The organization meeting for Austin SIGKDD was an outstanding success. Seventeen people attended the meeting. Everyone was very interested in furthering their professional skills and starting a weekly hackers dojo. The focus of the group will be on big data machine learning. For the initial couple of months we will learn how to use Mahout with Hadoop, looking at the math, algorithms, and software architecture along the way. In the future we expect to have one of more topic tracks where people can work on projects to improve their skills.
We decided to postpone voting to form a local chapter of ACM SIGKDD for a month or two, to see how things work out. We did decide to call ourselves the Austin SIGKDD for the interim. If we become an ACM chapter, we can change the name the Austin ACM SIGKDD. We discuss starting a virtual dojo using openmeeting for those who can not attend the dojo on a weekly basis. The primary meeting places will be the Austin Northwest Recreation Center, or Mangia Pizza as a backup. Both have free easy access and free Wifi. We discuss a format of trying to get the meeting place from 6-9, where we will have a structure activity, a presentation or lesson, from 7-8, where the time before and after is for hacking, depending on the members scheduling needs. The structured activity will be organized with slides and recorded audio so we can capture the presentation for those who can not be there or for future newcomers to the group. We decided to meet on Wednesday nights in the future. The group now has its own web page and mailing list at Yahoo groups. The group has open membership. Please join to continue to receive information on the group. Membership in the group is required to post to the mailing list. Here are the details on austinsigkdd: Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/austinsigkdd Group email address: [email protected] The next group meeting is Wednesday, December 7. I will send out a formal announcement on the SIGKDD mailing list once I book the room. I am requesting one or two volunteers to also be the admins for the various group web sites in case I die, get sick, get arrested, or move away :) The next meeting will focus on setting up a software development environment: 1. Selecting and installing a hypervisor. 2. Selecting and installing a Linux VM. 3. Installation of Cloudera Hadoop and Cloudera Mahout. 4. Installing Eclipse and plugins. 5. Downloading source for Mahout. Sincerely, David G. Boney [email protected]
