I'll be teaching two hands-on labs at Insight 2015 in Las Vegas: LCD-3459 Introduction to Data Science Data science is a very popular job profile and in great demand in a wide variety of industries. You no longer need a Ph.D. in mathematics or statistics to become a data scientist. Any data professional can upgrade … Continue reading Intro to #datascience and #spark at #ibminsight 2015

I'll be in San Francisco this weekend helping run the Apache Spark hackathon, and afterwards I'll be at Spark Summit 2015. If you're curious at all about Spark, you should come out and hack with us. We'll have some fun data sets and help you find a team. You can take the free Spark Fundamentals … Continue reading $10k! Spark hackathon in San Fran

My team will be supporting the Spark hackathon in Boston on May 28-30. This weekend's a good chance to teach yourself Spark. "Apache Spark is an open source processing engine built around speed, ease of use, and analytics. If you have large amounts of data that requires low latency processing that a typical Map Reduce … Continue reading $7,500! Spark hackathon in Boston May 28-30

My friends over at Big Data University just launched a refresh of their Apache Spark course. Spark is an engine for processing and mining large amounts of data quickly. The course takes advantage of a Docker image for Spark. Docker provides a way to run Spark on a typical laptop without getting a beefy server. … Continue reading Free Apache Spark course with Docker image

Tonight I attended a session about machine learning with Mahout at BNotions. The session was organized through the Toronto Hadoop User Group. Quick Notes BNotions uses Hadoop and Mahout for their Vu mobile app. Vu is a smart news reader that recommends articles based on article similarity to things you like as well as user … Continue reading Machine learning with Mahout and Hadoop session

I live-tweeted yesterday's New Features in Hadoop 2.0 session at the Toronto Hadoop User Group. I think it's a pretty good summary. If nothing else, it helped me absorb the information. Spoiler: The iPad raffle was won by yours truly. Hadoop 2.0 At the Hadoop 2.0 session ‪#TorontoHUG Got here just before they figured out … Continue reading New Features in Hadoop 2.0 summary

I'll be attending the New Features in Hadoop 2.0 - HA, FNN, HBase Coprocessors info session tonight. The session is being organized by the Toronto Hadoop User Group. It's at 7pm near King East and Parliament in Toronto. Feel free to say hello if you see me there. Cheers, Leons