A quick and belated summary here: - we gathered initially around pizza
- the major topics of discussion were how to do categorization fast and some discussion of recent SVD work by Dmitriy. - the fast categorization discussion was mostly me reciting chapter 17 of the MiA book. I don't think that this is on the web-site yet, but the basic outline is that an on-line sales offer company called Shop It To Me engaged my services this summer to help build models of user behavior. We did that and in the process their engineers put together a fairly impressive collection of ways to make Mahout SGD based models go *really* fast. Fast here means a million classifications per second, give or take. - Dmitriy has made great strides with an SVD algorithm using random projection techniques. He was able to clarify for me some points on which I was in error. I think that he is getting pretty close to having an algorithm that is very practical. - lots of side conversations also happened which is a better reason for a meetup than somebody standing at the front of the room. - Grant says he will be back in town in January which seems to be our best bet for a nucleus of crystallization for a meetup in that time frame. - we ran out of pizza exactly when Lance arrived. So we all went home. On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 12:21 AM, Isabel Drost <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 7 Dec 2010 Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote: > > I will post a summary. > > Thanks. Looking forward to reading more on the discussions. > > http://tinyurl.com/38ckqt9 <- for those interested, some pictures taken > at the event have found their way online. > > Isabel > > >
