Hi all, I've been a lurker on the dev mailing list, hoping to make some code contribution at some point but haven't gotten around to it yet :P
In any case, my background is a machine learning researcher, and I want the Mahout developers to be aware of this NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source Software in December of this year. http://mloss.org/workshop/nips08/ NIPS is one of the top 3-4 conferences for machine learning researchers. It was in fact at this conference in 2006 where the Stanford MapReduce machine learning paper was presented. (And obviously that paper is an important reference point for Mahout.) I think it's extremely important for Mahout to have a presence at the workshop, both to recruit contributors and to understand the open source direction of the general machine learning community. The submission deadline is Oct. 1, which obviously is extremely tight. However, they're only looking for a 500-word abstract right now, and deadline for this type of workshop is usually flexible if we can convince the workshop organizers the importance of our work. Another requirement is that the software must be officially released at the time of submission. I don't know the legal definition of that, but I would think that release candidate 3 is probably good enough. I had already planned on attending NIPS, so I'm more than happy to help one of the main Mahout contributors on positioning and presenting Mahout to the NIPS researchers.
