Working on Mahout as part of your studies at TU Berlin #

Did you ever wonder, who those weird people working on free software projects are? Did you ever ask yourself how these developers organise their work, how they collaborate, which values are important to them? Did you ever think about participating in a free software project yourself but never really had time to do so because your studies were just too time-consuming?

Well, if you are a student of one of the Berlin universities, there is a project at the research group DIMA at TU Berlin that might be of interest to you: With Hot Topics in Information Management the second edition of last year’s course focussed on building systems with Apache Mahout.

This term the course will concentrate on extending Mahout. During the first week, students are given a set of possible project ideas to choose from. Of course you are invited to add your own ideas as well. You will need to come up with a rough plan of material to read, modules to implement and a timeframe for each module.

You are asked to not only implement your choosen extension but to thouroughly (unit-/integration-) test it, to document it, to provide examples of its usage and finally to work together with the community on contributing your implementation back to the project.

During the course you are free to re-use resources built up for last year’s course - both hardware as well as installed software and available data.

The course starts next week on Tuesday - registration closes in a few days, so make sure you signed up if you are interested in working on Mahout during your regular project time and get credits for that.