Hadoop / Data Science Meeting 2.0 -- Plans for Moving Forward

[David S. Price]

Here are the working, future plans for this group crafted by a small contingent of us this evening. For those who couldn't attend tonight, please add your comments as well.

The group will continue meeting on 4th Wed of the month, 7pm at Urban Airship. (Thanks UA crew!)

Due to the imminent arrival of twin baby girls in my life this June, I'll be stepping down as head ringleader. For the foreseeable future the group will be in the good hands of:
Dave Revell -> scheduling, calagator, excitement
Todd Johnson -> organizing presenters, meeting agendas, hard stuff

As far as topic/focus for the group, people voted to continue with a broad group focus across Big Data (Hadoop) to Data Quant/Analytics (Data Science) with the hope of continuing to curate content for people across the spectrum of expert practitioners to into/novices/curious.

Meeting Agenda and Content Format
After some meet-'n-greet social time, begin each meeting with about 20 minutes of open "lightning" conversation regarding Big Data in the news, topics of interest, software updates, etc. The time will be facilitated by one individual who will keep the conversation moving quickly from topic to topic as well as seed the conversation with a few items to discuss. The group should contribute topics, but nothing will be discussed for very long. Bill Taylor will lead this part of the meeting in June.

Most meetings will be presentation driven. Presentations will rotate between topics about:
1) Big Data (e.g. Hadoop) and 
2) Analytics/Statistics/Quant. 

We discussed two types of speaking formats, which will rotate as well:
1) "Expert" presentations lasting 30min to 1hour. Will take more time to prepare by the presenter and will likely be more in depth.
2) "Intro" presentations lasting 10min, with 2-3 given by different presenters at one meeting. These should be focused on one simple topic and meant to provide a concise demo or overview. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to present on something of interest from software demos to research papers to current project overviews.

Lastly, once every three to four months the evening will become a Hackathon/Brainstorm Meeting where people will break into groups to work on ideas together, help others with ideas, discuss how to explore and architect solutions, etc. There will be no presenters during these meetings.

Next Steps
Most of all, we need presenters! Get in touch with Todd Johnson and/or post your message here if you're interested in helping out.

Dave R., I'll let you run with the scheduling from here.

Everyone else, please add your comments below.

Thanks again,
David Price

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I'll throw my hat in the ring for a 30-minute "expert" talk on
computational finance - market microstructure, derivatives pricing
models, etc.. The main connection to data science / big data is via
Monte Carlo "embarassingly paralell" methods.

SIde note - how many would be interested in a one-day (Saturday /
Sunday) "R Progamming for Scripting Language (Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP,
JavaScript) Programmers" class?

--
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Data is the new coal - abundant, dirty and difficult to mine.

[Todd Johnson]

Hey Ed, we were hoping in the short term that you would still give the ten-fifteen minute short presentation that you had planned for this month, next month. We have a couple of other short talks lined up, and I think that would fill out a meeting nicely. 

todd.

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

OK - count me in unless the date conflicts with Open Source Bridge?
(June 26–29, 2012)