Inductive Bias

As published on the Google Open Source blog the application period for mentoring organizations for GSoC starts now. The ASF is already in the process of applying. If you are a student, looking for an interesting project to work on during the coming summer - you might consider participating in GSoC. It does give you are great opportunity to get in touch with successful free software projects, learn how to work in global teams, improve your communication skills and last but not least show and publish your fantastic coding skills.

If you want to learn more on Why you should contribute to open source, the article by Shalin Shekhar Mangar is a great summary of some of the reasons why people work on open source projects.

Hacking, Mahout, Software Foundation GSoC

Sally Khudairi (VP, ASF Marketing & Publicity) asked for distributing the following survey to people who might be interested in contributing their views to a study on how the brand name Apache is perceived. Me personally, I would be especially interested in finding out more on whether there are any differences in perception inside the ASF vs. outside…

We have been working with PhD candidate Roland Schroll over the past two years as he’s been compiling information on the value of the Apache brand. His advisor is community-based innovation expert Dr. Johann Füller. This is a joint project of the University of Innsbruck and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

If you have 10 minutes to help, it would be much appreciated. The survey is at http://surveys.hyvelive.de/10_apache/p1.php?refGroup=Apache

They would like the surveys to be completed this month (February).

They are seeking at least 300 respondents. As such, if you know others who are interested in Apache from a market perspective, feel free to forward the link to them as well.

Thanks in advance for your interest!

Kind regards,
Sally Khudairi
VP, ASF Marketing & Publicity

Software Foundation brand, Software Foundation

This evening in X-Berg several local committers met for the second “Apache Dinner” - an informal gathering of local Apache committers, friends and associates for food, beer and interesting discussions. Next one is probably to be scheduled some time in February. Feel free to send a message to Torsten Curdt to be included on the next invitation mail. Thanks for organizing a nice evening, Torsten. Hope to see even more Apache friends at the next dinner

Freetime, Software Foundation Apache Dinner, Berlin, Dinner, Software Foundation

A few days ago, I received a mail from Torsten Curdt that read something like: “[...] For a long time now I wanted to organise an Apache Dinner Berlin. What do you think, when would be a good time for that?”. As that was about the third time I heard of that idea (and the third person mentioning the idea), I included some Berlin-based Apache-people asking whether they would be interested in having an Apache Dinner on November 24st in X-Berg. General answer: Yes! Sure!

The idea was to make it open to anyone interested in the ASF and send invitations to committers who are living in the greater-Berlin-area. Then book a table, have some food, get some drinks…

We met at Graefekiez - we, that is Torsten (Jakarta and Hadoop), Jan and Daniel (CouchDB), Simon+Vera (Lucene), oswald (xampp), Eric (Http Components) and myself - for a great “small menu” at La Buona Forchetta (Thanks to Torsten for coming up with that restaurant and booking the table). After that some of us moved over to a bar close to the restaurant.

After a long evening with lots of interesting (cross-project as well as non-technical) discussions, the general conclusion was to organize another Apache Dinner some time in January after Christmas-time is over:

Thanks guys for a great evening. Hope to see you all - as well as a few more Apache people from around Berlin - in January. Date and location to be set.

Final note to self: No Club Mate for Isabel after 02:00 a.m. …

Software Foundation Apache Dinner, Software Foundation

Lucid recently published a white paper that explains the changes and improvements that the new 2.9 release incorporates. Interesting for all who are thinking about upgrading to the new lucene version or generally want to know what is going on at Lucene.

Lucene, Software Foundation Lucene, lucid

After last week’s Hadoop Get Together heise published an in-depth article on the changes and improvements that come with the latest Lucene 2.9 release.

Thanks to Simon Willnauer for helping me write this article and patiently explaining several new features. Thanks also to Uwe Schindler for kindly proof-reading the article before it was sent out to Heise.

Get Together, Software Foundation Hadoop, Lucene, press

Title: Mahout@TU WS 09/10

There is going to be a project/seminar course at TU Berlin on Apache Mahout. The goal is to introduce students to the work on a free software project, interact with the community and build production ready software.

Students will be given several potential tasks ranging from optimizing existing implementations, implementing new algorithms and (depending on their prior knowledge) improving, scaling and parallelizing existing algorithms.

Successful completion of the course depends on a number of factors: Interaction of the student with the community, ability to write tested (as in test-first-developed) code that performs well in a large scale environments, ability to show incremental development progress at each iteration, ability to review patches and improvements, usage of tools like SCM, Issue-tracker and mailinglists. Of course theoretical background - that is understanding existing publications as well extending their ideas is crucial as well.

If you are a student interessted in Mahout missing some course work, consider subscribing to the Mahout course at DIMA Berlin (linked below). Goal is that your work is to be integrated in one of the next releases, once the community is satisfied.

If you are a Mahout developer or user and have some issue that you consider suitable for a student to solve, please to provide your ideas.

Location: TU Berlin
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2009-10-01
End Date: 2010-03-31

Software Foundation course, Mahout, Software Foundation, TU Berlin

GSoC 2009 is about to finish: Final evaluations are through, most of the code submitted by Mahout’s students has been committed to svn, code samples are on their way to Google.

In Mahout, we had three students joining the project: Robin working on an HBase based Naive Bayes extension and on frequent itemset discovery. David contributing a distributed LDA implementation. Deneche was working on a Random Forest implementation. All three of them have done great work during this summer, contributing not only code but valuable input on the project’s mailinglists as well. As a result, all three of them have been given committer status by the end of GSoC.

Apart from three new additions to the code base, summer also brought quite some traffic to the user list - not only in terms of subscriptions but also in terms of developers contributing to the discussions online. Currently, it looks like the project is really gaining momentum, as also noted in Grant Ingersoll’s post.

Discussions on the dev list on the future road map of Mahout clearly showed that the developers share the vision of a scalable, potentially distributed, stable machine learning library. That the focus should be on production ready code under a commercially friendly license instead of bleeding edge research implementations. Last but no least the goal is to build a lively, diverse community around the project to guarantee further development and user support.

2009 brought quite a few talks both in Germany as well as the US on the topic of Mahout (besides all the events on Hadoop, scalable databases and cloud computing in general) with an Apache Con US talk introducing Mahout in Oakland still to come.

Yesterday, a great article indroducing Apache Mahout with hands-on examples was published on IBM Developerworks by Grant Ingersoll. Check it out, if you want to learn more on Mahout, and Machine Learning in general.

Software Foundation Mahout, Software Foundation

On October 22nd 2009 the first NoSQL Meetup Germany is going to take place in newthinking store/ Berlin: http://nosqlberlin.de

Please submit your presentation proposals until September 22nd, accepted speakers will be notified soon after.

If you would like to sponsor the event, feel free to contact us: We would be very happy to provide videos after the event and free drinks for everyone during the event.

Hope to see you soon in Berlin.

*Camp, General, Software Foundation Berlin, newthinking, NOSQL

By November I will be traveling to Oakland - for me it is the first Apache Con US ever. And the first Apache Con I will be giving a talk in one of the main tracks:

I will be presenting Apache Mahout, give an overview of the project, of our current status and explain which problems can be solved with the current implementation. The talks will conclude with an outlook to upcoming tasks and features our users can expect in the near future.

There is great news already: First commercial users like Mippin are explaining their experiences with Mahout.

Currently, I am looking forward to meeting several Mahout (and Lucene, Hadoop, Solr, …) committers there. I met some at Apache Con EU already, but it’s always nice to talk to people in person who before one only knew from mailing lists. Of course I am also looking forward to having time to review and write code. Hope to see you there.

Update: Flights booked.

Apache Con, Hacking, Software Foundation Apache Con US, Software Foundation