Erlang-FP Joint meetup - Bob Ippolito: Random Choice

We invite you to an Erlang-FP joint meetup with Bob Ippolito.

Bob Ippolito is a Silicon Valley software engineer, entrepreneur and angel investor well known as the creator of Mochi Web. He was the CTO and cofounder of Mochi Media that was acquired by Shanda Games in 2010. Bob went on to work in the iOS Core Team at Facebook.

He started using Erlang in 2006 to prototype an ad server, and it quickly became the de facto platform for building servers at Mochi. Bob's open source contributions to the Erlang community include mochiweb, statebox, egeoip and kvc. He's currently dabbling in education, advising startups, and curating @DijkstraQuotes. For more of Bob's projects, check out his blog: http://bob.ippoli.to/

In this talk Bob will discuss different techniques and data structures for weighted random choice in Erlang. Random choice is an essential part of many systems, especially distributed systems, such as ad servers. The concepts in this this talk will be demonstrated with a "learning" IRC bot that builds a Markov chain and uses it to make sentences.