2012 - January Meeting

Our next meeting will be on Thursday the 26th of January at Bazaarvoice from 6:30 - 9pm.

As usual we'll have plenty of Pizza, Beer and Tacos. This event is free and open to everyone. We have lots of people that come that are new to Hadoop and Big Data.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

7:00 - 7:25 : "Small and Big Data at Bazaarvoice" - Alex Pinkin, Lead Developer Data Infrastructure, Bazaarvoice- @apinkin

 
Alex will be presenting on the data infrastructure powering over 5 Billion page views per month. The presentation will cover the use of RDBMS, NoSQL and Hadoop at Bazaarvoice.

7:25 - 7:45 : "SOLR Power FTW" - Robby Morgan, Lead Developer, Bazaarvoice

Robbie will present a case study from a large scale deployment of Apache SOLR, an open source Lucene based search platform.

7:45 - 8:30 :  "Gathering, Quantifying & Visualizing Private Equity Data" - Steve Watt, Hewlett-Packard - @wattsteve

Steve will present on a "Data Science" project where he mined the web, quantified the amount of venture capital invested in the USA from 2005 to 2010 and analyzed its distribution across sectors and by location. It will be presented in a tutorial format covering the use of Apache Nutch for web crawling, Apache Pig and Hadoop for analyzing the data and Protovis/D3 for creating the choropleth visualizations.

For more detail please see my blogposts here and here

Location

Bazaarvoice is located here (Map) 


When you arrive at Bazaarvoice, you can park in any of the open spots outside the building or in the garage next to the building. The meetup will be on the second floor. Take the elevator up to the 2nd floor and then follow the signs to the meeting room.

Sponsored By

2011 - July Meeting

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday July the 13th at CoSpace Austin from 6:30 - 9pm.

As usual we'll have plenty of Pizza, Beer and Tacos. This event is free and open to everyone. We have lots of people that come that are new to Hadoop and Big Data.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

7:00 - 7:25 : "Dexy Demo" - Ana Nelson, OpenGamma - @ananelson

 
Ana is the author of Dexy, an open source tool that allows one to create elegant, reproducible documents which include graphs and analysis from raw data and code. 

7:30 - 8:10 : "Data in the Digital Age" - Kaitlin Thaney, Digital Science - @kaythaney

Kaitlin will be presenting on the data ecosystem and discuss how the way we interact with data is changing in the digital age and the challenges and opportunities presented. The presentation will have a focus on scientific research. 

8:10 - 9:00 : "How Bitly scales data storage and processing" - Hilary Mason, Bitly - @hmason

Hilary will be presenting on some of the unique data storage and processing challenges they encounter at Bitly and how they address them. She will also be covering some of the algorithms that are used at Bitly.

Location

Directions to CoSpace are available here 

Sponsored By

2011 - June Meeting

Our June Meeting will be another joint meeting with GeekAustin and the Cassandra Austin Meetup. Tyler Hobbs from DataStax will be speaking on Brisk at Pervasive on June 20th from 6-9 PM. 

Please sign up on EventBrite so we can get an idea of how many folks are attending.

DataStax Brisk integrates Apache Hadoop with Apache Cassandra which provides you with the ability to run Map/Reduce Analytics workloads on top of the Apache Cassandra real-time Columnar Data Store.

Other Big Data Related Events in June

June 27th : The Hive Happy Hour in Santa Clara, CA

June 28th : Big Data Camp in Santa Clara, CA

June 29th : The Yahoo Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, CA

Location

Pervasive Software - Map

12365-B Riata Trace Parkway Austin, TX 78727

2011 April Meeting

Our April Meeting will be a joint meeting with GeekAustin who is hosting a "Machine Learning with Mahout" meetup at J.J. Pickle Research Campus on April 21st from 7-9 PM. Please sign up on EventBrite so we can get an idea of how many folks are attending.

Apache Mahout provides a set of machine learning libraries that run on top of Apache Hadoop. This is interesting in that it allows you to gain deeper insights into your data (Clustering, Classification) when contrasted with your typical text extraction analytics that are run with Pig or Hive.

Location

Big Tex Auditorium
J.J. Pickle Research Campus
10100 Burnet Road
Austin, TX 78758

2011 March Meetups

March is here and that means one thing... SXSW ! We won't be having an official meeting this month due to the fact that we have SXSW Interactive and The Data Cluster Party. The sessions/events below are all organized by Austinites, so please come out and support them. There are other big data sessions but I wanted to highlight the ones that were local. Our regular meetings will be picking up again in April.

Note: The Data Cluster Party does not require a badge, but the rest of the events do.

March 12 - Big Data, Hadoop and You: How to rock out with Big Data - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195893600434618

March 13 - Data Cluster Party - http://dataclusterparty2011.eventbrite.com/

March 14 - Big Data For Everyone - http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7475

March 14 - A Billion Columns? No problem: an Introduction to the Cassandra Database - http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7965

2011 February Meeting

Our next meeting will be on February the 17th at CoSpace Austin from 6:30 - 9pm.

As usual we'll have plenty of Pizza, Beer and Tacos. This event is free and open to everyone. We have lots of people that come that are new to Hadoop and Big Data.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

7:00 - 7:45 : "Flume" - Jonathan Hsieh, Cloudera - @jmhsieh

 
Jonathan Hsieh is a Flume Committer and the Project Lead. He'll be presenting on how you can use Flume to centrally manage the collection, aggregation and distribution of huge amounts of log data. He'll also cover the latest release of Flume (0.9.3) and conclude with a demo .

7:45 - 8:15 : "Graph processing at Web Scale with Google Pregel and Golden Orb" - Zach Richardson, Ravel - @jzachrichardson

Google has recently published a new white paper on Pregel, a graph processing runtime capable of running arbitrary graph algorithms at web scale. Zach has taken the specifications described in the paper and built Golden Orb, an Apache licensed open sourced equivalent that runs on Hadoop, and is in process to be submitted to the Apache incubator. 

Location

Directions to CoSpace are available here 

Sponsorship

This event wouldn't have been possible if it was not sponsored by the awesome folks at RackSpace and Cloudera

2011 January Meeting

Our January Meeting will be the Data Day Austin Conference on January 29th. Our user group is co-hosting the event along with GeekAustin and Riptano. See the event link for registration and location details - http://datadayaustin.eventbrite.com/ 

The Schedule is still being finalized, but you can see the speakers being added in realtime at the EventBrite link. The conference is hands on. i.e. Bring your laptops. The intent is that when you leave you will actually be able to do the things being presented. 

These skills are in extremely short supply and we want to cement Austin's position as a premiere destination for Big Data. This is why we are putting this on. Quite frankly, the amount of people available with these skills is not commensurate with the demand for them, This
is the perfect event to bring your coworkers and friends along to in order to help them become proficient in working with Big Data. 

I'm also hoping this event will be a catalyst that helps grow our local Big Data community for this coming year. 

Lastly, some Big Data events on the horizon: 

O'Reilly Strata Conference - Feb 1-3, Santa Clara, CA - http://strataconf.com/strata2011 

SXSW Interactive - March 11-13, Austin, TX (Featuring a Local Big Data Panel) - http://sxsw.com/interactive 

Data Cluster Party - March 13, Austin, TX - http://dataclusterparty2011.eventbrite.com/ 

Structure Big Data - March 23, New York City - http://events.gigaom.com/bigdata/