My Review of Hadoop Summit 2011 #hadoopsummit

I woke up early and cheery Wednesday morning to attend the 2011 Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, after a long drive from Los Angeles and the Big Data Camp that lasted until 10pm the night before. Having been to Hadoop Summit 2010, I was interested to see how much of the content in the conference had changed.

This year, there were approximately 1,600 participants and the summit was moved a few feet away to the Convention Center rather than the Hyatt. Still, space and seating was pretty cramped. That just goes to show how much the Hadoop field has grown in just one year.

Keynotes

We first heard a series of keynote speeches which I will summarize. The first keynote was from Jay Rossiter, SVP of the Cloud Platform Group at Yahoo. He introduced how Hadoop is used at Yahoo, which is fitting since they organized the event. The content of his presentation was very similar to last year’s. One interesting application of Hadoop at Yahoo was for “retiling” the map of the United States. I imagine this refers to the change in aerial imagery over time. When performed by hand, retiling took 6 weeks; with Hadoop, it took […]

Big Data Camp 2011 #BigDataCamp

It has been a while since I have been to Silicon Valley, but Hadoop Summit gave me the opportunity to go. To make the most of the long trip, I also decided to check out BigDataCamp held the night before from 5:30 to 10pm. Although the weather was as predicted, I was not prepared for the deluge of pouring rain in the end of June. The weather is one of the things that is preventing me from moving up to Silicon Valley.

The food/drinks/networking event must have been amazing because it was very difficult to get everyone to come to the main room to start the event! We started with a series of lightning talks from some familiar names and some unfamiliar ones.

Chris Wensel, the developer of Cascading, is also the founder of Concurrent, Inc. Cascading is an alternate API for Map-Reduce written in Java. With Cascading, developers can chain multiple map-reduce jobs to form an ad hoc workflow. Cascading adds a built-in planner to manage jobs. Cascading usually infers Hadoop, but Cascading can run on other platforms including EMC Greenplum and the new MapR project. RazorFish and BestBuy use Cascading for behavioral targeting. Flightcaster uses a domain specific […]

Google — Is Search-by-Multimedia on the Way?

Recently, I have been thinking about alternate ways of specifying search queries other than with text. A couple of weeks ago I came across a piece of music that I could not identify. I thought it would be a huge win for a search engine to allow me to upload this piece, and it would present me with matches, or near matches to other pieces that sound similar, or have similar characteristics. Some services already exist. Shazam allows a user to place a microphone near playing music and it will identify the artist and song. Some uses of search-by-sound:

Music identification (“solved” – Shazam) Music personalizaton and recommendation (“solved” – Pandora) Identification of the source of a sound (i.e. a species of bird, a musical instrument, an inanimate object) MP3 and media file search Finding material that violates copyright

As our motivating example, consider we find some really cool graphic on the web and we want to know where it likely originated (i.e. art, a meme). In such a search engine, we could upload the graphic and get results containing the exact image, or images that are very similar such as variations of the image (crop, resize, borders, different effects), […]