On Apr 13, 2008, at 10:16 AM, Toby DiPasquale wrote:
On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 6:41 AM, Grant Ingersoll
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
What about http://infochimps.org/ ?
Cool, there is also http://theinfo.org/
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.
Speaking from the business side of things, I am very interested in
Mahout. A lot of places lack the internal resources to really build
and QA a lot of these algorithms ourselves. Having a vibrant community
around this is basically bring a little bit of R to the big-time, IMO.
I'd like nothing better than for ML to become commoditized on top of
Hadoop. And it seems as if there's plenty of interest from the
academic side, given all the volunteering for the GSoC for Mahout ;-)
I agree. I'm sold on it (can't you tell?), but the question did come
up in the BOF. The key for us is translating this momentum into good
code, examples, docs and the more volunteers the better that all will
be.
-Grant
