San Francisco Bay Area ACM http://www.sfbayacm.org Just another WordPress weblog Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:05:43 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Software Package Development Processes and R on September 15, 2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1962 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1962#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:04:55 +0000 MatthewBascom http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1962 Date: Wednesday, September 15, 2010; 6:30 pm 6:30 – 9:00 pm (6:30 – 7:00 networking & snacks; 7:00 – 7:10 announcements; 7:10+ presentation, Q&A)

Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Bldg. 48, Oak Room, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, CA

Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year. Anyone may join our mailing list at no charge, and receive announcements of upcoming events.

Speakers: Spencer Graves, PhD, Productive Systems Engineering, and Sundar Dorai-Raj, Google Inc.

Title: “Software Package Development Processes and R”

Abstract:

This presentation will outline major elements of a good software package development process, illustrated primarily with the standard package development process used with R. R is an object-oriented programming language for statistics and an open-source alternative to S-Plus. The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) repository of contributed packages has grown roughly exponentially since its founding thirteen years ago, with over 2400 contributed packages available as of June 2010. CRAN and the standard package development process have helped make R the language of choice for an increasing portion of people involved in new statistical algorithm  development.Our limited search for similar processes for other languages has so far yielded nothing with all the features we believe have contributed substantively to the success of R. Accordingly, we believe that software developers working in other languages could improve the quality, reusability and portability of their code and their productivity more generally by modifying their work processes to include ideas copied from this standard R process.

Biography:

Spencer Graves and Sundar Dorai-Raj both have PhDs in Statistics and over 10 years R package development experience combined (over 30 years combined experience with S-Plus and R), with substantive contributions by either or both in over 9 CRAN packages and official acknowledgments in 5 others. They are project administrators or contributing developers on 6 different projects on R-Forge, a subversion repository supporting collaborative development of R packages. And they created local R Archive Network and subversion repositories internal to a previous employer.

]]> http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1962 0 Partner Announcement: SDForum – September 21 and October 19, 2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1966 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1966#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:35:59 +0000 Martin Stein http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1966 Two very interesting events by SDForum:

Title: SDForum’s Clean Tech Breakfast: “Revamping the Smart Grid”

Title: SDForum’s Quarterly Venture Breakfast: “Clean Technology’

Title: SDForum’s Clean Tech Breakfast: “Revamping the Smart Grid”

Date: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 from 8:00am – 10:00am

Description: The smart grid is coming to town! The current devices to generate, transmit and distribute electrical power are vulnerable to failure. The need to revamp this outdated technology is apparent, especially in an age of renewable energy. Come listen to our panel of experts, which include key players as well as investors in this massive enterprise, discuss the integration of both large scale and micro-scale technology, innovative business models, and giant investments and returns.

Speakers: Lee Burrows, VantagePoint Venture Partners; Drew Clark, IBM Venture Capital Group; Andy Colman, GRIDiant Corporation; Jon Previtali, AltaTerra; Moderator: Kris Brown, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Location: SAP 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto

Registration Link: http://www.sdforum.org/cleantech

Online Pricing: SDForum Members: $25, Non-Members: $35, Platinum Pass: $0
$10 more at the door (does not apply to Platinum Pass Members).

Online Discount code: CLEAN05 for $5 off regular registration price

Title: SDForum’s Quarterly Venture Breakfast: “Clean Technology’

Date: Tuesday, October 19, 2010 from 8:00am – 10:00am

Description: VC cleantech investing surged from a rounding error 10 years ago to the #3 category in 2008, according to the PwC Money Tree.  Recently, the US government has become a major funding source for key cleantech investments, facilitating their growth.  Will cleantech continue to be one of the leading areas for investments going forward?  If so, how will the mix of cleantech investments change?  What are the emerging categories within cleantech?  Which parts are fading?  Come hear our experts debate these and other cleantech topics in what promises to be a lively discussion.

Speakers: Wayne Hedden, PricewaterhouseCoopers; Marianne Wu, Mohr Davidow Ventures; Don Wood, Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Rick Yang, NEA; Moderator: Allison Leopold-Tilley, Pillsbury Winthrop

Location: Pillsbury Winthrop, 2475 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304

Registration Link: http://www.sdforum.org/venturebreakfast

Online Pricing: SDForum Members: $20, Non-members: $30, Platinum Pass: $0
$10 more at the door (does not apply to Platinum Pass Members)

Online Discount Code: GREEN05 for $5 off regular registration price

]]> http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1966 0 Learning when Concepts Abound – September 27,2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1975 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1975#comments Mon, 06 Sep 2010 07:21:00 +0000 Paul O'Rorke http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1975

Posted September 3, 2010 by Paul O’Rorke

Speaker: – Omid Madani, SRI AI Center

LOCATION: LinkedIn, 2025 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043

Date: Monday September 27th, 2010; 6:30 pm 6:30 – 9:00 pm (6:30 – 7:00 networking & snacks; 7:00 – 7:10 announcements; 7:10+ presentation, Q&A)

Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year. Anyone may join our mailing list at no charge, and receive announcements of upcoming events.

Title: Learning when Concepts Abound

Abstract:

Categorization is fundamental to intelligence. Without categories
(concepts or classes), every experience would be new, and we couldn’t
make sense of our world. We humans also require numerous concepts for
our increased sophisticated intelligence. From a practical perspective,
in some of today’s applications, such as text categorization, image
tagging, and word prediction, the number of classes can easily exceed
tens of thousands. A number of applications can benefit from
scalable learning under a huge number of classes.

In this talk, I will briefly go over supervised learning, in
particular multiclass learning. I will then present the approach of
learning a sparse feature-to-class mapping, or index learning. The
crucial property in efficient index learning is constraining each
feature to connect to (predict) a relatively small number of classes.
Online updating and classification take time that is almost linear in
the number of features of a given instance. I will touch on a number
of update techniques and related approaches. While our primary driver
has been scalability and simplicity, we have observed that
classification accuracies remain competitive or better when compared
to a number of other approaches, while we obtain speed up of orders of
magnitude. I will discuss applications to several tasks.

Bio:

Omid Madani is a senior computer scientist at the Artificial
Intelligence Center of SRI International. He is interested in all
aspects of intelligence and mind, as well as algorithms design and
analysis. His current research revolves around the themes of
large-scale learning and data mining, including learning in the
presence of myriad concepts, online learning, and unsupervised
learning, in particular exploring and engineering systems that learn
their own many concepts (computational development). In the 2009
European PASCAL Challenge on Large-Scale Hierarchical Text
Classification, with just over 12k classes, his team’s approach
obtained top rankings from among 18 participants. He has
successfully applied learning techniques to a number of information
retrieval applications.

Omid obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of
Washington in 2000 (thesis topic: Computational Complexity of Markov
Decision Processes). After a brief period in the industry, he went
back to academia as a postdoc at the University of Alberta, and then
back to the industry, as a senior research scientist at Overture and
then Yahoo! Research, before joining SRI. He was awarded the Alberta
Ingenuity Associateship while in Alberta. He is a life-time member of
the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and
a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the
Cognitive Science Society.

web: http://www.omadani.net

]]> http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1975 0 ACM Data Mining Camp, November 13, 2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1854 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1854#comments Sat, 04 Sep 2010 23:44:44 +0000 TriciaHoffman http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1854 WHAT is an UNCONFERENCE or CAMP?

An unconference is an event where users suggest topics, get together and discuss them in detail. This camp is focused on Data Mining, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, and the various applications of these technologies. There is an option to join the SF Bay ACM for $20 per year. Our last Data Mining Camp had 380 participants.

DONORS:

  • eBay Thank you for once again providing the venue!

    LOCATION:

    • eBay 2161 N First St, San Jose, CA 95131 (free parking)
    • The auditorium seats 420 people and 10 other rooms are available for break out sessions.
    • If you plan on connecting a Mac to a projector, please bring your connector cables.

    REGISTER / RSVP / SEE WHO IS COMING:

      Registration Site set up is TBD … Please Check Back!.

      SCHEDULE for Saturday, November 13th, 2010: tentative

      • 9:00 Pick up name tag, coffee, network
      • 9:15 Training Class TBD
    • FREE Data Mining Camp (11:15 – 7:30pm) (beverages & snacks included with RSVP)
      • 11:15-Noon Arrive, register, network, brainstorm session topics
      • Box lunches provided by eBay
      • Noon Unconference welcome, 5 min / donor, hiring announcements
      • 12:50 Expert Panel Questions and Answers
      • 1:40 Audience members suggest a topic, get show of hands for interest, select session room size by interest level, select time slot for session. We recommend sessions have a leader, blogger / note taker, and a timer so we can leave everybody 10 minutes to get to the next session. See the last SESSION MATRIX for example.
      • 2:30 SESSION break out time slot 1
      • 3:30 SESSION break out time slot 2
      • 4:30 SESSION break out time slot 3
      • 5:30 SESSION break out time slot 4
      • 6:30 Share summary of sessions over pizza and salad (Thank you Donors!)
        • Door prize drawings
      • 7:30 Thank you and wrap up.

    EXPERT PANEL:

    Here is the video of the Expert Panel from the last camp (March 20, 2010)

ACM Data Mining Camp: March 20, 2010 Expert Panel Discusion with Q&A

    Expert panelist: Dr. Ted Dunning, Mr. Joseph B. Rickert, Dr. Giovanni Seni,
    Dr. Michael Walker, Dr. Hugh Williams, Dr. Mike Bowles, and Mr. Greg Makowski

Video Link

SESSION TOPICS:

may include one or more focus such as…

  • Experience level: beginners to experts
  • Algorithms: Forecasting, clustering, text mining, sentiment, network analysis, collaborative filtering, fraud, machine learning, speech recognition, computer vision
  • Verticals: Internet advertising, social networks, targeted marketing, financial services, medical, genetics, green tech, space science, mobile devices, startups
  • Tools/Processes: Commercial, public domain, libraries, in SQL, in cloud, project or product management, SalesForce.com plug ins, CRM software plug ins
  • User Groups: R, SAS, Salford Systems, Hadoop, Mahout, Matlab
  • Help me: I am stuck on… I need guidance… How do you…? (but suggest topic of general interest)
  • Participate in Our Data Mining Blog: Find birds of a feather, invite participants in a session, suggest or plan session ideas, update during the session, share in the summary of sessions or add a job posting

    • PROMOTION AND PROMOTION PARTNERS:

    BLOG / TWITTER:

    Twitter Tag #DMCAMP

    • Twitter Tag #DMCAMP
    • You can contribute to the blog below: Lets get started planning the sessions
    • The blog is moderated to cut out spam, so your posts will appear after being approved.

      • VIDEOGRAPHER / PHOTOGRAPHER:

      • Ron Fredericks will be recording and web hosting sessions
      • Blog Post for this event
      • Examples: Webinars, Internet TV, event capture, web hosting, and DVDs
      • Tag line: “Video production for exceptional people, brands, and products”
      • Web site and video hosting: www.LectureMaker.com
      • Phone: 408-390-1895
      • Here is the link to my video blog post for your event: http://www.lecturemaker.com/2010/03/acm-data-mining-camp/
      • coordinate recording your session – ronf@lecturemaker.com

      ONE PAGE EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT:

      ORGANIZERS:

      Greg Makowski
      Greg Makowski's picture www.LinkedIn.com/in/GregMakowski
      Greg is the overall organizer, sponsor contact, co-marketing contact
      Patricia Hoffman, Ph.D.
      Patricia Hoffman's picture www.LinkedIn.com/in/PatriciaHoffmanPhd
      Tricia is the Data Mining SIG Chair, Expert Panel Moderator, and web marketer
      Mike Bowles, Ph.D.
      Mike Bowles's picture www.LinkedIn.com/in/MikeBowles
      Mike is the Volunteer Coordinator

      CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS:

      • In Advance:
        • Contact Mike Bowles, and ask how you can help!
        • marketing: Help announce and publicize to analytic crowds, groups, technical talks
        • marketing: tweet about the event (#DMCAMP)
        • marketing: announce to analytic contacts at your company or in your network
        • marketing: add the event web page to your email signature

          ]]> http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1854 0 A Smarter Process for Sensing the Information Space, November 22, 2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1981 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1981#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:38:15 +0000 Paul O'Rorke http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1981

          Posted September 3, 2010 by Paul O’Rorke

          LOCATION: LinkedIn, 2025 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043

          Date: Monday November 22, 2010; 6:30 pm 6:30 – 9:00 pm (6:30 – 7:00 networking & snacks; 7:00 – 7:10 announcements; 7:10+ presentation, Q&A)

          Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year. Anyone may join our mailing list at no charge, and receive announcements of upcoming events.

          Speaker: W. Scott Spangler, IBM Almaden Research Center

          Title: ”A Smarter Process for Sensing the Information Space”

          Abstract:

          With the growth of the internet the size of the information space is increasing exponentially. But more information is not always better. Furthermore, as the complexity of business relationships increases, there is a natural tendency towards less structured interaction. This highlights the growing relevance of unstructured information in documenting the interactions of organizations and individuals. Analyzing and making sense of this unstructured information space requires more than text mining algorithms, it requires a strategic approach.

          While every information analysis situation is somewhat unique, we propose a unified approach that addresses a wide variety of information space analytics problems. Our method for making sense out of unstructured data is described by six steps that are analogous to the algebraic order of operations, PEMDAS. These basic text mining operations can be combined in many interesting ways to handle a diverse set of problems, and just as in algebra, it is critical that these operations be performed in the correct order to guarantee a meaningful result. In this talk, I describe how PEMDAS has been implemented within smart organizations to enable decisions that produced substantial and quantifiable business value.

          Bio:
          W. Scott Spangler IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120 (electronic mail: spangles@almaden.ibm.com) Scott Spangler is a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He has been doing knowledge base and data mining research for the past 20 years. Since coming to IBM in 1996, Scott has developed software components for data visualization and text mining, which are available through eClassifier, Business Insights Workbench, COBRA and SIMPLE service offerings. Scott holds a Bachelors in Math from MIT and a Master in Computer Science from the University of Texas. Scott holds 22 patents and has authored 24 conference/journal publications as well as a book entitled, Mining the Talk: Unlocking the Business Value in Unstructured Information.

          ]]>           http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1981 0           DMSIG – Charting SearchLand: Search Quality for Beginners August 23, 2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1465 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1465#comments Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:30:17 +0000 TriciaHoffman http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1465 Posted May 8, 2010 by Patricia Hoffman, PhD

          LOCATION: LinkedIn, 2025 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043  

          Date: Monday August 23, 2010; 6:30 pm 6:30 – 9:00 pm (6:30 – 7:00 networking & snacks; 7:00 – 7:10 announcements; 7:10+ presentation, Q&A)

          Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year. Anyone may join our mailing list at no charge, and receive announcements of upcoming events.

          Speakers: Valeria de Paiva PhD, Cuil, Inc.

          Title: “Charting SearchLand:
          Search Quality for Beginners”

          Abstract:
          Determining the overall system performance and measuring the quality of complex search systems are tough questions. Changes come from all subsystems of the complex system, at the same time, making it difficult to assess which modification came from which sub-component and whether they improved or regressed the overall performance. If this wasn’t hard enough, the target against which you are measuring your search system is also constantly evolving, sometimes in real time. Regression testing of the system and its components is crucial, but resources are limited. In this talk I discuss some of the issues involved and some possible ways of dealing with these problems. In particular I want to present an academic view of what I should have known about search quality before I joined Cuil in 2008.

          Biography:
          Valeria de Paiva is a search analyst in Cuil, a start-up company creating a new search engine in Menlo Park, CA. Before that, she was a research scientist at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of PARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), California until 2008. At PARC she worked mainly with logical approaches to semantics of Natural Language and notions of context in AI.

          She received her PhD in Mathematics from Cambridge University in 1988 for work on “Dialectica Categories”, under Martin Hyland’s supervision. Her work uncovered a relationship between Gödel’s celebrated “Dialectica Interpretation” and Girard’s Linear Logic, which is still under intense investigation. She also worked in the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, in different projects, ranging from interactive theorem proving to lexical semantics, until moving to Birmingham for a full Lectureship in 1996 and to California in 1999.

          ]]>           http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1465 3           Partner announcement: IEEE Cloud Forum & Multicode Programming on October 13, Sept 14 2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1948 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1948#comments Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:20:26 +0000 Martin Stein http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1948 Two events by the IEEE – another interesting organisation of computing professionals:

          • The IEEE Cloud Forum for Practitioners. The Cloud in 2013 – October 13 in Monterey
          • Multicore Programming. Pitfalls and Solutions. September 14 at Microsoft in Mountain View

          Sponsored by the IEEE Reliability Society and the Naval Postgraduate School

          IEEE Cloud Forum for Practitioners: The Cloud in 2013

          - October 12, 2010 – Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey
          - $495 IEEE Members; $595 others – Includes breakfast, lunch & dinner

          Brings together researchers, practitioners, vendors, all interested in when, how, and whether to move their IT resources into a cloud environment. This Forum seeks to offer recommendations and suggestions through a unique set of speakers who will speak both for and against cloud adoption, and where they believe cloud computing will be in 2013.

          Keynote: – The Cloud in 2013 (Dr. Joseph Williams, Microsoft)  Talks and Panel: – Betting the IT Farm on Public Clouds – A Powerless Cloud – NIST Federal Cloud Recommendations – Cloud Insecurity: Risks in Using Public Platforms for Private Networks – When Not to Use the Cloud

          Visit the website: www.ieeereliability.com/cloudforum

          Multicore Programming:

          Pitfalls and Solutions

          Cosponsor: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

          Speaker: Madan Musuvathi

          Researcher, Microsoft Research

          Location: Microsoft Research (use rear/North door)

          1288 Pear Ave. (parking all around Building 6)

          Mountain View, CA

          When: September 14: 6:30 pm Networking with food and beverage

          7:00 pm Presentation

          Registration: Free – but please register! [ $2 donation helps cover food ]

          http://multicore.eventbrite.com [ please bring your PDF ticket ]

          Need a job? Bring your resume and meet recruiters during networking. (see below for sponsor)

          Abstract:

          A big impediment in developing and maintaining concurrent software is our inability to effectively deal with

          race conditions. These “Heisenbugs” are hard to find. Even when found, they are hard to reproduce –

          making it next to impossible to debug and fix them. In this talk, Madan presents a series of tools from

          Microsoft Research that help developers and testers find, reproduce, and debug race conditions.

          Madan will explain the theory underlying these tools and demonstrate their effectiveness in finding threadsafety

          violations, data races, deadlocks, and livelocks in product-quality software. The tools include CHESS,

          which uses model checking techniques to effectively unit test concurrent software, and Cuzz, which uses

          randomized algorithms to dramatically increase the bug-finding capability of existing concurrency tests.

          He will also explain various correctness criteria useful for developing reliable concurrent software.

          Bio:

          Madan Musuvathi is a researcher at Microsoft Research, where he focuses on concurrency analysis. He is

          interested in developing algorithms and tools that scale to and improve the reliability of large programs. Many

          of his tools are widely used by developers and testers inside Microsoft. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford

          University in 2004.

          Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/IEEEComputerSoc

          See us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=323745186971

          LinkedIn Group**: www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2606895

          Our web site: http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/computer

          Subscribe to email news: http://listserv.ieee.org/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=cs-chap-scv&A=1

          ** For IEEE Members only. Pre and post meeting discussion and posting of presentations.

          ]]>           http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1948 0           Business Process Mining on August 18, 2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1930 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1930#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:53:25 +0000 Martin Stein http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1930 Presented by: Hasnain Jaffery, EXCIMP B.V.
          Date: Wednesday, 18 August,  2010, 6:30 PM
          Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Bldg. 48, Oak Room, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, CA

          ABSTRACT

          Process Mining is the method of distilling a structured process description from a set of real-time execution data. The real executions data is captured in an event-log. The event-log data is the basis for process mining. Thus, process mining can only yield to meaningful results if the log files contain sufficient information and if the events are logged properly. Only events captured in the log are available for process mining. If an event is not logged, it will not be part the mined process model. Logging is by all means crucial.

          The business processes and best-practices are seen as the key intellectual property of any ERP Software (e.g. SAP). However, these processes are hidden in the code and distributed over the landscape. A significant part of that code was/has been developed with a clear structure in mind; it is extremely difficult to extract this structure from the running system. For instance, if the code has been developed using given business process models, then the running system only gives very little clues, which one of these models is currently under execution. On the other hand, information about the actual deployment and runtime usage of the system can be extremely helpful for SAP customer and developers, because it provides valuable data on the system’s actual use, which in turn can be used as input to various analysis and optimization tasks.

          Business process-mining techniques are now becoming available as graphical interface-driven software tools where processes can not only be represented as a flow diagram (more as Visio or Aris format) but can also be compared with the initial process flow diagram from a project (with showing match factors), be replayed step by step as part of the mining and process analysis. Process-mining is still a new field and state-of the art field/technology that can be of great help with process improvement activities.

          Hasnain’s BIO

          SUMMARY: Over 14 years of IT experience including 12+ years of SAP software development. 10 year working experience at SAP Labs, LLC which include project and product management along solution architect and development.  Developed and delivered the concept of business exceptions and centralized exception management system that has saved millions of dollars for customers by automating the exceptions and its resolution. Product Management, Design and Developed BPEM/EMMA collaboratively with another architect at SAP labs. EMMA is part of SAP R/3 BASIS and provides the advance capabilities and methods business process analysis and mining of logs and runtime artifacts while providing exception management capabilities over system landscape. Collaborated with SAP research team on several projects related to business process analysis. Lead several in-house and customer projects for the implementation and management of product BPEM and tool EMMA. The product is widely used by most of high volume SAP customers from several different industry sector including Utilities, Telcom, Insurance, Banking, Retail and Waste Management. Conceptualized and developed the prototype to extract the business processes from runtime data (application logs) for the executed business processes over the landscape involving SAP ERP system by using the open source tool ProM for Business Process Mining.

          ]]>           http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1930 1           DM SIG Google Prediction API: Machine Learning as a Service on the Cloud on July 26 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1842 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1842#comments Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:53:44 +0000 Paul O'Rorke http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1842 LOCATION: LinkedIn, 2025 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043

          DATE: Monday July 26, 2010; 6:30 – 9:00 pm    (6:30 – 7:00 networking & snacks;   7:00 – 7:10 announcements;  7:10+ presentation, Q&A)

          COST: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $20/year.  Anyone may join our mailing list at no charge, and receive announcements of upcoming events.

          SPEAKER:  Max Lin, Google  Research

          TITLE:  Google Prediction API: Machine Learning as a Service on the Cloud

          DESCRIPTION: Using machine learning tools to analyze big data is no longer a question of when, but rather how soon. Analyzing big data, however, is challenging: large resources need to be provisioned, algorithms need to be scaled, and predictive models need to be integrated with existing software.

          The Google Prediction API now adds Google’s machine learning solutions to developers’ toolkits through a simple, three-step process. In this talk we will introduce the advantages of machine learning on the cloud, present strategies of training classifiers on terabytes of data, and discuss how the Google Prediction API alleviates the restrictions of resource provisioning, scalability, and integration in big data analysis.

          SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY: Max Lin is a software engineer with Google Research in New York City office, and the tech lead of the Google Prediction API team.  Prior to Google, he published research work in video content analysis, sentiment analysis, machine learning, and cross-lingual information retrieval.  He graduated with a PhD degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

          View the Slides from the Talk:
          Google Prediction API Slides from Max Lin

          Suggested Reading:
          Mann, et al., “Efficient Large-Scale Distributed Training of Conditional Maximum Entropy Models”, NIPS 2009 http://bit.ly/cs0iBB
          McDonald, et al., “Distributed Training Strategies for the Structured Perceptron”, HLT-NAACL 2010 http://bit.ly/cpRXyU

          ]]>           http://www.sfbayacm.org/?feed=rss2&p=1842 2           Next generation sensor networks and the real-time internet on July 21, 2010 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1833 http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1833#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:42:18 +0000 Martin Stein http://www.sfbayacm.org/?p=1833 Presented by: David Orban, Widetag, Inc
          Date: Wednesday, 21 July,  2010, 6:30 PM
          Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Bldg. 48, Oak Room, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, CA

          ABSTRACT

          Next generation intelligent networks will have to be designed, built, deployed, and managed taking into account thoroughly novel criteria, given the qualitative changes that they will bring because of the orders of magnitude larger dimensions they will have. Autonomy, sensing, adaptability, sustainability, graceful material degradation are just a few of the parameters that will be necessarily part of what the Internet Of Things is going to be based on. Not computers, mobile phones, servers anymore, but components of a complex society of autonomous hardware, making fundamental decisions about the shape of the world around us. Us humans, still in charge, but free once more, after ten thousand years, from the slavery to our agriculture, our machines, our technology, to be human again.

          BIOGRAPHY

          David Orban is an entrepreneur and visionary. He is the Chairman of Humanity+, an organization dedicated to promoting understanding, interest, and participation in fields of emerging innovation. H+ represents a growing movement of people willing to work proactively to benefit the human condition through a commitment to scientific advancement.

          In recognition of his lifetime contribution to exponentially advancing technologies, David has been awarded the position of Advisor to the prestigious Singularity University.

          He is also a Founder and Chief Evangelist of WideTag, Inc., a high technology start-up company providing the infrastructure for an open Internet of Things. David shapes the strategic vision of its technologies by developing the policies and communication steps necessary to enable constructive progress.

          David is Founder of Startupbusiness, a social network aimed at enabling the Italian startup ecosystem. Startupbusiness is a spin-off of Questar, an Italian software publishing and distribution company, of which David is the Founder. Questar aims to enhance channel oriented electronic software distribution services, making them available to developers worldwide.

          He is further a Scientific Advisory Board Member for the Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks. The Foundation creates mechanisms to discourage the misuse of increasingly powerful technologies such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

          David is also a Founder of the Open Government Data working group. The group promotes a more robust understanding of why open government data is essential to democracy. The group utilizes increased civil discourse in order to make Government more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.

          His educational background includes studies in Physics at both the University of Milan and the University of Padua. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he and his family currently live in northern Italy, near Milan.

          David cuts across the limits of deep specialization to contribute to the new renaissance. He explains, “My vision is at the crossroads of technology and society as defined by their co-evolution.” David Orban’s personal motto is, “What is the question I should be asking?” This concept is his vehicle to accelerating cycles of invention and innovation in order to build the new world ahead.

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