Erik Schmidt

Erik M. Schmidt is a Senior Scientist at Pandora. His most recent work at Pandora has included leading the playlist and algorithmic design of Thumbprint Radio, a hyper-personalized radio product. His work has also led to the contribution of numerous playlist recommendation strategies to the Pandora listening experience, and the development of machine listening systems to automatically understand the musicological content of audio. Before joining Pandora he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab) at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. He received the Ph.D. degree from Drexel University in 2012, and also holds a Master's in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University and a Bachelor's from Temple University. His current work focuses on developing the next generation of playlist and recommendation products at Pandora. Erik has general research interests in the areas of machine learning and recommender systems for playlist generation and machine understanding of music audio.