Mahout Machine Learning Fun
It’s been an interesting few months over in Mahout land. First off, I am psyched about the response the project has been getting. Seems like there is a pent up demand for large scale machine learning these days. I figured we would do all right in the early months, but I didn’t think we would have as many subscribers and participants as we do this early. Furthermore, the code contributions have started to come in and we had 15 or so applicants (for 2 or 3 spots) for our Google Summer of Code CFP.
Additionally, there were a fair number of inquiries about Mahout at ApacheCon EU and I got to meet Karl Wettin and Isabel Drost there (two Mahout committers). I went well over 3 years in Lucene Java land before meeting any of the other committers on Lucene.
Next, we added Jeff Eastman as a committer. Jeff has jumped in head first and is already helping out a lot.
Sean Owen has donated the Taste collaborative filtering project. We also made Sean a committer, and he is already contributing in other areas. We are still waiting to clear the legal hurdles here, but I think you will see Taste in the Mahout code base within the month.
Finally, it’s not official yet, but keep your eyes on Mahout for what should be another significant announcement of an NLP/ML project joining Mahout. I know, I know, I’m such a tease… 
