I'm interested, but don't know if I can attend, as much as I would
love to go to Whistler in December. Let's talk off list, and we can
add others if they are interested. We should have a release out w/in
the week, so I would think that would be acceptable.
-Grant
On Sep 28, 2008, at 9:47 PM, Chuck Lam wrote:
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.
