Hey Grant, Mahouts, I'm very happy for the opportunity to really dig in and help build this project towards its potential, and no longer feel as much of the guilt by filing a gazillion JIRA tickets which I know will fall on somebody else's head to review and commit. :)
Background, where to begin... "I was born in London...", no, wait, that's a bit far back. Here we go: Originally trained in math and physics, to the point of being enrolled in enough PhD programs (none completed, oh well) that my financial counselor wonders whether I'll have my student loans paid off before my kids start college (current bet: 2:1 odds against). I got diverted into the software world during TechBubble_1.0, where I've been ever since. I've worked at a bunch of startups (as well as a few bigger companies I think are more adequately described as an "endup" in comparison), where I learned a bunch about IR/search and a little about NLP. Now I work at LinkedIn, where I originally helped build our distributed real-time search engine (on top of Lucene as well as some other extensions we built in-house and subsequently open-sourced, such as the zoie<http://zoie.googlecode.com/>project for the real-time search piece, and bobo-browse <http://bobo-browse.googlecode.com> for faceting), which uses our social graph as a key component in search relevance. Now I'm responsible for recommender systems at LinkedIn, and am building a generalized entity-to-entity recommendation engine platform (think: when you post a job on our jobs portion of the site, we recommend some profiles of members who would be a good match for the job [Job as Query for Members], or the reverse: jobs you might want to look at [Member as query for Jobs], or news articles you might like [Members as query for News], or personalized ad targeting [Member as query for Ads], or questions relevant to an interest group [Group as query for Q&A], or people like this person [Member as query for Members], etc... ). This current role is what kick-started me to collect the bits of code I'd written over the years to do massive matrix computations and put them in one place - the decomposer project<http://decomposer.googlecode.com>is where I put them, until I realized that matrix decompositions and dimensional reduction aren't really as "sexy" enough a project to actually get much of a community around all by themselves, so I'm currently porting all that code into Mahout which isn't already here (follow MAHOUT-180 for more details as that progresses, although now that I can assign JIRA tasks to myself [once my account is set up], I may break that into many more sub-tasks to break of more bite-sized chunks for Mahout to digest). So enough blathering on. If you want to know more about me, my LinkedIn profile <http://www.linkedin.com/in/jakemannix> has a more detailed professional view, Twitter has me in roughly 1/(fine-structure-constant-of-QED)-byte sized snippets<http://www.twitter.com/pbrane>, and I've got the beginnings of a blog <http://www.decomposer.org/blog> as well, but I'm not updating that terribly much lately, because just as Sean is hard-at-work on a book on Mahout, I'm supposed to be spending all of my "authoring" time writing a book for Manning as well: "Lucene in Depth", as a kind-of follow-on / advanced topics book to go beyond Hatcher, Gospodnetic and McCandless' awesome Lucene in Action introductory text. Looking forward to working with y'all more in the future. -jake p.s. For those of you in the S.F. Bay Area, LinkedIn is hiring both Analytics Scientists (to research ways of using our Big Data to make interesting new products), as well as IR and ML software engineers to work on our distributed platforms (including hadoop and voldemort), search infrastructure, and working with me on recommender systems. Email me for details if you're interested in hearing more! On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 3:13 AM, Grant Ingersoll <gsing...@apache.org> wrote: > I'm pleased to announce that the Lucene PMC has elected to grant committer > status to Jake Mannix. Jake has been doing some really great work with > Mahout recently and I am sure I speak on everyone's behalf when I say I look > forward to working more with Jake on Mahout. > > Jake, it is customary in Lucene when adding a new committer that the > committer provide a little background on themselves, so feel free to jump > in! > > Cheers, > Grant > > > -------------- > Want to be a Mahout committer? See > http://cwiki.apache.org/MAHOUT/howtobecomeacommitter.html for more > information.
