On Taming Text # This time of the year I would usually post pictures of my bicycle standing in the snow somewhere in Tierpark. This year however I was tricked into using public transport instead: a) After my husband found a new job, we now share some of the route to work - and he isn’t crazy going by bike when it’s snowing. b) I got myself a Nexus7 earlier this month which obsoleted having to take paper books with me when using public transport. ...
RecSys Stammtisch Berlin - December 2012 # Earlier this month I attended the fourth Recommender Stammtisch in Berlin. The event was kindly hosted by Soundcloud - who on top of organising the speakers provided a really yummy buffet by Kochzeichen D. With Paul Lamere the evening started with a very entertaining but also very packed talk on why music recommendation is special - or put more generally why all recommender systems are special: ...
Fourth #Recsys Stammtisch Berlin # This evening the 4th #recsys Stammtisch (German for “a meetup involving beer”) was kindly organised by Alan Said, Zeno Gantner and Till Plumbaum. The event was hosted by Aklamio with beers and drinks provided by Plista. They had three talks: @AlanSaid gave an overview of the topics covered in this year’s RecSys conference in Dublin. Instead of going into too much technical detail the presentation gave a whirl-wind tour of the topics that are currently under discussion, the competitions to participate in and links to people relevant to the topic to follow up with. ...
Speaking at ApacheCon EU 2012 # I’ll be at ApacheCon EU in November. Looking forward to an interesting conference on all things Apache that is finally returning back to Europe. Go there if you want to learn more on Tomcat, Hadoop, httpd, HBase, Camel, Open Office, Mahout, Lucene and more. Now on to prepare the two talks I submitted: “Choosing the right tool for your data analysis task - Apache Mahout in context” ...
Recsys meetup Berlin # Planning a meetup in Berlin: 8 people register, a table for 14 people is booked, 16+ people arrive - all of that even if no pre-defined topic or talk is announced. Seems like building recommender systems is a hot topic currently in Berlin. Thanks to Zeno Gantner from MyMedialight for organising the event - looking forward to the next edition.
Apache Mahout 0.6 released # As of Monday, February 6th a new Apache Mahout version was released. The new package features Lots of performance improvments: A new LDA implementation using Collapsed Variational Bayes 0th Derivative Approximation - try that out if you have been bothered by the way less than optimal performance of the old version. Improved Decision Tree performance and added support for regression problems Reduced runtime of dot product between vectors - many algorithms in Mahout rely on that, so these performance improvements will affect anyone using them. ...
Learning Machine Learning with Apache Mahout # Once in a while I get questions like Where to start learning more on machine learning. Other than the official sources I think there is quite good coverage also in the Mahout community: Since it was founded several presentations have been given that give an overview of Apache Mahout, introduce special features or even go into more details on particular implementations. Below is an attempt to create a collection of talks given so far without any claim to contain links to all videos or lectures. ...
See you in Vancouver at Apache Con NA 2011 # Mid November Apache hosts its famous yearly conference - this time in Vancouver/Canada. They kindly accepted my presentations on Apache Mahout for intelligent data analysis (mostly focused on introducing the project to new comers and showing what happened within the project in the past year - if you have any wish concerning topics you would like to see covered in particular, please let me know) as well as a more committer focused one on Talking people into creating patches (with the goal of highlighting some of the issues new-comers to free software projects that want to contribute run into and initiating a discussion on what helps to convince them to keep up the momentum and over come and obstacles). ...
GoTo Con # Location: Amsterdam Link out: Click here Start Date: 2011-10-12 End Date: 2011-10-14 This week late Tuesday night I am going to leave for GoTo con in Amsterdam. Train tickets are already booked - this is going to be my first trip with City Night line, will see how great they are. GoTo Amsterdam features a special Apache track as well as several talk on scaling up, searching, but also includes stuff in general architectural decisions. ...
Apache Mahout Hackathon Berlin # Last year Sebastian Schelter from Berlin was added to the list of committers for Apache Mahout. With two committers in town the idea was born to meet some day, work on Mahout. So why not just announce that meeting publicly and invite others who might be interested in learning more about the framework? I got in touch with c-base - a hacker space in Berlin well suited to host a Hackathon - and quickly got their ok for the event. ...