Grant’s Grunts: Lucene Edition

In case you haven’t heard, and are in Europe this June (or want to be), you should check out the Berlin Buzzwords conference.  It’s a great conference for all things related to Lucene, Solr, Hadoop, Mahout, NoSQL and generally scaling.  The CFP is open now through March 11.

Drew, Tom and I are feverishly working away on finishing up Taming Text.  We are currently in the process of addressing the feedback we got from our final review and should have updates up soon.  I have also posted all of the book’s source code up on Github under the Taming Text user.  The source includes, [...]

For those who have wanted other scoring models in Lucene/Solr (Okapi, others) more details can be found on Lucid’s blog: Lucid Imagination » Flexible ranking in Lucene 4.

Just ordered “R in Action” from Manning.  Looking forward to learning more about it, as it comes up often when discussing solving smaller problems that what is appropriate for Apache Mahout.  Hopefully, I will have time to post a review in the coming weeks.

After some time away, I’m happy to have had some time recently to work on Mahout again.  Lots of goodness all over the place happening there that I’ll leave to others to explain while I focus in on a few recent things I’ve been doing. First off, I was doing a fair amount of work [...]

The slides from my DC Hadoop meetup presentation are on SlideShare at: Intro to Mahout — DC Hadoop. I really enjoyed the meetup.  Lots of good questions and insights into machine learning.  For those at the meeting who were asking about references, check out Mahout’s references page, especially the Background Material section.

I’m on the hot seat for “Stump the Chump” this year at Lucene Revolution, so if you have questions you want me to tackle, please either show up at my talk or email them to info@lucenerevolution.org.  See Session Abstracts | Day 1 | www.lucenerevolution.org for more information.

Excellent post by fellow Mahout committer Sebastian Schelter on deploying a large scale recommender with Mahout: Deploying a massively scalable recommender system with Apache Mahout | “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”.

I just sent out to the mailing lists the official release announcements for Lucene and Solr 3.1.0 as well as posted over on the Lucid Imagination site the release announcement, etc. Lucid Imagination » Apache Lucene 3.1.0 and Apache Solr 3.1.0. Thanks to everyone for all their hard work in making these releases happen.

Finally back in the saddle from SXSW, where a good time was had by all, AFAICT.  It was my first time, so it was a bit overwhelming.  So many people, so much hype, so much to do and see.  Suffice it to say, most of the hype was about social media.  Can you say Bubble?  [...]