Flink London meetup - Strata + Hadoop special

Good news! With Strata+Hadoop (http://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/hadoop-big-data-eu) taking place in the same week, we have some influential names in big data attending our June meetup - and we have booked our venue to be right next door to Strata.

For those who don’t have the ticket yet, use the chance and get a 20% meetup group discount (use code USRG when booking).

We’ll start the talks 18:30 so arrive a bit earlier if you want some snacks.

--------------------------------- Guests ---------------------------------

Stephan Ewen

Stephan is a CTO at Data Artisans and one of the co-founders of Apache Flink. Before Flink, he has worked at Microsoft and IBM on large-scale data processing. Stephan holds a PhD in Computer Science from TU Berlin.

Stephan will drop by for a Q&A session and (if things work out) give an impromptu talk “Community Update and a look at some of the upcoming features”.

--------------------------------- Speakers ---------------------------------

Ellen Friedman

We are very lucky to have Ellen Friedman joining us from the USA. Ellen is an Apache committer (Flink, Drill, and Mahout) and a Big Data Consultant at MapR. She is also a scientist and author writing about numerous open source and big data topics (author of Mahout in Action (coauthor, Manning), the Practical Machine Learning series from O’Reilly, Time Series Databases (O’Reilly) just to name a few). Ellen holds a PhD in biochemistry and is an experienced researcher.

Abstract:

How the World Sees Flink: Building Community along with Code

At the heart of an open source project are the developers: If software were a beautiful old ship, the developers are the artisans who shape and carve the wood and deploy the sails. But it’s the users who put wind into the sails and send the project into motion. How, then, do the people who develop the code engage the attention of potential users so that the project comes to life?

In this non-technical presentation, I’ll talk about my contributions to the Apache Flink project as well as to other Apache projects including Drill and Mahout. We’ll see how projects evolve and discuss what participants can do to have a positive impact on the community and to influence the roadmap for development.

In addition we will examine the challenges faced by organizations as they embrace innovative technologies such as Apache Flink or try to make substantial changes in their way of using data. We can open the discussion to hear from the group about how they see Flink fitting in the overall big data space.

Ted Dunning

Ted is the vice president of Apache Incubator and the chief application architect at MapR. Being an active member of the open source community, he is a commiter and a PMC member of Mahout, ZooKeeper, and Drill projects at Apache. Ted is also a skilled data scientist (has developed algorithms for clustering, classification, matrix decomposition, estimation of extreme quantiles, and more) and author of multiple data analysis / big data textbooks (Real-World Hadoop and Practical Machine Learning series). Examples of Ted’s work are Yahoo Music (former MusicMatch), recommendation engine at Veoh, and fraud detection at ID Analytics. He has a PhD in computing science from the University of Sheffield.

Abstract:

What Happens Without Apache Flink

It is easy to forget just how much a framework like Flink is actually doing for you. Instead of demonstrating how good Flink is, I will go the other way and show you how bad it can be without Flink by walking through a simple web-spider application written in modern streaming style, but entirely without a high level framework like Flink.

By examining what goes wrong without Flink, you will be able to better understand how Flink makes things go right.

Kenneth Knowles

Kenneth is a founding committer of Apache Beam and one of the Software Engineers at Google who works on Google Cloud Dataflow (the backend of Beam). Prior to that, he built backends for startups, such as Cityspan, Inkling, and Dimagi. Kenneth is also an experienced mobile and cloud engineer, academic expert in logic and programming languages, and holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California.

Abstract: to be announced.