Thank you so much, everyone, for the very warm welcome. I have
thoroughly enjoyed working on the Mahout project and with the community
the past several months, so I am very much looking forward to continuing
to do so in the capacity of a committer.
I'm a first-year PhD student studying computational biology at Carnegie
Mellon, with a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and an MS in
computational biology also from Carnegie Mellon. I discovered Mahout
shortly after delivering my master's thesis, when another PhD student
mentioned his need for parallelized machine learning algorithms for
operating on the massive biological datasets his thesis entailed.
I delivered my first contribution to Mahout as part of the 2010 edition
of the Google Summer of Code, in the form of the spectral clustering
algorithms: k-means and eigencuts. The latter is an algorithm developed
as part of the PhD thesis of a faculty in my PhD program, who will
likely become one of my advisors. Since this past fall, he and I have
been conducting research in methods of diagnosing a disorder known as
Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD) using high-speed video of the cilia itself.
We've already submitted a poster and a paper on the topic regarding some
of our preliminary findings (which doesn't involve Mahout), but the
overall goal of the project is to develop a large-scale distributed
framework for processing these videos and characterizing the motion
patterns involved. As such, Mahout will be an integral part of this
project. Even though I don't have a thesis yet, I'm focusing into
image/video processing on a parallel environment, which means Mahout
will very likely be part of my PhD thesis.
So basically, you're all stuck with me now :) I hope to grow into the
enormous shoes I've been given with the committer title. Very much
looking forward to continuing to work on this project! Thanks again!
Shannon
On 2/12/11 12:12 PM, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
I am pleased to announce that the Mahout PMC has, in recognition of their
continued contributions to Mahout, elected Shannon Quinn and Dmitry Lyubimov to
be committers on the project. Please join me in giving a warm welcome!
Dmitry and Shannon, it's customary for new committers to write a paragraph or
so of introduction about themselves, if you don't mind sharing a bit about
yourself and how you use Mahout.
Thanks,
Grant
