Big Data Meetup at eBay Lab

Agenda

8:30 - 9:00 - Gathering

9:00 - 9:10 eBay Israel General Overview

Yuval Matalon
General Manager of eBay Israel

9:10 - 9:50 eBay's Hadoop clusters: Past, Present, and Future

Ryan HennigSoftware Developer, Platform Systems, ebay
Ryan Hennig has lived in Seattle his whole life, which is a rarity for the Seattle tech industry. He studied Computer Science and Physics at the University of Washington, while working for a variety of Seattle-area startups including Classmates.com, where he was one of the first ten employees, and Amazon, where he helped launch Search Inside the Book. Upon graduation he went to Microsoft and worked in the SQL Server division, building his passion as a data geek while working on the releases of SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012. In early 2012, he joined eBay's Hadoop Platform Team, which operates some of the largest Hadoop clusters in the world. In addition to solving the challenges of running such large, complex distributed systems, Ryan is passionate about innovation inside and outside of eBay: as well as winning awards from eBay's senior executives for innovation, he has partnered with outside organizations to sponsor hackathons around the US targeted at passionate young technologists at the University and High-school levels. His interests for the future of Big Data include easier manageability via virtualization and tools, and support for alternate workloads such as Graph Processing.

9:50 - 10:30Map/Reduce, the dominant paradigm for cluster computing
Chris SeversSoftware Engineer Search Science Eng Recall & Spam QE, ebay.
Chris works as an Applied Researcher/Software Engineer at eBay. He uses Hadoop daily to run jobs on large eBay data sets. He is an official contributor on Twitter's Scalding project and author of the scalding-avro module for reading Avro files. At eBay, Chris has given numerous internal talks about Hadoop best practices and authored a curriculum for eBay Applied Researchers to get started with Hadoop and eBay data. He has also given many talks outside of eBay on Hadoop, Scalding and doing machine learning at scale with Scala. Prior to joining eBay, Chris was a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at Reykjavík University in Iceland and at The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley.

10:30 - 10:45 Break

10:45 - 11:15
Text Mining Platform at PayPal

Adam CohenSr. Research Scientist, PayPal
Adam Cohen works at PayPal’s Risk Data Science group. Adam develops solutions for risk problems, by extracting attributes from big unstructured or semi-structured text data over Hadoop. Prior to joining eBay, Adam lead the video algorithm group at ARRIS. Adam has two BScs from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, in Physics and Electrical Engineering, both graduated magna cum laude when he was twenty.

11:15 - 11:45
The Benefits of Story Telling

Roy VallerManager, Software Development, PayPal
Roy manages a research team at PayPal Advanced Risk sciences, focused on creating innovative solutions for battling advanced technological fraud. He lives with his family in Givataim, within walking distance from PayPal’s offices. The daily walk only lasts a couple of minutes but he regards it as good excuse to avoid other physical activity.
He’s been with the Israeli tech industry since 1999 and has worked in R&D and data research for several startup initiatives before joining PayPal in 2010.

11:45 - 12:45
Big Data ecosystem in IsraelModerator: Yan Chelly, eBay Big Data Lab - Founder (ebay Israel)
Yan Chelly, a Paris native, came to Israel at the age of 18 to make “aliya”. After a 3 year service in the IDF he began he’s studies in Computer Science and Math In the Netanya Academy in Israel. After receiving his degree, Yan immediately began his journey into the world of eCommerce. As a 10 years veteran at ebay, Yan was able to gain knowledge and experience in many different fields such as: big data, data mining, classification and leveraging structured data in search. Yan, who’s a true seeker of innovation, decided to take upon himself new challenges, inside and outside of ebay.