I had a meeting with Simon Metson of University of Bristal and Steve
Loughran of HP Labs (Bristol) yesterday (both cc'd). One of the topics
of discussion was reaching out to the academic sector from the Hadoop
project.
In short it is felt that the academic sector has big data on a scale
equal to or greater than big players such as Yahoo!, Facebook and
Cloudera (e.g. Simon works on data from various sources such as
landslide modelling for cost benefit analysis and data collected from
experiments such as those conducted at the Large Hadron Collidor).
It was therefore agreed that there is a real need for the academic
sector to get to grips with Hadoop. Having large data sets and practical
applications such as these would undoubtedly help the Hadoop project in
terms of testing and validation. It's hoped that there would eventually
be code contributions from the sector too.
I suggested that the Community Development project would be the right
vehicle for this via the mentoring programme [1]. We are also thinking
of organising an event or two in the UK next year.
Since I'm not involved with the Hadoop project Steve has offered to work
with the Hadoop community to find suitable mentors. I'm posting here for
transparency and also in the hope that others in the community may be
interested in helping move this effort forwards.
I've not copied this mail to the Hadoop list, I'll let Steve and others
do that.
Steve - It may be worth subscribing to dev@community.apache.org which is
where we will be running mentoring programmes and may be able to support
some of your other activities.
Ross
[1] http://community.apache.org/mentoringprogramme.html
