Chicago Apache Lucene/Solr User Group - Leveraging Solr for Big Data Insight

Join us for an evening of pizza, beer, networking and Lucene/Solr presentations from LucidWorks and Avalon Consulting!

6:30: Eat & Greet -- Pizza & Beer

7:00: Intro and Speakers

"This Ain't Your Father's Search Engine" - Grant Ingersoll , LucidWorks

Abstract: In just a few short years, search has quickly evolved from being a small text box in the nether regions of a website to being front and center in our lives. Increasingly, however, the combination of search engine and Hadoop technology is also being used for practical, real time recommendations, events processing, complex spatial functionality and time series analysis capable of not only matching user's queries in text, but also driving real time decision making and analytics. In fact, open source Apache Lucene/Solr can do all of this and more by taking advantage of new data structures and algorithms as well as deeper integration with Hadoop and related projects. In this demo-driven talk, Lucene committer, Grant Ingersoll, will take a look at some of the new and exciting ways users are leveraging Lucene/Solr and big data to drive deeper insight into information needs that go beyond keywords in a text box.

Speaker: Grant Ingersoll is the CTO and co-founder of LucidWorks as well as an active member of the Lucene community – a Lucene and Solr committer, co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine learning project and a long standing member of the Apache Software Foundation. Grant’s prior experience includes work at the Center for Natural Language Processing at Syracuse University in natural language processing and information retrieval. Grant earned his B.S. from Amherst College in Math and Computer Science and his M.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University. Grant is also the co-author of “Taming Text” from Manning Publications.

"Empowering Big Data analytics in Hadoop with LucidWorks"- Pritesh Patel, Avalon Consulting, LLC

Abstract: The proliferation of Big Data in the world of Hadoop, master data management (MDM), and general distributed systems has created powerful business use cases for gathering intelligence. Search and Discovery, while often overlooked, is a primary data exploration tool for enabling end-users to explore large-distributed data sets. This is especially true when dealing with text or other non-numerical data. There are many possible integration points between Lucene/Solr and Hadoop; we will explore many of them in this talk and showcase a real world implementation example empowering analysis of Hadoop data with Lucene/Solr. It should be no surprise both can work well with each other considering Hadoop and Solr both share the same pedigree in Lucene!

Speaker: Pritesh is the Principal Architect, Search & Big Data Analytics at Avalon Consulting, LLC. In his previous role, Pritesh served as an Architect for Enterprise Search at Turner Broadcasting where he revamped search experiences for many sites. Pritesh has research publications in Data Visualization and Visual Analytics in IEEE publications and conferences. With his research work, he built a novel system that explores an unknown data space for the purposes of gathering intelligence while interacting with the visualization. He received his MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

8:00-8:30: Wrap-up, Questions, Announcements & Wrap-up

*We are always looking for speakers! If you have an interesting use case or talk you would like to share around Lucene/Solr, please let us know.