Thanks Avery, Greetings all. In the other Apache communities of which I'm familiar (Mahout and Lucene, in particular), it is customary for new committers to give a little background / bio / self-introduction, so I'll carry that over, in hopes that it is a fairly universal practice. :)
I'm originally a physics nerd, turned mathematician, turned software engineer mostly working on search (I built large parts of this<http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?type=people&keywords=jake+mannix>search engine, as well as this <http://twitter.com/#!/who_to_follow/search/jake%20mannix> one), and as such have spent a lot of time in the Apache Lucene<http://lucene.apache.org>community (both of the linked-to search engines are built on Lucene, naturally enough). Over the past few years, I've been working more trying to apply my IR and math skills to machine learning, and as such have been working on Apache Mahout <http://mahout.apache.org>, where I'm a committer and PMC member, primarily working on distributed matrix computations and in more specific: decompositions (e.g. SVD<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition>) and topic modeling (e.g LDA<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_Allocation>). As you might imagine, social graphs play a pretty important role in much of the work I've been in, so finding efficient ways to do monstrously large graph computations is what brought Apache Giraph to my attention. I hope to spend some of my time (both free and as part of my workday) helping make Giraph speedy and CPU+memory+network efficient, by whatever means I can think of, and to write up some fun graph applications to go in the "examples" area as well. In fact, finding ways of doing stuff which is a bit *outside* the normal thought of a BSP graph calculation is one of my motivations for using / working with / helping Giraph: I'd love to see how hard it is (and how efficient the result is!) to compute truncated matrix SVD's in Giraph, or do a big topic-model learning of an LDA model, or any of the various other sophisticated machine learning algorithms of which I sadly know very little (like really anything to do with gradient boosted decision trees, or restricted boltzmann machines, etc). Well that was a bit long, but I can be a bit chatty, but there you go. Looking forward to working with the rest of the community here, and building some great stuff! The codebase is pretty huge and impressive already, I'm honored to help out in whatever way I can. Hi! -jake On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Avery Ching <[email protected]> wrote: > As an early Apache Incubator project, we need to build and grow the Giraph > community of folks interested in large-scale graph processing. Both Jake and > Dmitriy have demonstrated exceptional passion and talent in working with > Giraph. The Giraph PPMC has had only positives to say about them in the > voting process. They have both graciously accepted the offered > responsibilities and we are pleased to announce that they are now Giraph > committers and PPMC members! > > Thanks, > > Avery >
