DC Spark Mini-Summit and 1 Year Meetup Celebration


Details
Come see a demo of Databricks Cloud, hear about Comcast's Recommendation solution using Spark and Spark's MLlib, and see a preview of MetiStream's Advanced Spark Training. And Celebrate the 1 Year Anniversary of the Washington DC Area Apache Spark Interactive! Many thanks to our host, RAND Corporation (http://www.rand.org/), for sponsoring us and making this event possible! More details below:
***IMPORTANT: Please bring a government issued ID in order to check into this facility ***
LOCATION, METRO, and PARKING:
Find details here: http://www.rand.org/about/locations/washington.html
Entering the Building
Due to construction to the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City Mall, the main building lobby to the RAND office will be closed until December 2015. During this renovation all visitors must go through the mall to get to the RAND space.
Enter the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City Mall from the Hayes Street entrance, to the right of the existing main lobby entrance. Upon entering the building, take a left turn, proceed to the end of the hall, take a right and proceed to the escalators located on the right side of the walkway. Follow signs to the Washington Tower Lobby and take the escalators to the top level of the mall, the third floor. From the escalators on the third floor, proceed straight ahead to the corner and then take a left. Continue down the hall to the Washington Tower Lobby, which is on the right.
Here's a map that should help: RAND MAP (http://files.meetup.com/14077672/RAND%20Directions%20-%20Mall%20Construction.pdf)
SPEAKERS:
DATABRICKS: John Tripier, Alliances and Ecosystem Lead at Databricks, will provide an overview and update on Spark and demo the Databricks Cloud.
COMCAST: Jan Neumann is a senior manager at Comcast Labs Washington DC where he leads the big data and multi-media content analysis research teams. His research focuses on machine learning for content analysis, home security, predictive modeling and recommendation systems. efore Comcast, he worked for Siemens Corporate Research on various computer vision and machine learning related projects. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. At Comcast Labs DC we provide personalized recommendations to our customers on the X1 Platform. This talk is an extended version of what was presented at this year’s Spark Summit East. We will start with a general introduction to recommendation systems and then describe how we implemented a real-time recommendation framework using the Spark framework. Our experience shows that Spark allows us to shorten the development cycle so that we were able to build a real-time recommendation system in just a few weeks.
METISTREAM: Silvio Fiorito started his career in software development at the height of the dot-com boom in Northern Virginia where he worked on some of the earliest web properties. The last few years his focus has been in security and big data development. Disappointed with the limitations of current frameworks, he started experimenting with Spark early on at version v0.6 and has been hooked since. His passion is in creating more powerful and insightful user experiences for exploratory analysis leveraging tools like Spark. Silvio is a Databricks Certified Spark Developer and MetiStream Trainer. Silvio will describe how MetiStream built a sophisticated training environment using Docker to give students extensive hands-on time with Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, and Hadoop. This training environment is completely self contained and can be deployed on-premises or the cloud with just a few steps. He'll walk through one of the Spark SQL labs from the Advanced class to show how students apply the content covered in the lecture through hands-on exercises.
**************************************************************************
REMINDER: Spark Summit on June 15th
Join the Apache Spark community at the fourth Spark Summit in San Francisco on June 15, 2015. At Spark Summit 2015 you will hear keynotes from NASA, the CIA, Toyota, Databricks, AWS, Intel, MapR, IBM, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Timeful, O'Reilly, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Space is limited so register now. Use promo code "DevList15" to save 15% when registering before June 1, 2015. Register at http://spark-summit.org/2015/register .

DC Spark Mini-Summit and 1 Year Meetup Celebration