The Fifth Elephant 2015

A conference on data, machine learning, and distributed and parallel computing

Machine Learning, Distributed and Parallel Computing, and High-performance Computing are the themes for this year’s edition of Fifth Elephant.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is 15th June 2015

We are looking for talks and workshops from academics and practitioners who are in the business of making sense of data, big and small.

Track 1: Discovering Insights and Driving Decisions

This track is about general, novel, fundamental, and advanced techniques for making sense of data and driving decisions from data. This could encompass applications of the following ML paradigms:

  • Statistical Visualizations
  • Unsupervised Learning
  • Supervised Learning
  • Semi-Supervised Learning
  • Active Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Monte-carlo techniques and probabilistic programming
  • Deep Learning

Across various data modalities including multi-variate, text, speech, time series, images, video, transactions, etc.

Track 2: Speed at Scale

This track is about tools and processes for collecting, indexing, and processing vast amounts of data. The theme includes:

  • Distributed and Parallel Computing
  • Real Time Analytics and Stream Processing
  • MapReduce and Graph Computing frameworks
  • Kafka, Spark, Hadoop, MPI
  • Stories of parallelizing sequential programs
  • Cost/Security/Disaster Management of Data

Commitment to Open Source

HasGeek believes in open source as the binding force of our community. If you are describing a codebase for developers to work with, we’d like it to be available under a permissive open source license. If your software is commercially licensed or available under a combination of commercial and restrictive open source licenses (such as the various forms of the GPL), please consider picking up a sponsorship. We recognize that there are valid reasons for commercial licensing, but ask that you support us in return for giving you an audience. Your session will be marked on the schedule as a sponsored session.

Workshops

If you are interested in conducting a hands-on session on any of the topics falling under the themes of the two tracks described above, please submit a proposal under the workshops section. We also need you to tell us about your past experience in teaching and/or conducting workshops.

Hosted by

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

Aniruddha Gangopadhyay

@aniruddha9591

Joining data streams at scale for fun and profit

Submitted Jun 15, 2015

Understand how to derive more value out of real-time data streams by joining them using a stream processing system to derive deeper insights. We’ll walk through our experience of building a platform for such use-cases at Flipkart, and describe the design patterns we have evolved within it; we have scaled this platform to process billions of events a day across hundreds of streaming data applications.

Outline

Real-time data streams are everywhere, which is not really surprising considering how easy it has gotten to generate them. For example, applications can write their hearts out to a Kafka cluster, logs can be streamed out via Logstash, a Change Data Capture (CDC) system can be deployed to to turn a database’s write-ahead log into a stream, etc.

Stream processing systems such as Apache Storm have become quite popular for analysing such data streams; they are used to power real-time analytical dashboards as well as other data-driven products such as recommendations, trending topics etc.

But a lot more value could be derived by joining multiple data streams in real-time — when it comes to data, the value of the whole is much greater than the parts. For example, while data streams of search queries and product result clicks are useful by themselves, joining them allows us to derive metrics such as clickthrough-rate. But doing this is wrought with several challenges:

  • Data streams could be coming in — or be processed with — different lags i.e. one stream could have data as recent as a few seconds ago while the latest data in another stream is from several minutes ago. This can occur due to buffering, cross datacenter replication etc.
  • Data streams could have data that is coming out-of-order i.e. while most of the latest few events in a data stream are from a few seconds ago, a small percentage could be from several minutes ago. This can also occur due to buffering, cross datacenter replication etc.
  • Data streams could be very large, to the tune of tens to hundreds of thousands of events per second.
  • Data streams could represent updates to some mutable state such as updates to a User Profile, an Order, Product Information etc. While this is not a big challenge by itself, it becomes much more complex to deal with in the context of the above challenges.

Stream processing systems such as Apache Storm do not provide any out of the box ways of expressing such complex joins, let alone taking care of the complications listed above. At Flipkart, we built a framework on top of Storm to do the same; this framework has been used for building hundreds of stream processing pipelines joining Kafka data streams.

In this talk, we’ll describe the design patterns that the framework implements, how we arrived at them and the lessons we learnt along the way.

Speaker bio

Aniruddha works as a Software Engineer at Flipkart. He is the lead developer for the stream processing framework of the company’s central Data Platform. In this role Aniruddha was responsible for building and operationalising the design patterns being described in this talk.

Siddhartha Reddy is an Architect at Flipkart. He works with Aniruddha on the stream processing framework described here.

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Hosted by

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