Hi everyone,I'd love to setup a hacker dojo similar to what David is doing in Austin in the Seattle area, are there other folks interested in doing this with a similar theme. Please let me know. This is great way to do deep dives on some of the algorithms in mahout.Regards
> From: [email protected] > Subject: Successful Organization Meeting for Austin SIGKDD > Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:35:05 -0600 > To: [email protected] > > 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]
