Paul O’Rorke

Peter Norvig focused on a major lesson learned at Google and elsewhere in recent years and gave a fascinating keynote presentation on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data” at the SDForum conference on “The Analytics Revolution” April 9th, 2010. The lesson is that data can be surprisingly effective: it can be used to get better performance improvements than one can get from improvements in algorithms.
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Jeff Eastman gave a presentation on Mahout at the SDForum Business Intelligence Special Interest Group’s meeting on April 21st, 2009.  Mahout is a collection of machine learning algorithms adapted for use on very large data sets using the Hadoop map-reduce platform.  Jeff’s presentation “BI Over Petabytes:  Meet Apache Mahout” gave a good introduction to Mahout and a snapshot of the current status.  His slides are available here and in the SDForum Archives. (continue reading…)