The year of the shit. Not only politically –both in the US, Spain, and Europe in general–, but personally in terms of my decision to end my long term relationship. In any case, here’s the list of points that would more or less sum up my year that I’m happy to see go:

• So much snow in Tahoe :)
• Skiing in Vail for my sister’s birthday
• Arkaen plays at Slim’s, opening for the former Scorpions guitar player, Uli Jon Roth
• I give a talk at CCRMA, Stanford, about Pandora’s Deep Learning Research
• Disseminating Backpropagation with an XOR gate
• Arkaen show at Brick’n’Mortar (Rick’n’Morty)
• Amazing trip to Yosemite with Nat
• Mom visits the Bay
• New official video of La Bossa d’Urina of El Tiempo
• Obsessed with Bloodborne
• I am a keynote speaker at the Deep Learning for Audio workshop at IJCCN, Alaska (PDF)
• Chris Cornell dies and I cover Show Me How to Live
• Trip to Lisbon, Algarve, and Sevilla (Justin and Amalia’s wedding!)
• Multiple visits by sister to the bay area
• Paper on multi-label music genre classification accepted to ISMIR (and won best presentation!)
• Wedding of Brian & Liane in upstate NY
• Bolsa and Anna come to California and we record the second album of La Bossa d’Urina
• Paper accepted on multimodal cold-start music recommendation to RecSys, Como, Italy
• Arkaen at the Great American Music Hall
• Open Mic World Tour in the Bary Area with La Bossa d’Urina
• Los Pandejos at the UC Theatre
• I get a new electric violin and I make a cover of Nutshell by Alice in Chains
• Our journal paper on Hierarchical Structure Analysis finally published
• I get promoted: Senior Data Scientist \m/
• Littlefinger, my new American Strat, is born
• Arkaen at Red Hat
• Celebrating my grandpa’s 90th birthday in Barcelona
• Presenting our work on Large-scale Music Recommendation at the Seminar in Deep Learning for Audio in Vienna
• Drums and percussion and effects recording at Nautilus, Barcelona, for our second album of La Bossa d’Urina
• Catalonia votes in a referendum (I write about it) and they declare the republic and the whole thing goes out of hand
• Toughest break up with Nat
• Thanksgiving with sister in Colorado
• Paper accepted on Audio Ad Quality Prediction for WSDM 2018, Los Angeles, CA
• Presenting our work with Jordi Pons at the workshop of Machine Learning for Audio at NIPS, Long Beach, CA
• I’m a panelist in the same workshop (first time doing such a thing!)
• New official video of La Bossa d’Urina of Es Difícil, by our titanest friend at NomasDF Productions
• Cover of The Tourist by Radiohead
• My green card doesn’t arrive and can’t leave the US for the holidays: I go to Princeton (for Christmas) and NYC (for new year’s) instead

Happy new year titanics. I really hope it gets better this time.