Back from ApacheCon EU and can't sleep...
Had a fairly decent BOF the other night given the stage we are at.
Got to meet both Isabel and Karl. Had a good number of people in the
room and had some nice discussions on the challenges we are facing.
One of the main discussions was on obtaining data to be used by anyone
coming in to the project who may not have data. There were a couple
of good suggestions: Apache mail archives, Apache web logs (possibly,
after being dedacted), as well as the usual suspects like Wikipedia,
Reuters collection (David Lewis), etc. If someone wants to take up
creating a simple util for cleaning up mail archives for use, that
would be a great contribution.
Another one was about obtaining computing resources. Had some
possible contacts that may be able to help, but am not going to commit
anything at this point, until it is official. But hopefully we can
get something in place for committers. Also was the suggestion that
we work with Hadoop and Nutch to figure out ways to obtain computing
resources.
Also had some discussion on how Mahout will be accepted in the
community. Will academics be interested? Will companies be
interested? My take was that both are taking a wait and see approach,
probably, but we do have some early supporters which seems to be
positive. I think a lot of companies view ML as "secret sauce", so
we'll see. However, I think this will go away as we build out our
algorithms. As w/ search, ML will become more of a commodity and it
will be not that be so much that any company is using ML, but look at
all the cool things your application can do with ML.
On other notes, seemed to be fairly good general interest in Mahout.
Cheers,
Grant
