Isabel Drost
Isabel Drost co-founded the Lucene sub-project Apache Mahout. She is employed at Nokia Berlin. After an internship at Google in 2005/06 Isabel joined Neofonie GmbH. She worked as research assistant in Berlin. Isabel holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Applied Sciences Mittweida.
November 10 11:30AM
"Contributing to open source projects is trivial: Make a change, create a patch, review and revise, have it accepted." When heavily involved with open source projects it's easy to forget what developers interested in contributing have to learn before even making the smallest first change.
The talk summarises some of the issues and questions students, long time developers, researchers have when faced with free software development. The talk mainly focuses on the technical issues, touching only briefly the (at least) equally large space of cultural differences of open development communities vs. corporate or even research environments.
Instead of providing pre-baked solutions to filling this gap the goal of the talk is to initiate a discussion on how to best talk your friends and colleagues into creating patches: Which strategies did work for you, which failed? Which resources do you generally use when mentoring interested peers? Where do you see most problems?
November 10 4:00PM
"Searching the internet" has become a common pattern when looking for information. However with current tools finding the relevant piece of data often turns out to be similar to searching for the needle in a haystack of unstructured information: Social networks, corporate content management systems, micro blogging platforms, tend to generate an ever increasing flow of online data.
This talk gives an introduction to Apache Mahout - a framework of scalable implementations of algorithms for data mining and machine learning. After motivating the need for machine learning the talk gives an overview of the features of Apache Mahout. The talk shows how to integrate how to integrate Mahout into your application. It shows the tremendous improvements that have been implemented in recent past - including the addition of several algorithms, performance improvements and better APIs for integration.
