Apache Con – Mahout, commons and Lucene #

The second day the track interesting to me provided an overview of some of the Apache commons projects. So seemingly small in scope and light-weight in implementation and dependencies these projects provide vital features not yet well supported by the Sun JVM. There is a commons math implementation featuring a fair amount of algebraic, numeric and trigonometric functions (among others), the commons exec framework for executing processes externally to the JVM w/o running into the danger of creating dead-locks or wasting resources.

After that the Mahout and Lucene presentations were up. Grant gave a great overview of various use-cases of machine learning in the wild, rightly claiming that anyone using the internet today makes use of some machine learning powered application each day – be it e-mail spam filtering, the Gmail priority inbox, recommendaed articles on news sites, recommended items to buy at shopping sites or targeted advertisements shown when browsing. The talk was concluded by a more detailed presentation of how to successfully combine the features of Mahout and Lucene/Solr to built next generation web services that integrate user feedback into their user experience.