Seattle Scalability Meetup: Moneyball & Spark

This meetup focuses on Scalability and technologies to enable handling large amounts of data: Hadoop, HBase, distributed NoSQL databases, and more!

There's not only a focus on technology, but also everything surrounding it including operations, management, business use cases, and more.

We've had great success in the past, and are growing quickly! Previous guests were from Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, Cloudant, Microsoft, 10gen/MongoDB, and more.

This month's guests:

Juliet Hougland, Cloudera

Moneyballing: Using Data to Win At Fantasy Football

Participants in fantasy football leagues manage teams by acquiring and trading players. Using predictive models based on historical data improves team selection and performance. In this talk we will use managing a fantasy football team as an example of how to integrate disparate data sources and make predictions based on complex event histories. We'll cover:

• Modeling data for building predictive models about individuals.

• Integrating disparate data sources.

• Applying portfolio optimization theory to player selection.

• Translating subjective knowledge of domain into a rigorous improvement of a predictive model.

Juliet recently joined Cloudera’s data science team. Juliet spent the last 3 years working on a variety of Big Data applications from e-commerce recommendations to predictive analytics for oil and gas pipelines. She holds an MS in Applied Mathematics from University of Colorado, Boulder and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College with a BA in Math-Physics.

Peter Brown-Hayes, TUNE

Solving MobileAppTracking with Spark and more.

I am currently a Lead Software Engineer working on the Data Flow team for the MobileAppTracking product at TUNE. This service is integrated with more than half of all the mobile applications in the iTunes store to date. Previously, I worked as a Software Engineer in the power industry before making the move to TUNE. In the power industry, I learned the importance of efficiency and data management. At TUNE we deal with new innovations and changes every day along with the technical debt of a start-up. The industry and even the market is still in it's adolescence, so drastic market changes and technical innovations trigger spur of the moment shifts and we have to be dynamic to adapt. I will be talking about some of the technical issues that TUNE has encountered as we've grown, and how we plan to solve some of our current problems with MapReduce and AWS using technologies like SPARK, SPARK Streaming, and Apache Kafka.

Our format is flexible: We usually have 2 speakers who talk for ~30 minutes each and then do Q+A plus discussion (about 45 minutes each talk) finish by 8:45.

There'll be beer afterwards, of course!

Meetup Location:

Whitepages (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1301+5th+Avenue+%231700%2C+Seattle%2C+WA), 1301 5th Avenue #1600, Seattle, WA

After-beer Location:

Doors open 30 minutes ahead of show-time. Please show up at least 15 minutes early out of respect for our first speaker.