ECL and Distributed Machine Learning with the HPCC Systems Platform

For our September meetup, we have Flavio Villanustre, Vice-President of Technology Architecture and Product at LexisNexis, giving an overview of their high-performance machine learning tools. LexisNexis will be raffling off a Kindle Fire!

Parking instructions and Directions

Turner is located at 1050 Techwood Drive, Atlanta, Georgia, 30318.

Enter Turner's campus through the Techwood Drive entrance. Park in the visitor parking area.

Register with security in the vistor's reception area and get badged.

Exit the main Turner building and walk North across the roundabout into the 1060 "Network Operations" building.

The "102 Windows" room is at the rear of the first floor, around the wall of television monitors.

Description

HPCC (High Performance Computing Cluster) Systems from LexisNexis is an open source massive parallel-processing computing platform that solves Big Data problems. Included in the platform is an extensible set of fully parallel Machine Learning and Matrix processing algorithms to assist with business intelligence; covering supervised and unsupervised learning, document and text analysis, statistics and probabilities, and general inductive inference related problems. ECL, the high level declarative data oriented programming language used with the HPCC Systems platform along with the associated Machine Learning toolkit, offer effortless linear scalability across entire clusters. A set of fully parallel linear algebra operations, written in ECL, provides extensibility, allowing for the quick implementation of new high level algorithms. Flavio will present an overview of the existing capabilities and algorithms of the HPCC Systems platform and ECL language and share our latest developments in distributed machine learning and how to leverage the most appropriate algorithms to quickly extract knowledge from big data to help make critical decisions. Open discussion to follow. Food and beverages will be provided. Attendees will have a chance to win a Kindle Fire following the presentation!

About the Speaker

Flavio Villanustre is the Vice-President of Technology Architecture and Product. In this position, Flavio is responsible for overall platform architecture strategy and new product development. Prior to 2001, Flavio served in a variety of roles at different companies including Infrastructure, Information Security and Information Technology. In addition to this, Villanustre has been involved with the Open source community for over 15 years through multiple initiatives. Some of these include founding the first Linux User Group in Buenos Aires (BALUG) in 1994, releasing several pieces of software under different Open source licenses, and evangelizing Open source to different audiences through conferences, training and education. He is a frequent speaker in the areas of data-intensive computing and machine learning, and has coauthored papers on parallel and data-intensive computing. In a prior life, Flavio was a neurosurgeon.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 – Welcome Reception / Meet & Greet (sponsored by LexisNexis)
7:00 - 7:05 - Introduction and announcements
7:05 - 8:20 – Presentation, Demo and Q&A
8:20 - 8:30 – Open discussion & Kindle Fire raffle