Welcome Shannon! Thanks for your continuing contributions, glad to have you 
aboard.
Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Shannon Quinn [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Shannon Quinn
Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2011 6:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Welcome new committers: Shannon Quinn and Dmitry Lyubimov

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

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