Spark ML with Holden Karau and Building a Recommendation Engine with Cars.com

Hey Chicago Spark Users,

We are excited to announce a very special visiting guest, Holden Karau, at our next meeting along with a great talk from Cars.com.

An introduction into Spark ML plus how to go beyond when you get stuck

Presenter: Holden Karau

This talk will introduce Spark new machine learning frame work (Spark ML) and how to train basic models with it. A companion Jupyter notebook for people to follow along with will be provided. Once we've got the basics down we'll look at what to do when we find we need more than the tools available in Spark ML (and I'll try and convince people to contribute to my latest side project -- Sparkling ML).

Building a recommendation engine using Apache Spark

Presenters: Krishna Anisetty and Sandeep Kandekar

This talk will introduce concepts of a recommendation engine, collaborative filtering and co-occurrence matrix. Learn how Cars.com (http://cars.com/) built their first version of a recommendation engine using these concepts leveraging Apache Spark.

Agenda

5:30 - Food and Drinks

6:00 - Talks Begin

Sponsor

A special thank you to our host and sponsor - cars.com (http://cars.com/)

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About the Speakers

Holden Karau (https://www.linkedin.com/in/holdenkarau) @holdenkarau (http://twitter.com/holdenkarau) is a software development engineer and is active in open source. She a co-author of Learning Spark & Fast Data Processing with Spark and has taught intro Spark workshops. Prior to IBM she worked on a variety of big data, search, and classification problems at Alpine, DataBricks, Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelors of Mathematics in Computer Science. Outside of computers she enjoys dancing & playing with fire.

Krishna Anisetty is a Manager/Architect of the Big Data team at Cars.com (http://cars.com/). In his current position at Cars.com (http://cars.com/), Krishna leads the teams to create solutions that leverage Hadoop technologies to solve Big Data and Machine learning problems. He graduated from Indian Institute of Technology with a Bachelors in Computer Science. Outside technology he loves traveling and visiting new places.

Sandeep Kandekar is a Senior Big Data Developer at Cars.com (http://cars.com/). He is currently focusing on big data, machine learning, and algorithms. He holds a Master of Science degree in Applied Computer Science, and is an active member of ACM, UPE. Outside software development, he enjoys painting, sculpting, and playing soccer with his two daughters.