How to build a Recommender using Apache Mahout

Jul 2013

8 Mon

9 Tue

10 Wed

11 Thu 09:30 AM – 04:30 PM IST

12 Fri 10:15 AM – 05:30 PM IST

13 Sat 10:15 AM – 05:30 PM IST

14 Sun

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Nimhans Convention Centre

(Skip ahead to session proposals)

In 2013, commodity hardware and computing capacity for storing and processing large and small volumes of data are easily available on demand. The bigger issues pertain to questions of how to scale data processing, handle data diversity, manage infrastructure costs, decide which technologies work best for different contexts and problems, and build products from the insights and intelligence that the data is presenting to you.

The Fifth Elephant 2013 is a three-day workshop and conference on big data, storage and analytics, with product demos and hacker corners.

http://fifthelephant.in/

Event format, themes and submission guidelines #

The Fifth Elephant 2013 invites proposals on use cases and real-life examples. Tell us what specific problem you faced, which technology/tools worked for your use case and why, how you have developed business intelligence on the data you are collecting, and analytics tools and techniques you employ. Our preference is for showcasing original work with clear take-aways for the audience. Please emphasize these in your proposal.

The conference will have two parallel tracks on 12th and 13th July:

Storage: OLTP, messaging and notifications, databases and big data, NoSQL
Analytics: Metrics and tools, cloud computing, mathematical modelling and statistical analysis, visualization

Workshops #

This year we are adding a preliminary day of workshops, on 11th July, to provide attendees more in-depth, hands-on training on open source frameworks and tools (Pig, Hadoop, Hive, etc), commercial solutions (sponsored), programming languages such as R, and visualization techniques and tricks, among others.

Product demos and sponsored sessions #

We have a demo track for startups and companies who want to showcase their product to customers at The Fifth Elephant 2013 and get feedback. Slots are also open for 4-6 sponsored sessions for companies who want to talk about their technologies and reach out to developers, CTOs, CIOs and product managers at The Fifth Elephant. For more information on demo and sponsored session proposals, write to info@hasgeek.com.

Commitment to open source #

HasGeek believes in open source as the foundation of the internet. Our aim is to strengthen these foundations for future generations. If your talk describes a codebase for developers to work with, we require that it is available under a license that does not impose itself on subsequent work. This is typically a permissive open source license (almost anything that is listed at opensource.org/licenses and is not GPL or AGPL), but restrictive and commercial licenses are also considered depending on how they affect the developer’s relationship with the user.

If you’d like to showcase commercial work that makes money for you, please consider supporting the event with a sponsorship.

Proposal selection process #

Voting is open to attendees who have purchased event tickets. If there is a proposal you find notable, please vote for it and leave a comment to initiate discussions. Your vote will be reflected immediately, but will be counted towards selections only if you purchase a ticket. Proposals will also be evaluated by a program committee consisting of:

Emphasis will be placed on original work and talks which present new insights to the audience.

The programme committee will interview proposers who have received maximum votes from attendees and the committee. Proposers must submit presentation drafts as part of the selection process to ensure the talk is in line with the original proposal and to help the program committee build a coherent line-up for the event.

There is only one speaker per session. Attendance is free for selected speakers. HasGeek will cover your travel to and accommodation in Bangalore from anywhere in the world. As our budget is limited, we will prefer speakers from locations closer home, but will do our best to cover for anyone exceptional. If you are able to raise support for your trip, we will count that towards an event sponsorship.

If your proposal is not accepted, you can buy a ticket at the same rate as was available on the day you proposed. We’ll send you a code.

Discounted tickets are available from http://fifthelephant.doattend.com/

Dates #

The program committee will announce the first round of selected proposals by end of April, a second round by end-May, and will finalize the schedule by 20th June. The funnel will close on 5th June. The event is on 11th-13th July 2013.

Hosted by

The Fifth Elephant

The Fifth Elephant - known as one of the best data science and Machine Learning conference in Asia - has transitioned into a year-round forum for conversations about data and ML engineering; data science in production; data security and privacy practices. more

All submissions

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How to build a Recommender using Apache Mahout

Submitted Jun 5, 2013

Section: Analytics and Visualization Technical level: Beginner

This session covers creation of a recommender using Apache Mahout for a consumer Web application. After attending this session, application developers will be able to notice the need for using recommenders in their application and will be able to start planning and implementing them for their specific use cases.

Outline #

Recommendation engines, or recommenders, are widely used by many applications for suggesting objects users may like. For example, an online shopping site will suggest products users may like depending on what they have bought and/or visited earlier. This session covers creation of a recommender for a consumer Web application.

We will talk about recommenders in the context of a specific real world use case, covering:

What is a recommender,
How to identify the essential input for a recommender, i.e. users and items,
Designing the recommender
Deploying it as part of a Web application
Tuning the recommender

We’ll be using Apache Mahout to create parts of the recommender. Apache Mahout is a machine learning library which also plays nice with Apache Hadoop for processing. We will, however, be focusing more on how to use it without Hadoop for this session.

Speaker bio #

Viraj is a Software Architect at GS Lab. For the last 7 years while at GS Lab, he has worked in the area of Web Applications. His current area of focus is Data Analytics, Design/Development of Scalable Web Applications and exploring Data Analytics use cases in Web based products. As a part of this, he created a recommender for a social news reader product. Prior to this, he has worked in Web Applications Security, developing Web-based attacks for an enterprise Web security assessment product.

He is a Computer Science M.Tech. from IIT-Kharagpur. Before that, he did his M.Sc. in Mathematics from University of Pune.