A little while ago, I was delighted to present two introductory Mahout – Taste talks, at Lucene Eurocon and Berlin Buzzwords. I received quite a lot of good feedback about the presentations and have been asked by a few attendees to post them.
If you’re one of those attendees or you missed the presentation, you can download the slides here:
At Lucene Eurocon, the first European conference on Lucene and Solr there were interesting presentations, ranging from practical relevance to language analysis. For me it was fun to give a practical presentation about recommendations as a complementary feature to search applications. I hope you find the presentation useful if you’re trying to work out how to build a recommender – I used the movielens dataset as an example in the presentation and based the code on my earlier ‘getting started’ blog.
I also really enjoyed doing the Berlin Buzzwords presentation and meeting up with people from the Mahout community and other attendees. This conference focused mainly on NoSQL, scalability and Hadoop. However, from my talks with people there I sense that there’s growing interest in Mahout. You should find the presentation useful if you want to know more about different algorithms and how to evaluate them. I will blog about this topic in more detail soon.
Until then, I’d love to hear some feedback on what you think of the presentations!