

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

From October 2016 to January 2017, Nina and I were in Hyderabad, India — and I worked remotely for Jukedeck throughout. Here’s what I learned.

Setup

Before leaving London, my team lead Kevin and I agreed on IST working hours (11 AM–7 PM, giving five hours of overlap with London), daily standup updates via Slack, and asynchronous participation in planning via Google Docs and Skype.

Standups

We initially had a colleague hold a laptop during in-person standups, but audio quality was poor. We switched to asynchronous video messages via Skype — which had the unexpected benefit of keeping standups brief and concise.

A Visit to MusicMuni Labs

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

While Nina presented on Music Therapy for Dementia at ARDSICON 2016 in Bangalore, I visited MusicMuni Labs — a startup founded by Gopala Koduri and Sankalp Gulati, mentored by Prof. Xavier Serra and researchers from the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

They’re building on research from the CompMusic project — focused on Hindustani and Carnatic classical music — with two products currently in beta:

Riyaz — An Android app for beginner to intermediate students that uses music technology to evaluate singing against reference lessons and give detailed feedback.

Jukedeck at the Science Museum Lates

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Jukedeck had a stall at the Science Museum’s Lates — a monthly adults-only after-hours event in London — and I joined colleagues Patrick, Lydia, Eliza, Matt, Katerina, and Gabriele to demonstrate the music generation technology.

The museum was packed. It felt like a poster presentation at a conference, but with a non-technical audience — and a constant stream of curious visitors with barely a moment for a break. For someone who works on the research and code behind the music generation, seeing how the public engaged with it was genuinely rewarding.