Welcome Drew! I've been using your excellent colloc code quite a bit in testing my svd stuff (produces nicely bigger vectors out of text!), looking forward to more cool stuff (NLP package! Bring it on! :) ).
-jake On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Drew Farris <drew.far...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > > >
