Hi Grant, fellow Mahouts, Thanks for the chance to join the team. I really look forward to contributing my skills to the project and learning a great deal as well.
So, a little bit about myself; It all started with an Apple //+ back in 1982. Growing up, I never thought I'd do something serious with computers. In college I studied Computer Graphics in the Art School, Architecture and ended up getting a Masters in Information Resource Management on top of that. Since then I've been a software developer and who has brushed up against information retrieval, search and NLP for many years. I got my start in search and content management working as a web-developer for a newspaper in the early days of the Internet. As Grant mentioned, I've worked at TextWise for a number of years. The company grew out of a NLP-oriented research group headed by Liz Liddy at Syracuse University and continues to focus on the commercial applications of text-oriented technologies albeit with a more statistical orientation as of late. While a TextWise, I've worked on projects ranging everything from cross-language IR to contextual advertising. Mostly I've been involved in developing the glue that holds the core algorithms together, helping them scale and combining the various moving parts of an system into a cohesive whole. I've had a chance to do everything from web crawling, document processing, database, visualization, web-app and distributed systems work. To that end, I've worked on an off with Lucene, Nutch, and many other projects from the Apache ecosystem for years. Reading "Programming Collective Intelligence" a couple years back really solidified my interest in machine learning algorithms. After building a number of different systems to process large amounts of content, the ability to quickly and effortlessly scale things up with hadoop/mapreduce really appeals to me. Thje Mahout project is wonderful to me in that it combines the these things I'm interested in personally, has relevance to the things I do for work and has a really outstanding group of people working on it. I'm looking forward to working with you all, Drew On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Robin Anil <robin.a...@gmail.com> wrote: > Welcome Drew > > @Grant: No customary introduction? :) > > Robin > > On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 2:33 AM, Grant Ingersoll <gsing...@apache.org>wrote: > >> On behalf of the Lucene PMC, I'm happy to announce Drew Farris as the >> newest member of the Mahout committer family. Drew has been contributing >> some really nice work to Mahout in recent months and I look forward to his >> continuing involvement with Mahout. >> >> Congrats, Drew! >> >> >> -Grant >
