News

Berlin Buzzwords 2017 – See you in 2018!

ekl — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:46:36 +0000

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Berlin Buzzwords 2017 is now over, and it was great! We have seen over 60 talks, welcomed more than 50 international speakers, had inspiring discusisons, met old friends and made new ones, gained valuable insights and enjoyed a great conference with amazing coffee!

We are very happy about this successful edition of #bbuzz and want to thank all speakers, attendees, volunteers, media partners and sponsors who all made Berlin Buzzwords 2017 possible.

Before we take a look back at three exciting days full of search, store, scale and stream, we want to ask you to help us make #bbuzz even better: Please take a minute to fill out our feedback survey.

On Sunday, Berlin Buzzwords kicked off with the most interactive part – the barcamp. Around 70 participants attended the first day of the event to exchange ideas and share knowledge. We had an excellent and educational afternoon learning on the subjects that mattered most to us all.

At the following two-day conference, more than 550 attendees visited Kulturbrauerei. Our speakers offered 35 hours of program on 4 stages. Besides the conference program, participants were invited to join hackathons and meetups in various locations all around Berlin.

Thanks to the team from WECAP, video recordings from all talks from stages 1 to 4 are uploaded to YouTube: If you missed a session you now have the opportunity to follow up on it at home. All videos have also been added to their corresponding session description on this website, along with the presentation slides.

You can find a collection of great photos of this year’s conference by our awesome photographer Gregor Fischer– on Skyfish or Facebook– check if maybe you will find yourself in one of them!

Last, but definitely not least, we would like to thank our sponsors, media partners, speakers, founders, program committee, workshop and barcamp organizer, volunteers, attendees, the video team as well as all members of Kulturbrauerei Berlin who were involved in the organization of Berlin Buzzwords for an inspiring time and for meeting old and new friends. See you at Berlin Buzzwords 2018!

Photo credit: cc-by-sa 3.0 Gregor Fischer/Berlin Buzzwords

Announcing summit on Open Source Governance

pbe_bbw — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 11:38:09 +0000

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We're happy to announce that in 2018 together with Isabel Drost-Fromm (Open Source Strategist at Europace AG, Member and former Director of the Apache Software Foundation, founder and PMC member of Apache Mahout) and Stefan Rudnitzki (Lead Developer at Europace AG, co-organizer of MongoDB usergroup Berlin and Async Cat Herding meetup Berlin) we'll be organizing a conference about governance, collaboration and community within the open source space. It will be covering the broad spectrum of community management, vendor neutrality and leading projects without discretionary power. Relevant conference topics include open source project leadership best practices, community management, open source project metrics, open source strategy for the enterprise, adopting open source collaboration in corporations, legal matters when dealing with open source.

The conference offers two days of talks and workshops and will take place in the same week and location as Berlin Buzzwords 2018. In autumn Europace will host a kickoff meetup at their offices in Berlin. Stay tuned for more information.

If you are interested in updates, please subsribe to our freshly set-up newsletter:

Program updates

ekl — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 06:51:45 +0000

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There have been a few changes in the conference program, and we would like to provide a quick overview to make it clear.

Gopi Krishnamurthy "Driving digital innovation at Bombardier Transportation through a modern approach to data analytics"

In this brand new session Gopi Krishnamurthy will showcase how you can stimulate digital innovation by using the power of self-service data preparation and analytics. The session is on Monday at 11:50 am at Maschinenhaus. Read more on the fascinating topic here.

Kevin LaPorte "Building a Vibrant Search Ecosystem at Bloomberg"

We are very excited to announce a new and very exciting session on buildng a seach infrastructure at Bloomberg! The session will take place on Monday at 5:20pm at Kesselhaus. You can read an abstract here.

Ivan Budincevic "Half a year of Measuring 2.0 in production at bol.com"

Ivan Budincevic will talk about the progress of Measuring 2.0, a measuring system introduced at Berlin Buzzwords last year, on Tuesday at 5pm at Maschinenhaus. You can read more about the session here.

The schedule on your #bbuzz app has been adjusted accordingly.

cc-by-sa 3.0 Gregor Fischer/Berlin Buzzwords

Rethinking Stream Processing with Apache Kafka: Applications vs. Clusters, Streams vs. Databases

nmu_bbw — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 09:36:48 +0000

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Modern businesses have data at their core, and this data is changing continuously. How can we harness this torrent of information in real-time? The answer is stream processing, and the technology that has since become the core platform for streaming data is Apache Kafka. Among the thousands of companies that use Kafka to transform and reshape their industries are the likes of Netflix, Uber, PayPal, and AirBnB, but also established players such as Goldman Sachs, Cisco, and Oracle.

Unfortunately, today’s common architectures for real-time data processing at scale suffer from undue complexity: there are many technologies that need to be stitched and operated together, and each individual technology is often complex by itself. This has led to a strong discrepancy between how we, as engineers, would like to work in an ideal world vs. how we actually end up working in practice.

When we set out to design the stream processing API for Apache Kafka – the Kafka Streams API – a key motivation has been to rethink the solution space for stream processing. Here, our vision has been to move stream processing out of the big data niche and make it available as a mainstream application development model. For us, the key to executing this vision has been to radically simplify how users can process data at any scale – from small to medium and to very large use cases. And in fact, one of our mantras is that, as application developers, we want to “Build Applications, Not Infrastructure!”

Let us pick a common use case example and use it to juxtapose how you’d implement such a use case with previous technologies in the stream processing space and how you’d do so with Apache Kafka and its Streams API. Imagine our task were to, say, build a fraud detection application. Essentially what we would need to do here is rather simple. The input to our application would consist of two main sources:

1. A real-time stream of customer transactions.

2. A continuously updated table of “context” per customer, such as each customer’s payment history. Oftentimes the input data for keeping this table up-to-date is also being made available through Kafka.

Our application would join the information in the input stream and the input table and then make an informed decision whether a new customer transaction in the input stream should be flagged as fraudulent or not. For example, if the customer has never made a payment outside the EU, then suddenly seeing a payment for this customer that originated in Australia would be very suspicious and most probably indicate fraudulent activity.

Before the introduction of Kafka’s Streams API, a common architecture for the use case above would look somewhat like this: (1) to collect and store customer transactions as a real-time stream you’d use Kafka as the de-facto standard, (2) to process the input stream you’d deploy a (typically shared) cluster of one of the stream processing frameworks such as Apache Spark or Apache Storm, into which you’d submit a framework-specific “processing job” for your fraud detection use case, and (3) to maintain a table for looking up the latest customer payment histories you’d use a (typically shared) external database cluster such as Cassandra. Given this architecture, you’d implement a “processing job” that is specific to the stream processing framework that you picked, and then submit your job to the shared processing cluster. This job would read the stream of customer transactions from Kafka and, for each incoming customer transaction, perform a DB lookup over the network to the shared database cluster, and then make the decision “is this transaction fraudulent or not?”.

Figure 1: Example architecture for fraud detection without Kafka’s Streams API, where you need separate shared infrastructure for processing streams and tables.

Let’s take a step back here and ask ourselves: what are the upsides and downsides of this approach? At first sight, this architecture seems to satisfy our needs because we have covered all the essential requirements of our use case, haven’t we? However, there are actually a number of downsides to this approach, which I only briefly summarize here: (a) we are being forced to leverage three different pieces of technology in our architecture, even though use case seems to be rather simple (to join a stream and a table in order to make a decision based on the joined data); (b) the end-to-end SLA -- availability, latency, etc. -- of our use case depends on the combined SLAs of three different systems; (c) it is rather difficult for us when, moving forward, our business requirements change because we are required to carefully orchestrate how to change this rather complex architecture (e.g. when we need to upgrade the database); (d) also, when the processing cluster and/or the database cluster are being shared across teams in a company, everyone must co-exist peacefully in these shared environments so as not to step on each others’ toes. Also, we realize that we haven’t built a single, self-contained “fraud detection application” -- rather, it has been split and spread in small pieces across this architecture, some of which is run inside the processing cluster, some of which is in the database, and so on. So we must deal with (e) a significantly more challenging situation for operations and debugging. If, for example, there’s a sudden surge of end-to-end processing latency -- think: customer transactions suddenly take much longer to be fully processed -- where should we look? Did we make a mistake in our processing job? Did another team’s processing job impact ours? Were there network issues that impacted our processing job talking to our remote database, and so on. And finally, we realize that (f) developing and testing all this is rather difficult and time-consuming for us because, for instance, how would we replicate our production environment on our local development machines in an easy way?

As mentioned in the very beginning of this article, the Apache Kafka community felt that there should be a better way for implementing use cases such as the fraud detection example above. A stream processing technology should be part of the solution, and not become part of the problem you are struggling to solve. In comparison to all the existing stream processing technologies out there, Kafka’s Streams API opts for something very unique: it provides you with a Java library that you can use in standard Java or Scala applications (rather than framework-specific “jobs” that you submit to a processing cluster). And, by building on top of the rock-solid Kafka foundation, the Streams API “enriches” your applications so that they become elastic, highly scalable, fault-tolerant, stateful (if needed), and distributed. For example, you can containerize your application with Docker and then deploy your application with Kubernetes in the cloud or on-premises. Also, if you need to scale out your application (e.g. you need more computing capacity to process an increasing volume of incoming data), you simply start additional containers. If we need to scale down, we stop a few containers. All this can be done during live operations without causing downtime. This is very important because, in many cases, Kafka users are powering mission-critical products and services with their applications: here, you don’t want to take down your business because your stream processing technologies requires you to fully stop and restart your processing jobs in order to add or remove capacity. (Imagine a car mechanic told you to hold your breath until your car’s engine has been fixed.)

Going back to our fraud detection example, what would this use case look like when implemented with Kafka’s Streams API? We only need one piece of technology, and that is Apache Kafka. We can build a single, self-contained application that implements the use case end-to-end. The Kafka Streams API ships with first-class support for the two core abstractions that you need for stream processing: streams and tables. And as it turns out, there is a close relationship between streams and tables, which we call the stream-table duality. Our application reads incoming customer transactions into a so-called KStream, and it maintains a continuously updated table of customer payment histories via a KTable.

Figure 2: Example architecture for fraud detection with Kafka’s Streams API. You have now a self-contained fraud detection application that is a standard Java or Scala application, and you no longer need additional infrastructure. Thanks to the Kafka Streams API, your application can process both streams and tables easily for operations such as joins, aggregations, and windowing. Also, the application is fully fault-tolerant to prevent data loss and is also elastically scalable to process millions of customer transactions per second.

Joining the KStream and the KTable works on locally available data, thus eliminating the need for remote DB lookups over the network plus, ultimately in this use case, the need for the external database altogether. Likewise, we no longer need a separate processing cluster, because our application is fully scalable and elastic and is capable of processing millions of customer transactions per second. Everything that our application requires for its functioning is now fully under its own, exclusive control. This means we have addressed the downsides of (a) having to stitch together many different technologies, (b) ending up with a lower end-to-end SLA as a result of having to combine the respective SLAs of these different technologies, (c) high friction when needing to change or adapt our architecture, and (d) the intertwining of different teams, roadmaps, and priorities across the organization above. Also, we can now develop, test, and deploy our application much more easily, thereby also addressing the aforementioned (e) difficulties for operations and debugging and (f) challenges to achieve quick development and testing cycles. For instance, going back to our example of using Docker or a similar container technology, we can spin up development and test environments in a matter of seconds. If you want to try this out for yourself, I have recently blogged about the Confluent Kafka Music demo application, which demonstrates this with Docker and Confluent Docker images for Kafka.

If you have read up to this point, then you certainly have quite a few questions. If we can believe the above is true, how does all of this work? How can we build “normal” applications and still perform event-time processing with joins, aggregations, windowing, transparently handle late-arriving data, and much more? So, if I sparked your interest, then I’d invite you to join my Berlin Buzzwords talk Rethinking Stream Processing with Apache Kafka: Applications vs. Clusters, Streams vs. Databases on June 13, 2017 at 11:50 in room “Maschinenhaus”.

Also, if you want to learn more about Kafka’s Streams API, I’d recommend to read the Confluent Kafka Streams API documentation as well as the Kafka Streams API documentation on the Apache Kafka website. If you want to give it a try yourself, take a look at our Kafka Streams examples and demo applications, and notably our Docker-based Kafka Streams tutorial. And download Confluent Open Source.

About the author:

Michael Noll is a product manager at Confluent, the company founded by the creators of Apache Kafka. Previously Michael was the technical lead of the Big Data platform of .COM/.NET DNS operator Verisign, where he grew the Hadoop, Kafka, and Storm based infrastructure from zero to petabyte-sized production clusters spanning multiple data centers – one of the largest Big Data infrastructures operated from Europe at the time. He is a known tech blogger in the Big Data community (www.michael-noll.com) and serves as a technical reviewer for publishers such as Manning in his spare time. Michael has a Ph.D. in computer science and is an experienced speaker, having presented at international conferences such as ACM SIGIR, Web Science, and ApacheCon.

The data that unites us is stronger than the job roles that divide us

nmu_bbw — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 18:41:49 +0000

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It is often said that the world is not changing, but this is not true when it comes to data. The fact is, it has already changed.

From the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms to the biggest enterprises in the world, all have massive ‘data labs’ or data analytics expertise. They employ sophisticated technology that supports the people they hire to look at their data in a new way for new gains in efficiency, customer insights, and ultimately, profitability.

Beyond the biggest enterprise though, data analytics allows almost any worker, in any sized firm to become a discoverer of marginal profitability for the enterprise.

Why? Because the only people who will truly find the right insights within business data, are the business ‘doers’ who understand that data, the context from which it was extracted, and the ways in which insights need to be shaped and shared with the business, with users, and with customers and the public.

Alteryx is part of this. We help all types of business, from the major consulting firms, large enterprises, and even small businesses, citizen scientists and journalists to gain analytic insights from their data so that they can use their own intelligence to interrogate large and varied data sets – quicker, and with faster time to insights versus time spent ‘munging’, prepping and cleaning data.

The attendees like you at Berlin BUZZWORDS are part of this new world, already using modern tools, and working in new ways, but also suffering from the pains from older ways of working, too.

There are many legacy processes, tools, platforms – and mind-sets – to overcome before we take the world with us and become a really inquisitive, data-based community of people. But it will happen – because we live in an age of ubiquitous data, democratically-designed tools, and the cultural awareness that it’s not always the strongest or the biggest, it’s the smartest that survive to thrive. We know this. Humankind has always highly prised intelligence – that’s why we root for Odysseus, not the Cyclopes, or Reineke, or Rattenfänger von Hameln – even when we shouldn’t!

Data is really becoming something accessible to all and there are some powerful platforms that everyone can use to ask the kinds of questions from their data that they could not, even a year ago. That’s why we say it’s a new world – every year the world we grew up in recedes further as we become separated from it by new data tools, methods of inquiry, and types. Last year was not our world, and next year will be a new one again. The one constant is the spirit of inquiry, discovery and knowledge that the tools of yesterday, or needing to code, of having to ask IT departments for help in running reports – those are not the ways of our world, now.

All sorts of people and businesses are using their data to answer challenging and worthwhile questions. You don’t need to work for a big business to get the right tools to interrogate your own business data. It’s about the thrill of discovery, it’s about working smarter and getting to the good parts of the job, and spending less time ‘munging’. And it’s open to all.

Simply stated, Alteryx aims to put tools into the hands of analysts so that they can consciously and meaningfully play with data, and have more fun with their job whilst delivering greater success.

There’s no reason that every worker can’t own the tools for democratising profitability across the enterprise – because the power is not in what you know, it’s in what you can share in order to make impactful changes to the business – and how quickly you can make those insights become action.

Download link http://pages.alteryx.com/Frei-Versuch-Deutsch-W.html

cc-by-sa 3.0 Thomas Wegner/Berlin Buzzwords

About the author:

Tom Becker is the Senior Director of Alteryx DACH.

Design Patterns for Calculating User Profiles in Real Time

nmu_bbw — Mon, 29 May 2017 08:40:44 +0000

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Knowing your users’ preferences and behavior could help in optimizing the user’s E-journey by improving search relevancy and presenting relevant products. One way to leverage those preferences is to calculate a passive user profile based on the user’s interactions such as ad views and searches.

At mobile.de, Germany's largest online vehicle marketplace, the user profile contains preferences for vehicle attributes, such as color, price, and mileage. These are represented as likelihood distributions, that allow us to infer how likely a user will e.g. view or “favourite” cars with certain features. The user profile is calculated and updated constantly in real time in order to reflect the user actions on his E-journey almost immediately. The challenges in designing such system are big and I would like to share some of the possible tradeoffs.

In a nutshell, updating user profile in real time is actually a stateful stream processing system in which the state is the user profile, the state key could be the user ID, and the state update operation can be simple as counter increment or an average/variance update.

One of the most important choices in the design of such a system, and the main focus of that blog, is how to store the stream state?

There are basically two major options, local storage and an external (global to the workers) storage. Most of the stream processing frameworks are designed to process stream of events in a distributed fashion by starting multiple workers (executers) on multiple nodes. Each worker processes a subset of the events and could store a fraction of the stream state inside an embedded data storage which could be accessed only by that worker.

Typical choices of local storage could be a simple in memory key-value data structure such as dictionary or an embedded key-value data storage. The stream state can be then queried by exposing a REST endpoint on each worker. The main benefits of using local storage for state management are the needless to maintain an external data storage, and extremely low latencies while updating and querying the state, resulting from data locality and the lake of network bottlenecks typical to external storage. On the other hand, scaling out the local storage to fit an increasing state size can be quite challenging, as the local storage bounded to the available space on the node “hosting” the worker. Recovering from failures could be quite slow in the case of a really large state and in some cases it might even produce duplications (for example by reading from Kafka same messages again since those were not committed due to the failure). One more important point to consider is whether the state must be always queryable even in the case of worker failure. If that is one of the main business requirements, then it is better to avoid the local storage option since any failure of a specific worker would cause to a subset of the state to be unavailable.

The second option for storing the state is an external storage. Some of the popular choices here are Cassandra and Hbase. External storage has the advantage of more resiliency to failures, stronger high-availability, and a more robust recovery mechanism. Additionally, it can be scaled out and adjusted much better to handle an increasing requests rate (querying the state) and growing state size. Furthermore, guaranteeing that the state is always queryable could be achieved by simply deploying a REST service on top of the external storage. In case some of the stream processing workers are down, the state would be still queryable via the REST service. On the other hand, updating and querying stream state in an external storage would introduce higher latencies, mostly resulting from network bottlenecks, in addition to possible race conditions scenarios which are the price of the external storage being accessible by all the workers at the same time.

Race conditions in a distributed system can lead easily to an incorrect state as illustrated in the following example: worker-1 is processing an ad view event of user X with a blue car and exactly at the same time worker-2 is processing another ad view event also of user X but with a red car. The current state (user profile) in the external storage for user X is {color-blue: 2 views}. The sequence of operation, performed by each worker, would be then as following: read the current state of user X from the external storage, then apply the state update operation (simple counter increment) locally, and finally write the new state back to the external storage. Eventually worker-1 would try to write {color-blue: 3 views} whereas worker-2 {color-blue: 2 views, color-red: 1 views}. Which of the writes would win the race isn’t deterministic and either way the final state for user X would be incorrect.
How to escape those race conditions scenarios is an interesting topic by itself, however a deep dive into that topic is already beyond the scope of this blog.

One thing though that is worth to mention is that there are two major approaches for the possible workarounds. Either to design the stream processing system in a way that all the events of a specific user would be processed always sequentially by a single worker, either to have a complete change of mind and design the system as a stateless one by persisting to the external storage only the state delta changes.

At mobile.de we calculate user profiles on a daily base, and we store each daily user profile for a period of 60 days. The main motivation behind that decision is to allow us provide the various stakeholders with a possibility to decide based on how many days they need the user profile, and as well the option to apply different decay functions on the profile days in order to boost more recent data. We generate each day approximately 2 million user profiles and each profile have 20 dimensions (profile dimensions are based on car attributes and could be for example price and color). In order to get a specific profile dimension, the following key combination, which is also the state key, is used: (user ID, date, dimension).

2M (daily profiles) * 20 (profile dimensions) * 60 (days) = 2.4 Billion keys, which is quite a big state. The requirements that we had for the user-profile product were quite clear:

The user profile should be always served even if the stream processing system, which updates the user profiles in real-time, is down. We prefer to serve not the most updated user profile rather than not serving it at all.

The serving layer must be able to scale out with the increase in the requests rate.
The state storage must be able to scale out and grow with the increase in the state size.
Additional CPU intensive calculations and transformations are required as one step before serving the final user profile result.

The user profile need to be updated “just-in-time”, meaning that even if there are some latencies and the user profile is updated with some delay, for example 30 seconds after that the corresponding user interaction event triggered, it is completely tolerable.
All that made our mind to store the stream state in an external storage. We have selected Cassandra as the external storage and Akka-http to implement the REST service on top of it.

To conclude, choosing how to store the stream state is one of the most important choices in the design of a stateful stream processing system. The right choice should be made only after thoughtful review of the technical pros and cons of each possible option and more importantly after deeply analyzing and understanding the business requirements.

Photo: cc-by-sa 3.0 Gregor Fischer

About the author

Igor Mazor is a Senior Data Engineer at mobile.de, Germany's largest online vehicle marketplace. Since joining the company in 2016, he has been pioneering the implementation of scalable micro-services around data products. Igor’s current focus is on designing and building a real-time infrastructure that can support millions of users per day.

Berlin Buzzwords Program Highlights

ekl — Mon, 29 May 2017 07:27:01 +0000

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This year Berlin Buzzwords features multiple talks on storing, processing, streaming and searchability of large amounts of digital data, ranging from beginner-friendly sessions to in-depth technical presentations. For everyone who is at Berlin Buzzwords for the first time, you can find our highlights below, but you'd better take your time to check out the full conference agenda:

Heather van Cura: 10 Ways to Ally For Women in Technology

Not your usual Buzzwords topic, we‘re delighted to welcome Heather vanCura who speaks about diversity in workplaces and outlines the positive influence it causes!

Heather VanCura leads the JCP Program at Oracle, and is a leader of the global community driven adoption and user group programs. Heather drives the efforts to transform the JCP program and broaden participation and diversity in the tech community. ...more info

Grant Ingersoll: BM 25 is so yesterday

Grant is the Co-founder and CTO of Lucidworks and a long-term companion of Berlin Buzzwords. Besides that, he is an active member of the Lucene community – a Lucene and Solr committer, co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine learning project, and a long standing member of the Apache Software Foundation. More info on Grant can be found in his speaker profile.

In his talk, Grant is going to review the best practices in reverance tuning and provide details on how to use techniques like learning to rank and query intent classification to improve results, with examples in Apache Solr.

Ellen Friedman: The Shape of Revolutions: What Makes a Difference?

Ellen Friedman is a solutions consultant, speaker and author, currently writing mainly about big data topics. She is a committer for the Apache Drill and Apache Mahout projects. With a PhD in Biochemistry, she has years of experience as a research scientist.

In her session, Ellen will share her thoughts on the revolution happening in data processing and usage, in particularily pertaining to the streaming technologies. Learn more about Ellen Friedman and her talk here.

Ted Dunning: Update on the t-digest: Finding the Faults in Real Data

Ted is the VP of Incubator at Apache Software foundation as well as member of the Board of Directors at Apache and mentor on many recent projects. Ted is the Chief Application Architect at MapR Technologies and previously was the chief architect behind the MusicMatch (now Yahoo Music) and Veoh recommendation systems.

Ted will explain the algorithms behind the t-digest with practical examples to provide insights into system measurement programs. More about Ted Dunning and his upcoming session.

Stephan Ewen: Exepriences running Flink at a very large Scale

Stephan Ewen is Apache Flink committer and co-founder and CTO of data Artisans. Before founding data Artisans, Stephan was leading the development of Flink since the early days of the project. His #bbuzz talk this year will focus on his personal experience running Flink stream processing applications for very large scale. More information on Stephan Ewen here.

Trevor Grant/ Andrew Weiner: Weekend Project: Real-World Airbnb Data Science and Pricing Bot

Trevor Grant is PMC Member on the Apache Mahout project, and contributor on Apache Streams (incubating), Apache Zeppelin, and Apache Flink projects. By day he is an Open Source Technical Evangelist at IBM. ...more info

Andrew Weiner studied Philosophy at Carleton College in Minnesota, which naturally led to a job in fixed income derivatives on Wall Street. …more info

In their hands-on workshop Trevor and Andrew will present interesting highlights of a personal project involding AirBnB API. The speakers will show how to collect data from the API and present a collection of examples of how AI tools and algorithms can be used to extract value from the data.

And of course, we are very thrilled about our Keynotes. The conference kicks of on Monday, June 12 with Karen Sandler and her talk on Free and Open Software Today, followed on Tuesday by Duncan Ross and his talk on Bridging the gap between data sceptics and data evangelists:

Karen Sandler: Free and Open Software Today

Duncan Ross: Bridging the gap between data sceptics and data evangelists

cc-by-sa 3.0 Thomas Wegner/Berlin Buzzwords

Hackathons and Meetups

ekl — Mon, 29 May 2017 07:22:33 +0000

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On and around Berlin Buzzwords we have organized meetups and hackathons for you to get involved, make things happen and work on high quality and deep technical content. Besides the annual Barcamp on Sunday we offer attendees the possibility to participate in meetups, workshops and hackathons for an intense and focused insight into their favorite topics. They are organized by meetup groups as well as local companies. Berlin Buzzwords participants can attend for free after they successfully registered to the conference. Please, bear in mind that some events require special registration due to the limited number of participants!

Below is the summary of all hackathons and meetups in chronological order:

June 11: amazon Alexa bootcamp

This will be a hands-on session and will include coding. If attendees have a Dot or Echo, they should please bring it with them. Amazon will also have Mark Bate as experienced solution architect from the Amazon Alexa team.

WHEN & WHERE: Palais Kulturbrauerei (Galerie), Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin from 6pm to appr. 9pm
REGISTRATION: please sign up here: http://www.cvent.com/d/25qsc2

June 13: Rethinking Stream Processing with Apache Kafka

Join Confluent for an Apache Kafka meetup in Berlin on June 13th from 5:45pm. Our guest speaker Michael Noll will be talking about Rethinking Stream Processing with Apache Kafka: Applications vs. Clusters, Streams vs. Databases. The details can be found below. See you there!

WHEN & WHERE: @ Deloitte Analytics Insitute(top floor), Hohenzollerndamm 150-151, 14199 Berlin (map) from 5:45pm to 7:45 pm
REGISTRATION: please, sign up here and feel free to check out the meetup page

June 13: plista X Berlin Buzzwords workshop: Create your own chatbot!

plista will be a part of this year's Berlin Buzzwords Conference! They will be hosting a workshop on Chatbots in their mensa. plista uses Chatbots for data democratization and small tasks. Parallel to the Berlin Buzzwords conference, which is about storing, processing, streaming and searchability of large amounts of digital data, plista would like to share their passion with you.

WHEN & WHERE: @ plista GmbH, Torstr. 33-35, 10119 Berlin (map) from 6:30pm onwards
REGISTRATION: please, sign up here - plista X Berlin Buzzwords Workshop

June 14: Apache Flink Meetup

Join the Apache Flink Meetup for an evening of pizza, beer, and the latest and greatest on Apache Flink® at their host idealo.

7:00 pm Pizza, Beer, Networking

7:30 pm Introduction by idealo

7:40 pm Stateful Stream Processing with Apache Flink – Tzu-Li (Gordon) Tai, data Artisans

8:30 pm An introduction to Apache Beam via Nexmark, a benchmark suite for batch and streaming systems – Ismaël Mejía, Talend

WHEN & WHERE: @idealo Internet GmbH, Ritterstr. 11, 10969 Berlin (map)
REGISTRATION: you can register here and find out who else is attending

June 14: MICES Mix-Camp E-commerce Search

MICES is a one day event on E-Commerce Search. The goal of the event is to bring together participants of different backgrounds (IT, product managers, UX designers, search managers, information retrieval specialists, search technology vendors, etc.) to discuss challenges, ideas, best practices and case studies in the e-commerce search domain.

WHEN & WHERE: MICES will be hosted by myToys, Potsdamer Straße 192, 10783 Berlin (map) from 8:30pm onwards
REGISTRATION: you can register here

June 15: Document-oriented Data design with RavenDB

Document-Oriented NoSQL databases have great potential to provide flexibility, scalability and performance for their users. The first step to fulfill this potential is building the "foundation" - planning the way we would store data in a very different database from the
traditional SQL.

WHEN & WHERE: rent24 GmbH, Potsdamer Straße 182, 10783 Berlin (map), from 10am to 6pm
REGISTRATION: please, sign up via e-mail here: mku@newthinking.de

Photo: cc-by-sa 3.0 Gregor Fischer

Download our Berlin Buzzwords event app!

lisa_bbw — Thu, 18 May 2017 14:00:27 +0000

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Prepare yourselves and download our great new app with programme, speakers, partners, exhibitors. Compile your own schedule and don‘t miss a talk! Set up your profile and let others know you are coming. Share your opinion with other attendees and highlight those talks and speakers you liked best.

Miss anything on the app? Do not hesitate to let us know. Contact Daniel: dka@newthinking.de

Download on Google Play

Download on iTunes

Find your way to #bbuzz

lisa_bbw — Thu, 04 May 2017 12:11:14 +0000

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Once again we’ve partnered up with Deutsche Bahn to give you the opportunity to travel to Berlin fast, at a reasonable price and environmentally friendly. All attendees of Berlin Buzzwords 2017 can travel hassel-free from any DB railway station in Germany at a fixed rate.

If you specified a certain day and time, train tickets can be purchased at 99 € (2nd Class) or 159 € (1st Class). Flexible tickets cost 139 € (2nd Class) or 199 € (1st Class)*. Seat reservation is not included in the price. The ticket is an outbound and return ticket, single journeys are available at half price. Special ticket prices for international travel are available on request. For further questions you can reach the DB hotline at +49 (0) 1806 / 31 11 53 quoting the keyword “newthinking”**.

Acting today for tomorrow and get your ticket now. Make sure you check out this “green” travel alternative to Berlin and we hope to see you at #bbuzz!

Simply click on the link below to place your order.

*An exchange or refund of the ticket is possible until the first day of validity for an according fee. An exchange or refund is excluded after the first day of validity. Tickets are sold as long as the stocks last.

** The hotline is available from Monday to Saturday 07:00 am to 10:00 pm. Calls will be charged at 20 cents per call, from mobiles 60 cents per call at maximum.

Photo: Deutsche Bahn AG / Axel Hartmann

The schedule is online!

nmu_bbw — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 13:31:28 +0000

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Only six weeks to go until the eighth edition of Berlin Buzzwords kicks off. To get you prepared, we have published our schedule so you can already look at our fantastic speakers and choose which topics you would like to hear more about.
You can browse through this years‘ vast choice of sessions, how about streaming with Flink, modern techniques in search relevance, handling billions of Edges in a graph database, or wonder what rename() does? You can also get some hands-on experience in one of our workshops.

With more than 60 excellent speakers this year we cannot wait for June to come.
The full schedule can be found here. And, to keep latency as low as possible, we have got our own Berlin Buzzwords app for you which you can download NOW for free in the Google Play store and on iTunes. The app allows you to create your own timetable to make sure you make the most of your individual Buzzwords experience.

Photo: cc-by-sa 3.0 by Philipp Kaden

Volunteering for Berlin Buzzwords 2017

nsc_bbw — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 16:05:48 +0000

Berlin Buzzwords volunteers

Join the Berlin Buzzwords team and become a volunteer to make our Big Data Open Source conference a huge success. Volunteering is a great way to be a vital part of the conference and barcamp. You will get the opportunity to network while getting a behind-the-scenes look. And the best is: You get a full conference ticket for free!

About 20 volunteers will be responsible for various conference duties such as accreditation and stage management. You will help to create a memorable Buzzwords atmosphere for more than 600 attendees, speakers and fellow volunteers.

What do you need to do?

We’ve got several volunteering options – every shift omprises 8 hours or 2 x 4 hours (2 days), the available positions are the following:

Construction/Dismantling
Barcamp
Accreditation
Stage Manager

What are the benefits of volunteering at Berlin Buzzwords?

a free ticket for the whole conference
free food and drinks
a Berlin Buzzwords 2017 t-shirt
and our eternal gratitude!

You want to be involved in the organization of this year's #bbuzz? Send an email to: volunteer@berlinbuzzwords.de

Thank you for your commitment, we are all looking forward to welcoming you as a team member!

Keep up with the latest Berlin Buzzwords news and follow us via social media on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Xing or subscribe to our newsletter.

Photo: cc-by-sa 3.0 by Thomas Wegner

Duncan Ross at #bbuzz: Bridging the gap between data sceptics and data evangelists

pbe_bbw — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 11:43:24 +0000

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We are happy to announce our second keynote for Berlin Buzzwords 2017: Duncan Ross!

Duncan is the Chair of Trustees of DataKind UK, a not for profit that hopes to improve the entire not for profit sector by helping them make the most of the big data revolution. They do this by encouraging volunteer data scientists to work for not for profits through short and longer term engagements. This work has covered a huge range of organisations, most recently looking at how to use open government data to track the beneficial owners of companies.

Duncan himself has been a data miner since the mid 1990s. He currently leads the Data Science team at Times Higher Education, where he is responsible both for the creation of the World University Rankings, and also for building out data products to support universities in their development journey. Prior to this he worked as Director of Data Science at Teradata, where he developed analytical solutions across a number of industries, including warranty and root cause analysis in manufacturing, and social network analysis in telecommunications.

In his spare time Duncan has been a city councillor, chair of a national children's charity, founder of an award winning farmers' market, and a member of the UK Government's Open Data User Group.

In his keynote speech Duncan will focus on the ethical challenges to using data. Currently the gap between data evangelists on one hand, and data sceptics on the other is growing: Can this gap be bridged? How can we build a coherent and constructive argument for the positive use of data science in the world?

Welcome to #bbuzz, Duncan – Looking forward to your keynote!

Photo: cc-by 2.0 techmsg

Announcing Keynote Speaker Karen M. Sandler

ekl — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 08:51:59 +0000

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We are thrilled to announce Karen M. Sandler as the first keynote speaker for the 2017 edition of Berlin Buzzwords!

Karen is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that provides home for free and open source software projects, such as git, samba, QEMU, selenium, inkscape and more. Karen is a professional lawyer and is known for her advocacy for free software, particularly in relation to the software on medical devices. Prior to joining Conservancy, Karen served as an executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center.

Karen co-organizes Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program to draw more women and people of color into Free and Open source software. In addition to her work at the Software Freedom Conservancy, she is also a pro bono counsel to the FSF and GNOME. Karen is a recipient of the O’Reilly Open Source Award and co-host of the oggcast ''Free as in Freedom''.

In her keynote speech Karen will focus on Free and Open Source software today. Viewed in a broader social construct, is free software a movement or should it be? Using free software means making a political and social choice. However, that is not always a choice that is available for everyone. Karen analyzes the role of free software and questions if it is just a convenience for the privileged or an essentiality.

We are very happy to welcome Karen on board!

Photo: Karen M. Sandler

Call for Submissions open now

pbe_bbw — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 08:58:54 +0000

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Speakers and speakers-to-be: Prepare yourselves for the Call For Submissions of Berlin Buzzwords 2017! It'll be open from December 12, 2016 until February 14, 2017!

We look forward to numerous abstracts on varied topics around your thoughts, ideas, researches with a focus on large Data Processing, NoSQL, IR/Search or related topics. Our program committee will rate each submission and the best ones will be invited to talk. Please find some more advice on the how / what / where and when in our FAQ section.

It's your first submission for Berlin Buzzwords? We are happy to receive your session idea. Please register at our website and take part in our Call for Submissions!

You have already registered for a previous #bbuzz? Great! You just need to update your account. Log in with your username and password here!

Newbies welcome!

As we are aiming to be inclusive, we would like to encourage everyone to submit, the more varied and diverse, the better. So please find some additional tips to get you writing. Do not hesitate, we all needed to start at one point.

All presentations must be noncommercial. Product-related submissions will be rejected
Pick a catchy title
Avoid beginning with, “In this talk I'll…”, or “In this talk you'll learn…”. Instead, start with a sentence that connects directly with the paper’s title. A rhetorical question, or an interesting industry data point is also a good way to commence your session abstract
Be thorough and provide sufficient information to be able to rate your entry. But don't be too detailed. Keep your abstract short and concise
Pick a topic that excites you and that you care about: your enthusiasm will also inspire the audience
Choose a relevant and original subject. Participants want to see new presentations on innovative applications, actual use cases and best practices
Ask a colleague if the topic sounds like something they would want to see at a conference

Your benefits:

A well-written proposal serves as your free entry to Berlin Buzzword and ensures you free accommodation during the conference for two nights in the amazing city Berlin
It also opens up doors for making your work visible and for establishing connections with other committers in your field of interest
Writing an abstract leads you to think about your work in different ways and regard it from different angles
After your talk you will have a professionally recorded video of your presentation

We can't wait to see your proposals!

Photo: cc-by-sa 2.0 Gregor Fischer | Arrow: cc-by-sa 3.0 Nick Pagano | Font "Comili": SIL Open Font License 1.1 Camille Bissuel

Childcare at Berlin Buzzwords 2017!

pbe_bbw — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 11:31:35 +0000

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We want to make Berlin Buzzwords more family-friendly, so we decided to offer onsite childcare this year on both conference days.
We will hire professionally trained tutors to take care of your children in a separate and specially equipped room at the venue or, if conditons allow, nearby outdoor playgrounds.

Requirements:

One parent or guardian must be registered at the Berlin Buzzwords 2016.
Your child needs to be at least 18 months old and maximum 12 years old.
Childcare registration closes 8 weeks prior to Berlin Buzzwords, i.e. deadline is April 18th, 2017!
The price for a children's ticket is EUR 99 and valid for both conference days (June 12th & 13th), including meals.
Childcare tickets are limited to 10 seats on a first-come first-served basis.

In case you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask – just send us an email: info@berlinbuzzwords.de

Please note: Generally children are free of charge, so you can of course bring your children without buying childcare tickets. You'll only need a children's ticket if you want to use the childcare services provided.

Foto: cc-by-sa 3.0 Gregor Fischer

Ticket sale for #bbuzz 2017 has started!

pbe_bbw — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 14:26:16 +0000

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The ticket sale for the 8th edition of Berlin Buzzwords has begun. As per usual, we offer a limited number of 'Trust Us' tickets for €425,- available to purchase only until November, 20th (first come first served!). In addition to that, there are reduced tickets for €150,- offered to pupils, students, people on social welfare, handicapped people and retirees. Please, make sure to present valid documents at the registration.

All tickets grant access to barcamp and two conference days as well as Wi-Fi, food, snacks and drinks throughout the conference. You are welcomed to join hackathons and meetups taking place all over the city, organized by Berlin Buzzwords and partners.

Hurry up and secure a discounted ticket here.

Photo: cc-by-sa 3.0 Thomas Wegner

Getting started for Berlin Buzzwords 2017

nmu_bbw — Thu, 20 Oct 2016 13:38:33 +0000

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We're excited to announce the dates for Berlin Buzzwords 2017!

From June 11-13, 2017 we celebrate the 8th edition of one of Europe's most exciting Big Data conferences! Once more Berlin Buzzwords takes place at Kulturbrauerei in the very heart of Berlin. The venue remains the same, but apart from that, we have made some exciting new changes for you:

Alongside the well-known Search-Store-Scale headers, a new track has been added: Stream. Data streaming proved to be a very popular topic at Berlin Buzzwords 2016, so we have decided to award it with its own track in 2017.

Besides that, we are happy to welcome a new member in the program committee – Fran Bennett. Fran is a data scientist, and the CEO and co-founder of the agile big data specialists Mastodon C. Check out her profile for more information!

Last but not least, Tickets are already on sale! You can buy your Trust Us ticket here. They're limited and only available until November 20, 2016! So be quick and buy now!

Photo: cc-by-sa 3.0 Thomas Wegner

#bbuzz 2016 - It's a wrap

dbe — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 14:19:59 +0000

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Berlin Buzzwords 2016 is over and it was awesome! We hope you have seen interesting sessions, had inspiring discussions, met old friends and made new ones, gained exciting insights and enjoyed the lovely weather in Berlin. The bbuzz team is happy about this successful event and wants to thank all speakers, attendees, volunteers, media partners and sponsors who all made Berlin Buzzwords 2016 possible. Before we take a look back at three exciting days full of search, store, scale and machine learning we want to ask you to help us make #bbuzz even better: Please take a minute to fill out our feedback survey.

Berlin Buzzwords kicked off with the most interactive part – the barcamp. More than 100 participants attended the first day of the event and shared their knowledge with the crowd.

"Despite the temptations offered by the glorious weather, a large group of Buzzwords attendees once again showed up a day early for the BarCamp. The hot topics, much as with the main conference, were search, containers and machine learning. By drawing on the knowledge of everyone in the room, we had an excellent and educational afternoon learning more on the subjects that mattered most to us all!" – barcamp organizer Nick Burch

At the following two-day conference more than 550 attendees visited Kulturbrauerei. Over 50 international speakers offered 35 hours of program on 4 stages. Furthermore participants were invited to join hackathons and meetups in various locations all around Berlin and even Hamburg.

Thanks to the team from WECAP, video recordings from all talks from stages 1 to 4 are uploaded to YouTube: If you missed a session you now have the possibility to check it out at home on your couch – perfect for binge watching in case your're not interested in the UEFA EURO 2016. All videos have also been added to their corresponding session description on this website, along with the presentation slides.

On Flickr you can find a collection of great photos of this year’s conference by our photographer Thomas Wegner – please take a look!

Last, but definitely not least we would like to thank our sponsors, media partners, speakers, founders, program committee, workshop and barcamp organizer, volunteers, attendees, the video team as well as all members of Kulturbrauerei Berlin who were involved in the organization of Berlin Buzzwords for an inspiring time and for meeting old and new friends. See you at Berlin Buzzwords 2017!

Community & Commercialization: How to Build an Open Source Company in 2016

dbe — Sat, 28 May 2016 09:56:53 +0000

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There are a lot of companies today that proudly wear the open source badge to show their dedication to various open source projects, particular communities, or to just the idea of open source licensing. Many companies have gone Red Hat’s initial route and created a revenue model based on support and services for open source projects. That was the initial path of Lucidworks, too. We offered support and consulting contracts for customers who wanted to take advantage of the benefits of open source software but didn’t want to have to rummage around in mailing lists or discussion forums trying to get help troubleshooting. And we did fine building a robust support, services, and consulting business. But eventually we learned that this approach wouldn't scale the way we wanted it to in terms of time, staffing, or revenue. There had to be a different way.

We’d been building Apache Solr-based apps for several years for clients in a variety of industries for a variety of use cases. We noticed that there were a lot of common capabilities that open source Solr lacks out of the gate but that nearly every dev team went on to spend weeks or months recreating. What if we could offer a complete platform for building search apps that had all of those problems already solved – all the code QA’ed and tested and ready for deployment? That’s why we went on to create our Fusion platform. Fusion lets developers leap over several month’s worth of development time and resources by providing the common capabilities all search apps need. With Fusion, teams can focus their energy and budget where it matters - in building out the capabilities and features specific to their organization or business needs. We debuted the platform in fall of 2014 and opened up a new revenue stream for the company.

The revenue for our platform is based on a recurring license so we’re able to build revenue over time with more and more licenses. We are still very much dedicated to open source Solr – and increasingly Apache Spark – as the foundation of our platform for building data apps. We’ve avoided commercializing fundamental features with broad cross-industry appeal such as security and monitoring, as taking these features out of the hands of the open source community can potentially threaten the integrity of the project. We understand that Apache Solr thrives because of its community and contributions from organizations all over the world. At the same time, we can offer a commercial solution that saves a dev team 3 months and several thousands of dollars to simply get an app up and running.

We still offer support, training, and consulting for our customers, but the addition of our platform gives us more variety in revenue streams allowing upward growth and sustainability as an open source company. We retain an obligation to the community to give back to the projects that have been so crucial to our success, which is why we employ 1/3 of the Apache Solr committers who continue to work on open source Solr and we host the community’s annual conference. This dedication to community and giving back is of paramount importance to us. Without a community, you don’t have an open source project. It’s a careful balance, creating value from a project that is owned and created by a community, while still giving value back that benefits everyone in the community.

Bio:
Will Hayes is CEO of Lucidworks, a San Francisco-based enterprise search company. Lucidworks provides the search platform for the world's biggest brands, built on the open-core, open-source search project Apache Solr. Previously, Will worked at big-data analysis company Splunk and biotech firm Genentech.

Twitter handle: @iamwillhayes

Prepare for Berlin Buzzwords 2016

dbe — Fri, 27 May 2016 11:00:59 +0000

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Maybe you've been to #bbuzz before, maybe it's your first time that you're attending the event. Either way we are happy that you're part of it and prepared some helpful information for you to make the three days as smooth and successful as possible:

What to do before the conference kicks off?

Plan your conference schedule. It frees up your time on site so that you can move quickly to the sessions you are interested in. You can find the timetable online. Moreover you will find a printed program in your conference bag that will be handed out at the registration.
Dress code is casual and comfortable. Make sure to wear comfortable shoes as you can expect to walk throughout the day.
Bring your business cards, you will meet people that you want to have contact with after the conference.
Have empty space available in your luggage to be able to bring back some giveaways and gifts provided by our sponsors and media partners.
Don't forget: Berlin is a big city and you will need some time to get from A to B. Check all important information about the venue and how to get there here.

Barcamp information

Registration starts on Sunday, June 5, at 1 pm at Frannz Club. You'll find the entrance at the corner Schönhauser Allee and Sredzkistraße (see sitemap attached below)
The barcamp itself starts at 2 pm - hosted by Nick Burch
Do you want to hold a presentation at the barcamp? That's great. But please make sure to bring your own laptop and an adapter for your MacBook (if necessary)
Food and drinks are not included during the barcamp. But don't worry, the bar at Frannz will be open and there is a fair for children and families at the whole Kulturbraurei area on Sunday with lots of food stands.
Find more barcamp information here.

Conference information

Check-in location for the conference will be Maschinenhaus (see sitemap attached below). Here you will pick up your name badge, conference bag and wristband that serves as your ticket
Check in early - the earlier, the better! The registration opens on Monday, June 6, at 8 am and on Tuesday, June 7, at 8.30 am. Fresh coffee and a delicious breakfast will wait for you at Palais.
You can store your coat and luggage at the wardrobe in Maschinenhaus
The Welcome Speech and the keynotes on Monday and Tuesday morning will be at Kino (see sitemap attached below)
After the first coffee break all sessions take place at Kesselhaus, Maschinenhaus, Frannz Club and Frannz Salon
During the two days of conference Berlin Buzzwords provides free food as well as free coffee, tea, water, juices and soft drinks
Documentation: all sessions will be recorded and will be published online after the conference. Furthermore there will be a photographer on site
Our sponsors will use lead scanners at their booths. There is a QR code on your badge that provides the following information: name, company, job position, email address and Twitter handle. In case you're not feeling comfortable with this, please let the booth staff know.
Last but not least: Berlin Buzzwords provides free WiFi!

What to do after the conference?

Please take a minute and fill out our evaluation we'll publish after #bbuzz
Visit our website to download the slides of the talks and check out the pictures and videos of Berlin Buzzwords 2016

Join the Meetups and Hackathons!

dbe — Fri, 13 May 2016 09:55:53 +0000

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After two days of Berlin Buzzwords conference, it's time to get involved, make things happen and work on high quality and deep technical content. Besides the annual barcamp on Sunday we offer attendees the possibility of visiting meetups, workshops and hackathons for an intense and focused insight into their favorite topics. They are organized by meetup groups as well as local companies. Berlin Buzzwords attendees are free to go to any of these after successful registration.

Below is a summary of all hackathons and meetups in chronological order:

June 6

FutureTDM Knowledge cafe - 6 pm @ Maschinenhaus at KulturBrauerei

FutureTDM is a European Commission funded project to identify current barriers to text and data mining (TDM) in Europe. Content mining techniques lie at the heart of data-driven research and innovation. Yet, as identified by the European Commission, the practice is currently underused by EU researchers. Let's talk about it!

June 7

Meetup @ idealo - Experiences with state-of-the-art open source Big Data frameworks - 7 pm @ idealo

idealo and Berlin Buzzwords are offering an evening on experiences with state-of-the-art open source Big Data frameworks.

June 8

Apache Flink Hackathon by Berlin Buzzwords - 10 am @ Hubraum Kitchen

data Artisans invites participants of Berlin Buzzwords who are interested in stream processing and Apache Flink to join the Apache Flink Hackathon.

Running buzzwords in production - 6 pm @ plista

plista invites all Buzzwords Conference participants (and all others) to join for beer, pizza and talks on Mesos, Marathon, Spark and NiFi

Search Technology Meetup VI - 6.30 pm @ codecentric (Hamburg)

Join the sixth edition of the Search Technology Meetup Hamburg for pizza, drinks and great talks on search technology topics

Inside Berlin Buzzwords: an Interview with Carlos Baquero Moreno

nsc_bbw — Fri, 13 May 2016 09:55:53 +0000

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Today we are introducing to you Carlos Baquero Moreno, who is an Assistant Professor and teaches Distributed Systems at Universidade do Minho, Portugal. In our expert to expert interview our program committee member Steve Loughran – a member of technical staff at Hortonworks, where he works on leading-edge developments within the Hadoop ecosystem – wants to know why we should care about causality.

Steve Loughran: Hi Carlos, we really appreciate that you take the time to talk with us. What is your talk about, and why should people attend?
Carlos Baquero Moreno: My talk is on causality. I have been studying it since late 1970s focusing on small clusters, co-ordination and problems. Causality is the tool developed. Now we are building bigger systems, we are finding problems with stronger co-ordination. Global systems have different latency and reliability and larger in scale (# of machines) and spread across the world. These things create problems - bigger ones. People are starting to rediscover the work and use it — but without understanding the fundamentals.
A colleague and I have just published a paper in the Communications of the ACM ("Why logical clocks are easy"); an introductory article to explain the concept of Causality. This talk is to go with the paper

What is causality and why should I care?
People assume that there is a "universal time", but see "there is no now" to show that's not true. We show that even if there was a now, it's not always relevant. What is relevant is how things arrive rather than when they happen. It's better to have a notion of causality rather than rely on a universal time that doesn't quite exist.

Where do you see the area of technology you work in going in the next few years?
I'd like to see all these parts of cloud, develop towards working offline, once there's no connection.
There was work done in the 80s-90s ton coping with offline-ness, but our phone apps nowadays assume they will always be connected.
Even though connectivity will improve, it's not always that hard to handle failures. Your app can be designed to handle it. Classic example: Central failure of something like google or AWS is a SPOF for phone apps.
Edge+ IoT generates a lot of info; today we are thinking "I'm just going to ship this to the datacenter", but in future it may change, and it doesn't make much sense today. People follow the easy routes. Example: I can't open the garage door to my car or turn my lights on when the network is down.

Having looked at the other talks — what do you hope to learn from the conference yourself?
I have never attended Buzzwords before, although I have seen some of the videos —and liked it. It's got a really good reputation. There was a talk a few years ago on replicated data types which first brought the conference to my attention.
There are lots of talks about stream processing; I hope to find out more about them. I am looking forward to talks from Flavio, Sam B. Alvo from twitter to hearing stuff you don't know. It's good to have a mix of subjects. I've been to other similar conferences and its good to have that mix.
It'll be my first time in Berlin, so I'll also be looking forward to discovering the city.

What are you most enjoying working on at the moment?
"Replicated Datatypes": more efficient ways to sync data across locations.

Emacs, vi or something else?
Mainly vi + gnu-vim. Latex, C++.

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us, Carlos! See you at Berlin Buzzwords 2016.

Inside Berlin Buzzwords: an Interview with Daniel Molnar

pbe_bbw — Fri, 13 May 2016 09:51:35 +0000

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Daniel Molnar and Steve Loughran met up for an interview! Daniel Molnar will be speaking at Berlin Buzzwords on Monday, June 6, 2016. He's a generalist in a tight-knit data team enabling data driven company culture and operations as a data janitor, data analyst and occasional data scientist. A perfect interview partner for our program committee member Steve Loughran who is a member of technical staff at Hortonworks, where he works on leading-edge developments within the Hadoop ecosystem, including service availability, cloud infrastructure integration, and emerging layers in the Hadoop stack.

Hi Daniel, thank you for taking some time for a short interview. We are very pleased to have you as a speaker at Berlin Buzzwords 2016. Your talk takes place on Monday, June 6. What is it about, and why should people attend?
Migrating a full data stack completely relying on AWS services (and a lots of them) to Microsoft Azure does not seem to be an enlightening and funny task. How we managed to do it with open sourcing tools as roadkills and what we learnt about the barebone necessities ending up within the sole body of a Raspberry Pi may shock the absolute believers of distributed computing. An adventure in bash, make and SQL with a detour in Moore's law and falling memory prices.

Why?
This is in production and we're happy with the benchmarks.

Why a raspberry pi?
The Commodore 64 of our times. A computing unit. It's good to see solving a problem with a Raspberry Pi instead of a Hadoop cluster.

How do you compare Azure to AWS? What do you miss from AWS? How much data do you keep in Azure?
It's a different beast. AWS is more ground up, its pieces are dumb as an axe, but it's working. Azure is everything MS ever did moved to the cloud plus more. As it arrived later, it offers more sophisticated tools. We're new to open source, so we made lots of roadkills on the way as open source tools.

Having looked at the other talks — what you hope to learn from the conference for yourself?
Benchmarks from real life. Simple solutions that work in production.

Probability and statistics are become core parts of big system applications. Where would somebody begin to learn (or re-learn) this branch of mathematics?
I am confused why most CS curriculum circles around calculus as we would be engineers building bridges while probability that should be taught to everybody is curiously missing most of the times. I recommend learning in context: Ben Goldacre 'Bad Science', Leonard Mlodinow 'The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' and Nassim Nicholas Taleb 'Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets'.

Where you see the area of technology you work in going in the next few years?
I'm hoping that we skip to the next part of the hype cycle and things can be more about solving real and important problems.

What are you most enjoying working on at the moment?
I'm writing a book titled 'The Data Janitor Handbook'. I have to make James Mickens proud of me.

Emacs, vi or something else?
I use pico/nano on remote machines since 1994. These days both Textmate and Sublime is in daily use.

Thank you, Daniel!

Don't miss Daniels talk on "Migrating a data stack from AWS to Azure (via Raspberry Pi)" on Monday, June 6, 2016 at 12.20 am @ Frannz Club, Kulturbrauerei.

Photo: What? CC BY-SA 2.0 Véronique Debord-Lazaro

Inside Berlin Buzzwords: an Interview with James Stanier

nsc_bbw — Fri, 13 May 2016 09:50:53 +0000

James Stanier

James Stanier and Steve Loughran teamed up for an interview! James Stanier will be speaking at Berlin Buzzwords on Monday, June 6, 2016. He's a VP Engineering, Product (Backend) at Brandwatch. He works on projects that try to analyse and make sense of large amounts of social media data. A perfect interview partner for our program committee member Steve Loughran who is a member of technical staff at Hortonworks, where he works on leading-edge developments within the Hadoop ecosystem, including service availability, cloud infrastructure integration, and emerging layers in the Hadoop stack. We believe that both are cycling enthuasiats.

Steve Loughran: Hi James, I am glad you got a minute. Tell me what is your talk about, and why should people attend it?
James Stanier: I will give an overview and some examples of probabilistic data structures, bloom filters, etc.. The coverage of these data structures usually scares people off because the maths seem too complicated. This is easier than people think, you can do some clever interesting stuff with not much memory and everyone will be really impressed. Therfore, I will give practical tips on how to go about these particular structures, how to influence heap usage, how to pick perfect timings and situations to use them, which particular libraries to use, etc.

Can you describe the uses of the technology you are covering?
I am going to dwell on real time filtering of lists, as well as on example filtering: e.g. twitter uses next to no memory. So I'll focus on cache optimisation.

Probability and statistics are becoming core parts of big system applications. Where would somebody begin to learn (or re-learn) this branch of mathematics?
Start with the problems, the tools and then look at the history behind them. For example, reading Lamport's papers from the 1980s is a lot easier when you can read something and then immediately go "hey, this is in Zookeeper!"

Where do you see the area of technology you are working in going in the next few years?
Tooling like spark & mllib make it easier to do ML on large datasets, improving things we can do in sentiment analysis + extensions, e.g. intent to purchase things, mood detection, people trying to detect when unusual things happen online. New techs will let you ramp up a knotch, now thinking of long term strategy, "store in HDFS forever".

What are you most enjoying working on at the moment?
I got some VC funding, so I am having a lot of fun hiring, building more stuff, managing a team.

Emacs, vi or something else?
I' m using emacs and latex for my PhD, but have always been using vi. Intellj is great for coding.

Why Bbuzz?
I think this is one of the best conferences, you can always find some good talks and it's free of nonsense. This is going to be my 4th time there, I first attended in 2012, and it‘s my second talk.

Having looked at the other talks — what do you hope to learn from the conference yourself?

Solr, — big Solr shop; Solr 6. I'm interested in Kafka Streams; Confluent spin off looks good, I would like to see where they are going. Apache Kudu looks promising as well.

Thank you, James!

Don't miss James talk on "Acceptably inaccurate: probabilistic data structures" on Monday, June 6, 2016 at 11 am @ Kesselhaus, Kulturbrauerei.

Photo: James Stanier at Postbahnhof CC BY-SA 2.0 by Gregor Fischer

Become a volunteer at Berlin Buzzwords 2016

nsc_bbw — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 12:59:08 +0000

Call for Volunteers

Joining the Berlin Buzzwords team as a volunteer means being an integral part of the conference and barcamp. You will help to create a memorable Buzzwords atmosphere for over 600 attendees, speakers and fellow volunteers.

It's a unique opportunity to participate in one of Germany's most exciting Big Data Open Source conferences. About 20 volunteers will be responsible for various conference duties such as accreditation and stage management.

Become a team member for one day!
As a volunteer you become involved in the organization of the event. You will gain insights from behind the scenes. In exchange for 8 hours of volunteering you will get a free ticket for the whole conference including food and drinks and a Berlin Buzzwords 2016 t-shirt - and of course our eternal gratitude! You want to be involved in the organization of this year's #bbuzz? Send an email to: volunteer@berlinbuzzwords.de

We are looking for volunteers in the following fields

Construction/Dismantling
Barcamp
Accreditation
Stage Manager
WIFI

Thank you for your commitment, we are all looking forward to welcoming you as a team member!

Keep up with the latest Berlin Buzzwords news and follow us via social media on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Xing or subscribe to our newsletter.

Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Gregor Fischer

Call for Submissions Flink Forward 2016

nsc_bbw — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 09:55:46 +0000

Flink Forward

Today Flink Forward has opened its Call for Submissions and started the ticket sale! The conference takes place September 12 – 14, 2016 at KulturBrauerei in Berlin. Flink Forward will bring together the open source stream processing community. Most Apache Flink committers will attend the conference, making it the ideal venue to learn more about the project and its roadmap and connect with the community.

The conference welcomes submissions on everything Flink-related, including experiences with using Flink, products based on Flink, technical talks on extending Flink, as well as connecting Flink with other open source or proprietary software.

All sessions will be reviewed by the Flink Forward program committee, and are 40 minutes in length. The call for submissions is open until June 30, 2016. To submit a session, please click here.

Tickets
Early Bird tickets are on sale now. Get your ticket here. Tickets are available for either the full three days or the talks only and include free WiFi, food, snacks and drinks throughout the conference.

Find more information about the Call for Submissions in their blogpost.

Picture: copyright www.prostream.de

Berlin Buzzwords on educational leave

dbe — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 14:45:23 +0000

educational leave

We are happy to announce that Berlin Buzzwords has been accepted as a learning event. Employees who are working for a Berlin-based company (or based in Rheinland-Pfalz) have the chance to request educational leave from their employer.

Requirements

Requirement for being able to apply for an educational leave is being employed in Berlin or Brandenburg respectively Rheinland-Pfalz. Well, having kind of a connection to the field of big data would be awesome as well :-)
Important: The job location is decisive and not your place of residence (e.g. you are living in Berlin but working in Cologne → unfortunately you cannot apply for an educational leave in this case!)

Application forms

In the bottom part of this page you can find a document called "bildungsveranstaltung_bescheid_berlin" and "bildungsveranstaltung_bescheid_rheinlandpfalz". You have to present the application form to your employer and you need a reference number from your employment or education authority. Check out the relevant link provided by the city of Berlin. More information on educational leave for the state of Brandenburg can be found here. Further information on educational leave for the state of Rheinland-Pfalz can be found here.

What's the next step?

With the application form you can refer to your employer. The application for exemption has to be handed in 4-6 weeks ahead of the event. You can download the example “beispielantrag_bildungsurlaub” below.

We will provide a registration confirmation with title, time period and the approval of the event format. After the conference, you will need a certificate of participation in order to propound to your employer. Please come to our accreditation counter at Berlin Buzzwords to register for the form.

In case of any open questions, please contact us at info(at)berlinbuzzwords.de.

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Berlin!

Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Gregor Fischer

Book your accommodation for Berlin Buzzwords 2016

nsc_bbw — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 17:07:27 +0000

berlin_skyline_hotel.jpg

Berlin offers many options for accommodation, so you're kind of spoilt for choice. To make it easy we made special arrangements for accommodation with 3 hotels in 3 different price categories.

Category 1: Fat Of The Land
Holiday Inn® Berlin City Center East Prenzlauer Allee

The modern 4-star hotel Holiday Inn® Berlin City Center East is located in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg with good connections to to Alexanderplatz and the Berlin television and all sights of Berlin. A few walking minutes away, you can reach the heart of East Berlin with its great shopping malls and sights. It is easily accessible by car or public transport. The conference location KulturBrauerei is only about 10 minutes away by public transport. Every room is furnished in a comfortable style, with soundproof windows, air-conditioning, cable television, internet connection, a mini bar and hair dryer, as well as tea and coffee making facilities. Free high speed WiFi is available throughout the hotel.

Single rooms are available at a rate of 82 € and double rooms at a rate of 92 €. Reservations can be made online, via phone +49 (0) 30 44661-0 or via email res@hi-berlin.com by using the booking code „Berlin Buzzwords“.

Holiday Inn® Berlin City Center East Prenzlauer Allee
Prenzlauer Allee 169
10409 Berlin
Tel.: +49 (0) 30 44661-0
Fax: +49 (0) 30 44661-661

Category 2: Decently priced and comfy
Hotel and guest house Kastanienhof

Featuring original works of art, rich breakfast buffets, and easy access to transport connections, this 3-star hotel in Berlin is on the Kastanienallee street, between the Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg districts. The Kastanienallee tram stop is just outside the Pension Kastanienhof. Alexanderplatz can be reached in 15 minutes by public transportation. The conference location KulturBrauerei as well as the the Underground station Senefelder Platz (U2) are only 9 minutes within walking distance. The traditional-style Hotel Pension Kastanienhof has spacious rooms and suites with flat-screen TVs and a modern bathroom. Each room offers free internet.

You can make a online reservations, by using the booking code “newthinking" you get a 10% discount.

Hotel Pension Kastanienhof
Kastanienallee 65
10119 Berlin

Category 3: The Penny Pinchers
MEININGER hostel

The MEININGER hostel is located in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district on Schönhauser Allee. The subway station Senefelderplatz (U2) is right outside the hotel, and from here you can catch the metro to all the main places: Alexanderplatz, Stadtmitte (city centre) with Friedrichstraße und Gendarmenmarkt, Potsdamer Platz, KaDeWe, the Olympic stadium etc. It is easily accessible by car or public transport. The conference location KulturBrauerei is only 8 minutes within walking distance. All modern bedrooms are non-smoking, and some have balconies and views of the Berlin skyline and TV tower. Free wireless internet access is available in the lobby and all public areas. Guests have free use of the safe and baggage room. The MEININGER hostel also has a bar, communal lounge and shared kitchen.

Get a 10% discount on regular room prices by making a telephone reservations using the booking code „Tech Konferenz“ +49 (0)30 98321074 or an email reservation welcome@meininger-hotels.com.

MEININGER Hotel
Schönhauser Allee 19,
10435 Berlin
Tel: +49 (0) 30 9832 1074

Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Ian Weddell

Open Call for Hackathons, workshops & meet-ups at Berlin Buzzwords 2016

nsc_bbw — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 12:24:21 +0000

WS_Hackathon_bbuzz.jpg

Before and after the two days of conference, Berlin Buzzwords features every year an open series of free hackathons, workshops & meet-ups to strengthen the platform for developers, engineers, IT architects, analysts, data scientists and for an intense and focused insight into their favorite topics. We are looking for hosts and idea contributors for our annual events!

Why organizing a hackathon, workshop or meet-up?
You want to establish your local group or company, be a community mobilizer and build relationships which last long after the event. Hackathons, workshops and meet-ups are community driven events and can play an important role to found a stable network. #bbuzz events offer a forum to meet, discuss, connect and inspire attendees in a collaborative, participative and open atmosphere.

Areas of interest

Apache Flink
Hadoop
Spark
Elasticsearch
and many more

Become part of Berlin Buzzwords 2016!

You already have a complete event planned with an idea, room and you've got your team?
You are interested in providing space for a hackathon or workshop?
You have an idea and a team, but no room? – We are happy to connect you with our partners.

In all cases, get in contact with us, we're happy to promote your event. Write an email to info [at] berlinbuzzwords.de.

Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Gregor Fischer

Travel to #bbuzz by train

pbe_bbw — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 08:07:12 +0000

bahnbruecke_alexandersvenson_cc-by-2-0.jpg

Once again we’ve teamed up with Deutsche Bahn to give you the opportunity to travel to Berlin fast, at a reasonable price and environmentally friendly. All attendees of Berlin Buzzwords 2016 can travel from any DB railway station in Germany at a fixed rate.

Tickets are return tickets and are valid for two weeks starting from your first travel day.

If you specified a certain day and time, train tickets can be purchased at 99 € (2nd Class) or 159 € (1st Class).
Flexible tickets cost 139 € (2nd Class) or 199 € (1st Class).*
Seat reservation is not included in the price. Special ticket prices for international travel are available on request.

Simply click on the button below to place your order:

Photo: cc-by 2.0 Alexander Svenson

Speakers and Sessions are online

dbe — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 12:58:22 +0000

berlin_buzzwords.jpg

As Berlin Buzzwords 2016 gets closer, the conference program is starting to shape. We are proud to announce the first round of speakers and sessions: Browse the published sessions here and find all information on our speakers here.

This year's program is the most multifaceted and it’s full of interesting topics. There is a good amount of scale topics: Apache Kafka, Flink and Spark to name a few. Moreover, we have the search track which provides talks on Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch and machine learning. We are also looking forward to store sessions on Apache Parquet, Cassandra and NoSQL databases.

We have great talks that offer advances and improvements, e.g. Apache Lucene 6: What's coming next? by Uwe Schindler, while other speakers like Christoph Tavan will do a live coding sessions on Live-Hack: Analyzing 7 years of Buzzwords at Scale. Berlin Buzzwords 2016 also presents speakers who are new to the conference: Todd Lipcon describes Apache Kudu in his talk Apache Kudu (incubating): Fast Analytics on Fast Data and the fundamental problem of distributed consensus will be revisited in Flavio Junqueira's talk Towards consensus on distributed consensus.

Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Gregor Fischer

Neha Narkhede confirmed as keynote for Berlin Buzzwords

nsc_bbw — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 13:14:58 +0000

neha.jpg

We are very excited to announce Neha Narkhede as Berlin Buzzwords 2nd keynote speaker for the conference!

Neha Narkhede is co-founder and CTO at Confluent. Previously, she was responsible for LinkedIn’s petabyte scale streaming infrastructure supporting hundreds of billions of events per day. She is also one of the initial authors of Apache Kafka and serves as a PMC member and committer for the project. In the past she has worked on search within the database at Oracle and holds a Master degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Naha will talk about "Application development and data in the emerging world of stream processing"

For a long time, a substantial portion of data processing that companies did ran as big batch jobs -- CSV files dumped out of databases, log files collected at the end of the day etc. But businesses operate in real-time and the software they run is catching up. Rather than processing data only at the end of the day, why not react to it continuously as the data arrives? This is the emerging world of stream processing. But stream processing only becomes possible when the fundamental data capture is done in a streaming fashion; after all, you can’t process a daily batch of CSV dumps as a stream. This shift towards stream processing has driven the popularity of Apache Kafka. Making all the organization's data is available centrally as free-flowing streams enables a company's business logic to be represented as stream processing operations. Essentially, applications are stream processors in this new world of stream processing.
In her keynote, she will explain how the fundamental nature of application development will change as stream processing goes mainstream.

We are very happy to welcome Neha Narkhede and Diane Mueller-Klingspor on board!

Announcing Keynote Speaker Diane Mueller-Klingspor

dbe — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 11:50:07 +0000

Diane Mueller-Klingspor

We’re thrilled to announce one of the the keynote speakers for Berlin Buzzwords 2016: Diane Mueller-Klingspor.

Diane is a long-time Pythonista and Open Source advocate who ran away to university at the young age of 16 to study computer science when it was decidedly an uncool thing to do. She currently works as a Community Lead at Red Hat on their Kubernetes-based container application platform, OpenShift Origin. She is deeply involved in the Maker community, and is the founder of GetMakered Labs, a mobile makerspace collaboration to inspire and encourage kids of all ages to connect with new technologies.

In her keynote “Inspiring the Next Generation to Run Away and Join Our Software Circus” she describes how we can all create magical experiences that inspire and connect under-represented communities to new technologies. Producing sufficient numbers of graduates who are prepared for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations has become a national priority around the globe. We all have a responsibility to onboard, attract and enroll new entrants to STEM if you care about the future of open innovation. In this keynote, she will discuss how to combine connected learning principles to create and deliver new technology workshops to inspire and encourage under-represented and under-served communities.

9 tips for writing a successful submission

dbe — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 10:02:34 +0000

Tips for submissions

A goal of our conferences is to be inclusive to the largest number of submitters, with the most varied and diverse backgrounds possible. In order to encourage as many people as possible, we've prepared some tips for those of you who don't feel comfortable handing in a paper yet, but actually would like to go out with their knowledge.
If you are working on exciting topics and projects with a special focus on Large Data Processing, NoSQL, IR/Search or related topics - Berlin Buzzwords is open for your ideas. Anyone no matter if experienced or new to the stage is welcome to propose a session. The most exciting topics will complete the program:

first of all: all presentations must be noncommercial. Product-related submissions will be sorted out
have in mind that the first thing people see is the title of your talk. If you want to draw the reader's attention then you should come up with a catchy but also solid title
know your audience and what the topics of the conference are. Include keywords that attract the right people and that are in line with the main subjects of the conference
avoid beginning your session description with the phrase, “In this talk I'll…”, or “In this talk you'll learn…”. Instead use an initial sentence that connects directly with the paper’s title. A rhetorical question, or an interesting industry data point is also a good way to start your session abstract
be thorough and provide enough information to be able to judge your entry. But don't be too detailed. Keep your abstract short and concise
tell us one "story" that is part of the larger picture, so the readers know in which direction you'll be heading
pick a topic that excites you and that you care about: your enthusiasm will also inspire the audience
choose a relevant and original subject. Participants want to see new presentations on innovative applications, actual use cases and best practices
ask a colleague if the topic sounds like something they'd want to see at a conference

Why all this effort?

a well written proposal serves as your free entry to Berlin Buzzword and ensures you free accomodation during the conference for two nights in amazing Berlin
it also opens up doors for making your work visible and for establishing connections with other committers in your field of interest
by writing an abstract you'll think about your work in different ways and angles
after your talk you'll have a professionally recorded video of your presentation

We can't wait to see your proposals!

Photo: cc-by-sa 2.0 Gregor Fischer

Newly formed program committee!

nsc_bbw — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 14:28:36 +0000

isabell_simon.jpg

After six successful Berlin Buzzwords' we want to thank the founders Isabel, Jan and Simon for their ideas, contribution, time, support and most of all: thanks for inspiring us. We also would like to thank the long-standing members of the program committee: Jim Webber, Jonathan Ellis and Mike McCandless who enriched the committee with great advice and their expertise for many years. For this years' Berlin Buzzwords they won't be part of the program committee anymore. We would like to take the opportunity to introduce to you the new faces of Berlin Buzzwords. Please, warmly welcome:

Gary Dusbabek
An Apache Cassandra committer and PMC member, Gary Dusbabek is a life-long programmer specializing in distributed systems. Past experience includes working with large-scale text and image indexes in the newspaper industry and building a multi-data center distributed metrics and monitoring system for a large Cloud provider. Gary is the principal architect behind the open source Blueflood metrics platform and is currently building platforms for clients at Silicon Valley Data Science.

Tugdual Grall
He is a Technical Evangelist at MapR, an open source advocate and a passionate developer. He currently works with the European developer communities to ease MapR, Hadoop and NoSQL adoption. Before joining MapR, Tug was Technical Evangelist at MongoDB and Couchbase. Tug has also worked as CTO at eXo Plaform and JavaEE product manager, and software engineer at Oracle.
Tugdual is Co-Founder of the Nantes JUG (Java User Group) that holds since 2008 monthly meeting about Java ecosystem. He also writes a blog available at tgrall.github.io
Twitter/Github : @tgrall

Vasia Kalavri
She's a PhD candidate at KTH, Stockholm, doing research on distributed data processing, systems optimization, and large-scale graph analysis. She is a PMC member of Apache Flink and a core developer of Flink's graph processing API, Gelly. Vasia has a MSc in Distributed Computing from KTH, Stockholm and UPC, Barcelona, and a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from NTUA, Athens. She has previously worked as a teaching assistant at KTH, where she developed and taught training courses for engineers. She has also interned at Telefonica Research and worked as a web developer.

Georgi Knox
She's a back-end Engineer who works on the Platforms team at GitHub. Originally from Sydney, Georgi now lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her current nerd crush is on distributed systems and Go. When not geeking out she likes to loose convincingly in her shuffleboard league, drink single-origin flat whites and dress up her cats in costumes.

Ema Orhian
Ema is a passionate Big Data Engineer and Consultant contributing to open source projects. She is one of the co-founders of the Big Data Research Group, a group that provides open source solutions and proof of concepts in the Big Data area. Ema is actively involved in organizing technical events, speaker at local and international conferences and meetups.

Find all members of the program committee here.

Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Philipp Kaden

Take part in the Call for Submissions for #bbuzz

nsc_bbw — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 14:27:17 +0000

call_for_submissions.jpg

For the seventh year in a row Berlin Buzzwords provides a platform for Apache and also further Big Data Open Source committers, projects and technologies. Since we believe in collaboration, participation and exchange of ideas, we want to encourage all Big Data Open Source enthusiasts to submit a session on Large Data Processing, NoSQL, IR/Search or related topics. Share your knowledge, applications, use cases and best practices with the community and shape the program of Berlin Buzzwords 2016!

Submit your session on innovative technologies for storing, analysing and searching today's massive amounts of digital data.

It's your first submission for Berlin Buzzwords? We are happy to receive your session idea. Please register at our website and take part in our Call for Submissions!

You have already registered for a previous #bbuzz? Great! You just need to update your account. Log in with your username and password here! For further details please see below.

What topics are we looking for?
Berlin Buzzwords is looking for talks on:

Search / IR systems – Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch or comparable solutions
NoSQL – like Apache Cassandra, Flink, MongoDB, Hbase, CouchDB and others
Large Data Processing – Hadoop itself, MapReduce, Cascading etc.

Related topics not explicity listed above are welcome as well.

We listed all necessary information below. If you have further questions, take a look at our FAQs.

What do you get?
It's a geek to geek conference, but if we choose your session, you get to be the expert and answer questions from the audience. Besides entering the stage at #bbuzz, you get a free ticket for the conference, barcamp and satellite events taking place all over Berlin. As a speaker you will also get free accomodation during the conference for two nights (June 05-07) at RAMADA Hotel Berlin-Alexanderplatz.

When does the Call for Submissions end?
The Call for Submissions ends on February 7, 2016. Proposals submitted after this date or which reach us through other channels cannot be accepted.

How long are Berlin Buzzwords sessions?
We have 20 and 40 minute slots. You can let us know your preference in your proposal.

You have already registered for a previous #bbuzz?
Great! You just need to update your account. Log in here! Log in with your username and password. Please note, if you've forgotten your username or password, you can reset it. On the main page you see the note “Berlin Buzzwords 2016: subscribe to event”, click on it and you will be asked "Are you sure you want to join the group Berlin Buzzwords 2016?". Click “Join”. You will return to the main page, click now on "Dashboard" and go to "Add Session" in order to submit your new abstract.

How do we review the submissions?
There will be an anonymized review of all submissions. Members of the program committee will not see the name, photo, short bio and gender of the proposer to reduce unconscious bias.

Photos: cc-by-sa 2.0 Gregor Fischer

Ticket sale for #bbuzz 2016 has begun

dbe — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 13:27:31 +0000

Ticket sale.jpg

The ticket sale for the seventh edition of Berlin Buzzwords has started. Once again, we have a limited number of 'Trust Us Tickets' for €425,- while stock lasts. Furthermore we offer reduced tickets for €150,- for pupils, students, people on social welfare, retirees and people with disabilities. Just make sure to present valid documents at the registration.

All tickets are valid for the full three days and include free WiFi, food, snacks and drinks throughout the two conference days on Monday and Thursday. You can also join the barcamp on Sunday and meetups & hackathons taking place all over Berlin hosted by Berlin Buzzwords and local companies.

Hurry up! The first 50 buyers get a #bbuzz t-shirt*. Order your reduced ticket here.

Photo: cc-by-sa 2.0 Gregor Fischer

* The t-shirt will be handed out at the conference in June.

Mark your calendar for Berlin Buzzwords 2016!

dbe — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 15:28:55 +0000

Bbuzz2016.jpg

Since today, we can officially announce, that Berlin Buzzwords 2016 will take place on June 5-7 at Kulturbrauerei Berlin.

We'd be happy to see all Big Data enthusiasts again next year, so please mark your calendar! The ticket sale and the call for submissions will probably start in December. If you want to keep up with the latest Berlin Buzzwords news follow us via Social Media on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Xing or subscribe to our newsletter.

For those who can't wait for Berlin Buzzwords 2016, we have a suggestion: we recommend you watch the video recordings from Berlin Buzzwords 2015 in this YouTube Playlist or click through some of the photos that we collected on Flickr. Then there's the possibility to have a look at the speaker' slides that can be found with each session via berlinbuzzwords.de/15/sessions.

Photo: cc-by-sa 2.0 Gregor Fischer

Not just another tweet!

nsc_bbw — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 12:18:06 +0000

Grumpy cat

We looked at the latest tweets and retweets by our speakers and found some funny pieces on open source, map reduce and SQL code! Enjoy our tweetroll:

this is indeed how most programs work on a multicore computer! pic.twitter.com/IvSpNdgGkO

— Özgür Akgün (@ozgurakgun) April 11, 2015

Linux pour garder son PC propre! pic.twitter.com/IqOTX5IGEl

— Ma Vie Linux (@Mavielinux) April 6, 2015

map reduce explained - thx Dave Chapell pic.twitter.com/05FUyJBL3w

— Tugdual Grall (@tgrall) October 11, 2014

Surprises you find when reading through the SQLite code. Somebody must've received a lot of calls. pic.twitter.com/1yTAvYLHMx

— Matthias Plappert (@mplappert) March 12, 2015

Here's a true gem. pic.twitter.com/83ow3BCmLS

— BigData GrumpyCat (@BigDataGrumpCat) July 25, 2014

Thank you!

pbe_bbw — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 14:04:41 +0000

abschluss_main.jpg

Once again Berlin Buzzwords lies behind us and once again we’ve enjoyed the great spirit of our speakers, attendees, volunteers, media partners and sponsors who all made Berlin Buzzwords possible. Before we take a look back at four exciting days full of search, store and scale we want to ask you to help us make #bbuzz even better: Please take a minute to fill out our feedback survey.

"Buzzwords is how I keep a finger on the pulse of Berlin and Berlin is key to figuring out where tech in Europe is going. Of all the places and events in Europe, coming to Buzzwords in Berlin is the one event that I consider indispensable." – Ted Dunning

Berlin Buzzwords kicked off with the most interactive part – the barcamp. More than 150 participants attended the first day of the event and shared their knowledge with the crowd. At the following two-day conference more than 600 attendees visited the Postbahnhof. Over 60 international speakers offered more than 30 hours of program in 50+ sessions on 4 stages. On the fourth and final day participants were invited to join hackathons and meetups in various locations all around the city.

Thanks to the team from WECAP, the video recordings from all talks from stages 1 to 3 were uploaded to YouTube quite promptly: If you missed a session you now have the possibility to watch it at home on your couch – perfect for binge watching on the next rainy weekend. All videos have also been added to their corresponding session description on this website, along with the presentation slides.

On Flickr you can find a collection of great photos of this year’s conference by our photographer Gregor Fischer – you should check them out!

Last, but definitely not least we would like to thank our sponsors, media partners, speakers, founders, program committee, workshop and barcamp organizer, volunteers, attendees, the video team, the catering, the architects and our event engineers as well as all members of Postbahnhof Berlin who were involved in the organization of Berlin Buzzwords for an inspiring time and for meeting old and new friends. See you at Berlin Buzzwords 2016!

Photos: cc-by-sa 2.0 Gregor Fischer

Time for #bbuzz binge watching!

dbe — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 11:09:15 +0000

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Since cloning humans is still not perfectly working we are happy to present you the videos of Berlin Buzzwords 2015. Watch all talks of stage 1 to 3 you've missed or you want to see again on our YouTube channel. Enjoy more than 21 hours of inspiring and exciting presentations from this year's conference.

Photo: cc-by-sa 2.0 Gregor Fischer

Closing Party and free side events

nsc_bbw — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 16:38:40 +0000

party_on.jpg

You listened to great speakers, learned about the latest developements in large scale computing and met quite a few people. Apart from the sessions, there is enough space and time for you to exchange ideas and experiences and meet new people!

Join our combined Berlin Buzzwords Closing Party and droidcon Berlin Opening on Tuesday June 2 at 6:30pm and meet interesting people not only from the field of Big Data, but also from Android Development. Grab some food or enjoy a free beer sponsored by the droidcon Berlin startup partner Badoo!

Our event partner Fingerfood also provides some great food for a little fee:

Thuringian rostbratwurst with country-style, french bread for 2,00 €
Lentil stew with cocnut, spring leek with coriander for 4,00 €
Tabouleh salad with cucumber, tomato and mint yoghurt optionally with falafel or spicy kofta for 4,50 €

There are also some events – sponsored by our partner – we would like to invite you to:

GameDuell TechTalk with Boaz Leskes

Elastic invites everybody to join the GameDuell TechTalk with their lead developer, Boaz Leskes on Wednesday, June 3. Boaz will cover the recent highlights and future plans of the company's resiliency strategy. He will explain all aspects of Elasticsearch, ranging from the lowest level of a single file, through network connection of a single node, and all the way up to distributed failures on the cluster level. Participants will get an interesting peek under the hood and learn about the inner workings of Elasticsearch. The GameDuell TechTalk will be wrapped up by a Q & A round, where two more Elasticsearch engineers, Adrien Grand and Ryan Ernst, will step in to answer questions ranging from architecture to practical use cases. Registration starts at 02:30 pm. Register for GameDuell TechTalk and find more information here.

Where?
GameDuell Event Lounge
Taubenstr. 24 - 25
10117 Berlin

Apache Flink Workshop

This full-day hands-on workshop on Apache Flink by data Artisans takes place on Wednesday, June 3. The workshop includes introductory tutorials and exercises for developers to get familiar with Apache Flink, and build Big Data applications using the platform. The workshop will start at 09:00 am sharp, the training finishes at 06 pm. We'll be going for a drink afterwards at Oscar Wilde. Register for Apache Flink Workshop here.

Where?
Google Office Berlin
Unter den Linden 14
10117 Berlin

Photo: cc-by-sa 3.0 Gregor Fischer

First impressions of #bbuzz 2015

pbe_bbw — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 11:56:49 +0000

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Berlin Buzzwords 2015 just started and we already collected first impressions of our audience, speakers and team. Find pictures of our keynote speaker Ludwine Probst, our barcamp organizer Nick Burch and our lovely head of project, Daniela Bentrup.

Find more photos on our flickr channel.

Photos: cc-by-sa 2.0 Gregor Fischer

Come along to the Barcamp today!

nsc_bbw — Sun, 31 May 2015 08:31:01 +0000

Ted Dunning

As you're hopefully all aware, this coming Monday is the first conference day of this year's Berlin Buzzwords! As most of you should know, we've also got a number of great events on either side of the main event, including some Hackathons and meetups. Our biggest side event though is the Berlin Buzzwords Barcamp, which takes place today!

For some of you, this will be your first Barcamp, and you might be a little aprehensive about what to expect. Before that, some all-important housekeeping information on this Sunday's event...

Where: Postbahnhof Berlin (Entrance: Fritzclub/ Postbahnhof)
Date: May 31, 2015 (the evening before Berlin Buzzwords)
When: 5.00 pm (registration starts 4.30 pm)
Who: Eligible are all attendees of Berlin Buzzwords
Registration: 4:30 pm
Registration: Please register for "Sunday Barcamp and Meetups only"

What is a Barcamp though? Barcamps are a kind of "un-conference", where the schedule isn't decided until the day, and is based on those who attend. Everyone is welcome, and everyone can participate in a variety of ways. They're not without structure though! They're dynamic events, focused on the overall Berlin Buzzwords event's topics, tackling the same challenges but in a different format. At the Barcamp, each session will run for 30 minutes, giving enough time to get into the meat of a topic, but without a chance for anyone to get bored... There are participator sessions, with everyone taking part, perhaps by leading the session, perhaps by giving some insights, perhaps by asking some great questions, or perhaps just by encouraging.

Our Barcamp kicks off with registration from 4.30pm, where you can register not only for the Barcamp, but also for the main conference too, letting you skip the queues on Monday morning and instead spend more time enjoying the delicious breakfast. Once we're all there, it's onto the introduction, explaining how we'll work, and reminding everyone of the main themes of the event, which are:

Beyond Hadoop v1: Mesos, Hadoop and Storm
Taking NoSQL into new areas
NoSQL in the real world - what to pick, how to cope when it breaks...
Logging, monitoring and managing at scale
Science in a grid-free Big Data World
ElasticSearch, SOLR and Lucene

Our sessions vary from beginner to uber-advanced, from developer to scientist to dev-ops to beginner to expert. We try to colour-code our schedule to help you find your right place. We'll be running at least two rooms, maybe more (weather permitting...), to hopefully ensure everyone has something of interest at all times.

The first order or our business is the all-important schedule. We all get together with giant post-it notes, and write down the sessions we want to talk on, along with those we'd wish someone else would cover! Armed with an uber-scientific scheme of shows of hands, we group related sessions, assign rooms, rope-in people to moderate or kick-off sessions, and generally agree which of our themes seem the most interesting for the evening. Once we have an agreement, we have our schedule, and talks can begin!

Our Barcamp sessions are deliberately participatory. We don't want a long lecture from one expert here - we've the main conference for that after all! Instead, we want to get groups of interested folks together, and have them share their experiences, their knowledge, their problems and their questions, so we all learn from each other. We start with a session topic and someone to lead it, and see where our interst takes us! Sometimes it's a great new thing, sometimes it's learning how to take an "old-hat" topic and make it work. Sometimes it's highly technical, sometimes it's how to explain it all to the confused business staff with the cheque books... Some sessions will use the projectors to show code, some to show ideas to kick things off, but many will just make it with a flipchart! We can't promise the SQL standards body debating query languages with CouchDB and Cassandra developers this year (sorry!), but with some luck we'll have a few firey sessions as good as that epic 2012 Barcamp delivered. Who knows, maybe in a few years, you'll be able to regale tales of watching a session as great as that one was!

So, this Sunday, make sure you get into Berlin early, and come along to the Barcamp! Bring your thinking cap, bring your problems, your solutions, your ideas, your challenges and your knowledge. We'll have people there new to the whole thing, and people who invented that system so new it doesn't even have install documentation, with everything in between! Curiosity is your friend, and we promise a great evening, or your money back ;-)

For those poor folks who can't make our Barcamp on Sunday, don't forget that on Monday registration opens at 8:30 am, there's breakfast available from 8:30 until 10:00, and our welcome session kicks off at 10:00 am. We'll look forward to seeing you the Postbahnhof then!

Photo: cc-by-sa 2.0 Philipp Kaden

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #16

pbe_bbw — Wed, 27 May 2015 13:33:29 +0000

speaker_16_bbuzz.png

Every week we are introducing new speakers which will be on stage at #bbuzz 2015. Thanks to our program committee we can present part of our new eclectic program. Presentations range from beginner friendly introductions on hot data analysis topics to in-depth technical presentations about scalable architectures. The conference presents more than 50 talks by international speakers specific to the three tags "search", "store" and "scale".

Application Performance Management with Open Source Tools

Tudor Golubenco & Monica Sarbu
Scale - 40 min

Monica is a core committer to the Packetbeat open source project and the CEO of the commercial entity behind this project. Before, she was a core developer for IPTEGO, a succesful Berlin-based startup. Tudor is also one of the core developers of Packetbeat. Prior, he was the CTO of IPTEGO and worked for Acme Packet and Oracle. He enjoys coding in Go, C, Python, Js and others.

The talk will demonstrate the methodology and usability of Elasticsearch as an event analytics engine, speaking about collecting performance metrics for the transaction amongst others and sharing tips for efficiently storing data. During the talk, the audience learns how Packetbeat, Yahoo Boomerang, Logstash, Elasticsearch, Kibana and Bonito work together for a complete application performance management solution that is more applicable and more flexible than commercial offerings.

Scale with NSQ: a realtime distributed messaging platform

Georgi Knox
Scale- 20 min

Georgi is an Aussie software engineer living and working in New York City. Next to writing lots of codes, she enjoys dressing up her cats in costumes. She currently works in Bitly's Application Engineering team. Working with the succesful Bitly's back-end engineeering team along the creators of NSQ is very existing to her.

Her talk will cover NSQ - an open source realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale and handle billions of messages per day. NSQ was built by the engineering team at Bitly and is being used by a wide range of companies today. Quesions regarding the origins and importance of NSQ will be answered during the talk. Drawing onreal-life scenarios experienced by Bitly, the ability of NSQ regarding availability, performance, latency, fault tolerance and scale will be discussed.

Speaker interview: Andrew Psaltis

pbe_bbw — Tue, 26 May 2015 09:45:55 +0000

apsaltis_bbuzz14_interview.jpg

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Andrew Psaltis.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
My name is Andrew Psaltis; I’m a data engineer, author, educator and entrepreneur focused on building and teaching others how to build large-scale data-intensive systems. I specialize in solving hard data problems and building real-time data pipelines utilizing Spark, Storm, Kafka, Solr, Hadoop, and many other tools. I’m deeply entrenched in Streaming Data, Big Data Analytics and obsessed with delivering insight at the speed of thought.

I am the author of Streaming Data by Manning, a Skillsoft speaker, and thoroughly enjoy speaking and teaching about technologies related to streaming and large scale data pipelines.
When I’m not working and writing, I love to spend time with my lovely wife and our two kids, coach U10 boy’s Lacrosse, take in as much Lacrosse as possible, bake (breads and pizza), hike, cycle, camp, and travel.

How did you get started developing software?
It seems like I have always been involved in software to some degree or another. However, it really got started for me when I was in grad school in the early 1990’s, pursuing a dual masters degrees in Biomechanics and Exercise Biochemistry. At the time the university could not afford the software to analyze our biomechanics research, so naturally we wrote it ourselves. At that moment I was hooked, I found my second love. However, it was not until the time that I saw friends that were completing their doctoral studies searching for and taking one of the few jobs in a remote location that I thought to myself – “You know I can continue my studies and be at the mercy of a job or I can follow this software passion and work anywhere I can speak the language”. As the saying goes, I made a left hand turn and never looked back.

What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk?
I hope to accomplish several things: First to help inspire others to look at Spark Streaming and second to peel back the covers and take a look at how Spark Streaming works.

What do you expect?
I expect for me to learn as much from the audience and others as they get from me – I truly believe teaching is a two way street – and to have an amazing experience and soak it all in.

What will your talk be about, exactly?
My talk will be about peeling back the covers on Spark Streaming and digging into how it works. The intent is that if people understand how it works then they will be better positioned to be able to build amazing solutions using it. If time permits I would love to show an IoE example using Spark Streaming.

Have you enjoyed previous Berlin Buzzwords editions?
This is my second Berlin Buzzwords, 2014 was my first. I had an amazing experience last year and am very excited to be going back again in 2015.

What was the first Apache project you got in touch with?
Lucene. I have used it fairly regularly since late 2001 / early 2002. I love it and the tools that have evolved on-top of and around it, such as Solr and ElasticSearch.

Many of the nowadays buzzwordly talks have come from the Apache Software Foundation. What do you think makes Apache projects so successful in particular for communities developing complex software?
I think it strikes this amazing balance of very hard working, smart, energetic people that are after a common goal and all work towards the betterment of something. I have tried, as I am sure others have to replicate this model inside of organizations, but the organization always gets in the way of itself.

Anything you are planning to hack on during Berlin Buzzwords?
I would love to be hacking on adding some IoE input to Spark Streaming – would be great to perhaps use a watch, or some other device out in the wild to pull data in.

Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
I plan on being there everyday and participating, hopefully it will not be hard to track me down. I am reachable on twitter @itmdata and via linked in.

Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
Last year was the first time I visited Berlin and my time was too rushed, there was so much I wanted to see. This year my family is traveling with me and we are arriving two days early to try and see things. I am sure we will only see a fraction of what we would like to see.

Photo: cc-by-sa 2.0 Philipp Kaden

Speaker Interview: Andrej Rosenheinrich

pbe_bbw — Mon, 25 May 2015 12:45:11 +0000

interview_aro.png

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Andrej Rosenheinrich.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
Softwaredeveloper, mainly working in a search context, elasticsearch enthusiast

How did you get started with developing software?
A friend of our family owned an Atari ST and showed me Asteroids back in the 80s. I instantly knew that I wanted to do something with a computer. So my father borrowed a KC 85-2 from the university, put me in front of it and gave me a BASIC manual. That day I wrote my first program: 10 PRINT "HALLO" 20 GOTO 10. It was awesome fun!

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
May be inspire a few people that elasticsearch is more than search and pointing out that preparing data in the right way is part of the game

Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
How elasticsearch features can be used to summarize news and how natural language processing can help here.

Have you enjoyed previous Berlin Buzzwords editions?
Yes, I visited BerlinBuzzwords in 2012 and really liked it! I won a ticket for last years BB at the elasticsearch meetup in Berlin (thanks again!), but missed it because my son was born. Best possible excuse, right?

Many of the nowadays buzzwordly talks have come from the Apache Software Foundation. What do you think makes Apache projects so successful in particular for communities developing complex software?
Its open source and written by people who work in the business every day. Its made for people like us by people like us. A perfect fit!

What was the first Apache project you got in touch with?
Tomcat, about 13 years ago.

What are the risks of going Apache?
Some projects are made by a few enthusiasts, one leaving can be a quite a big blow to it.

Anything you are planning to hack on during Berlin Buzzwords?
No, I will listen to all the talks and check out all the interesting stuff

What's your favourite beer?
I prefer black beer, either from Köstritzer or some beer from the Czech Republic.

Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
I really enjoy going to the elasticsearch meetup in Berlin. Learned lot of interesting stuff there.

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #15

pbe_bbw — Sun, 24 May 2015 13:31:14 +0000

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In-memory data pipeline and warehouse at scale using Spark, Spark SQL, Tachyon and Parquet

Ema Iancuta & Radu Chilom
Scale - 40 min

Radu is big data engineer at Atigeo, working on scalable applications in order to make big data matter. He contributed to ambitious open source projects and has been active supporting the big data community for a long time passionately. Most notable he was involved with the HackTm (400 people hackaton).

Ema is a software developer at Atigeo and main commiter of github. She is a passionate engineer, interested in scaling algorithms and implementing statistical models. Momently, she works on big-data analytics in healthcare apps. Moreover, she contributes to and organizes the Timisoara Big Data Meetup.

During the Talk, a live demo of building an in-memory data pipeline and data warehouse from a web console will be given. Amongst other things, Ema and Radu will tell you about architectural guidelines and design patterns meant to help you achieve optimal CPU/Memory for the utmost performance during large scale processing and interactive querying. Topics will be RDDs, shuffle, file consolidation, RDD persistence models (memory, disk, off-heap) serialization, Tachyon. Tips and tricks for maximizing performance and working around the weaknesses of these technologies will be shared.

Cassandra at Yammer

Michal Rutkowski
Store - 40 min

Michal is technical Architect/Tech Lead interested in delivering data driven solutions that scale.Since completing the PhD in theoretical computer science in the UK, he worked on delivering software solutions that are scalable and enable organisations to move fast. He was a technical architect for one of the game teams at Playfish, the London based EA game studio and now as a senior core services engineer at Yammer/Microsoft.

Amongst other things, Michal will share insight on the implementing of parts of the Yammer’s messaging pipeline from a custom storage solution backed by Java BDB to Cassandra. His speech will cover the following topics: modeling data and capacity supported by metrics, zero downtime production rollout. It will answer questions of how did things started falling apart after three months of seamless operation to continue with how developers coped with problems that occurred during the process of implementation.

Speaker interview: Tudor Golubenco

pbe_bbw — Sat, 23 May 2015 12:58:45 +0000

interview_tgo.png

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Tudor Golubenco.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I’m a software developer interested in computer networking, distributed systems, real-time, performance of all kinds and open source. I write code mostly in Go these days, but I also enjoy C, Python, Javascript and others. I’m a Club Mate addict.

How did you get started with developing software?
Shortly before the fall of the communist regime, there was a factory in Romania that was cloning western Z80 CPUs. My mom and dad somehow managed to put together a complete home computer running BASIC. I was 7 or 8 years old and they showed me how commands like 10 CIRCLE 50, 50, 10 were transformed in actual drawings. I was hooked.

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
I worked for about 8 years on the team that built a VoIP monitoring product. It was a multi-threaded near-real-time mostly-written-in-C application that was sniffing the network traffic and was measuring all sorts of performance and quality metrics. It did the job great but as it grew over the years it became really hard to maintain. Keeping the complex metrics precise and real-time became harder and harder with each feature and new metric that we added.
I think that tools like Elasticsearch open a new way of doing this type of monitoring products, which will prove to be easier to maintain, easier to scale and more flexible in the long run. We didn’t see talks about this approach, so we want to plant the idea and get some feedback on it.

When did you start contributing to Open Source projects?
I had some small contributions ever since I was in University, but nothing really notable. Since November last year, however, I’m in the very happy position of working full time on Open Source Software, which is a dream come true for me. I got there by a leap of faith: I quit my job and joined my wife in working full time on our open source project. Come to the talk to hear the rest of the story!

Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
Tweet me @tudor_g, I’ll meet anyone interested in Packetbeat or monitoring in general at any time.

Speaker interview: Patrick Peschlow

pbe_bbw — Fri, 22 May 2015 13:01:22 +0000

interview_ppe.png

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Patrick Peschlow.

How did you get started with developing software?
By itself nothing special: a programming class at school. But maybe it's interesting to hear about the first useful application I wrote back then: A database program to log the time I spent talking to my friends on the phone, and that allowed me to run various statistics on the data. I know it might sound ridiculous, but in fact I was a serious telephone addict at that time and had lots of fun crunching the data.

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
That the audience will learn from mistakes I made.

Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
A relatively young guy with grey hair - that's a combination that should be easy to find ;-)

What's your favourite beer?
There's no single favourite, but let me name a few that really stand out for me, in no particular order: Brinkhoff's No. 1 (Germany), Asahi (Japan), and San Miguel (Spain).

Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
I've been to Berlin quite a few times already. On a private trip a few years ago I visited the a park called "Gärten der Welt", in Marzahn, which I enjoyed a lot.

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #14

pbe_bbw — Thu, 21 May 2015 13:19:59 +0000

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Model as code – How to automate the deployment of R models in production environment

Isabelle Robin & Matthieu Vautrot
Scale - 40 min

Isabelle is a Data Scientist at Quantmetry, a French consulting start-up ealing with Big Data and Data Science. She has worked in several projects in Machine Learning, where she dealt with outlier detection, community detection in graphs, data visualization or production stakes. Matthieu joined Quantmetry in 2014, where he works as a consultant.
He worked on scalable recommendation systems using Apache Hadoop, Mahout and is now happily embarking on using Spark.

Data Science has enabled companies to establish predictive models about sales, human resources, enhance their customer knowledge and so much more. But what is the afterlife of these models ? Are they doomed to fade away eventually? This talk will present several techniques to automate the deployment of any R model in two complementary production environments : a big Data cluster and a web service allowing for easy reusability

Online learning, Vowpal Wabbit and Hadoop

Heloise Nonne
Scale - 40 min

Heloise is a Senior Data Scientist at Quantmetry, a consulting company in Data Science. Data driven missions in various companies (banking, insurance, industry, energy) are lead by her, whilst she is in charge of the R&D projects at Quantmetry.

Online learning has recently caught a lot of attention. It allows to process massive data, using up a low amount of memory and limited CPU ressources. Heloise will share the the recent experiences Quantmetry´s team has made with online learning and on parallelisation of Vowpal Wabbit on Hadoop in particular. Her talk will shed light on how to run Vowpal Wabbit on Hadoop.

Speaker interview: Konark Modi

pbe_bbw — Wed, 20 May 2015 11:59:24 +0000

interview_kmo.png

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Konark Modi.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
My name is Konark Modi, currently I am working as a software engineer at Cliqz based out of Munich. I love art and keyboards - whether they make music, or an interesting data point for what they call it to be Big Data. I have worked with one of the largest OTA's in India, and coming into the world of data engineering with a dev-ops background has been an incredible journey for me. I like to contributing to the community in whatever way I can - be it through organizing conferences for like minded people or just disrupting social causes with technology.

How did you get started with developing software?
Long long time ago, used to play with LOGO language and then started with GW-Basic for fun during my school time, finally did my studies in computer science and have been passionate about software development ever since.

Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
This talk is all about building and operating highly-scalable, fault-tolerant and low latency near-real time architectures. With special coverage of Apache storm that let's us achieve all of these features. I wish to get people excited about Apache storm and they should start relating how they can use this for their own use-cases.

Have you enjoyed previous Berlin Buzzwords editions?
I will be attending Berlin Buzzwords for the first time. All this time I have been an ardent fan and have watched the sessions via videos. Now I am totally excited to be part of this awesome event.

Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
I'll be hanging around, or just tweet to me @Konarkmodi for more details on how Hogwarts can grow leaps and bounds with the help of Data Magic.

Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
Yes I was in Berlin in July last year. The most I enjoyed was bike tour by Fat Tire Bike Tours. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to explore the city but strictly before / after the conference.

What's your favourite beer?
I prefer sticking to Apfelschorle :) .

Photo "Notes": cc-by 2.0 Brady

(Graphs)-[:ARE]->(Everywhere) Learn&Hack-Day

pbe_bbw — Tue, 19 May 2015 08:27:25 +0000

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Co-Scheduled with Berlin Buzzwords, C-Base Raumstation offers a day-long Learn&Hack event about all things graph.

Join us for a relaxed day of learning about the power of graphs, graph modeling and querying. We will look into cool use-cases and applications, and explore how easy it is to get your own graph-model and -app going in just a few minutes.

If you're lucky you can win printed copies of the brand-new 2nd edition of "Graph Databases".

Where? Rungestraße 20, 10179 Berlin
When? Sunday, May 31, 09:30-21:00

You can register here: http://www.meetup.com/graphdb-berlin/events/222114664/

Schedule

10:00 – 14:00

Neo4j & Cypher Intro

14:00 – 16:00

Create Your Graph,
Live GraphGist Modeling
Apply what you've learned

16:00 – 19:00

From Graph to App
Take your graph model and use cases
Put an UI in front and deploy it to the cloud

19:00 – 21:00

Meetup
Show your App
Advanced Graph Talks

Drinks, Pizza & Finger-Food in between

Photo: cc-by-sa 2.0 Thomas Wegner

Speaker interview: Szehon Ho

pbe_bbw — Mon, 18 May 2015 11:20:45 +0000

interview_sho.png

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Szehon Ho.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I am a software engineer at Cloudera, and also a PMC member of Apache Hive. I have been in this project for only a year and a half, but have been fortunate in doing major development on this widely-used project in the Hadoop space. The best part about Hive is getting to work with and learn from the best minds in industry, in Cloudera and the community. Before this, I was a principal software engineer at Informatica in the platform group learning the fundamentals of enterprise software, and before that I got my bachelor in EECS at UC Berkeley. I was originally born in Hong Kong, but did most of my schooling in the Bay Area, California.

How did you get started with developing software?
I got started late. Because I love learning all sorts of things, I spent a lot of time exploring a different areas like history, foreign language, math, physics, and did not get around to taking my first programming class until my freshman year in Berkeley, and did not decide to go into software over other EECS specializations until halfway through Berkeley. What changed it for me was my realization that learning software was immediately applicable, that is, you do not have to wait years to get the fruits of what you learn. And with how fast the software industry is changing, it satisfies my thirst for learning as every year there is a new thing to learn.

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
I hope to show how such a widely-used tool like Hive can be successfully migrated to a cool 'buzz' project like Spark, keeping the entire functionality-set and user expectations built on years of production use. While I am excited with all the new projects being built and buzzed about, I also think its an interesting challenge to re-platform a project already widely-deployed and solving real-world problems onto something new.

Many of the nowadays buzzwordly talks have come from the Apache Software Foundation. What do you think makes Apache projects so successful in particular for communities developing complex software?
One part of the community ideal of the ASF is an emphasis on contribution for the project and not for an employer. Another part is the open nature of the community, allowing membership through merit and all members a voice. Though issues of course exist, it is the best forum for many individuals, even from competing organizations, to work together on a complex software. This allows complex projects to amass a talent pool that allows them to become successful. I have been fortunate personally in my project of Apache Hive to work alongside database PHD's, Hadoop industry veterans, ASF members, and many other talents employed by Cloudera and other organizations, all improving the project in different ways.

Have you been to Berlin before?
I have not been to Berlin, but have visited other big German cities and love the balance between a rich historical heritage and the very modern art and music scene. One of my best memory last year is going to admire the architecture of the Hamburg Rathaus and stumbling across a very boisterous goth rock concert going on there, where we stayed until nightfall. I heard that this is even more the case in Berlin, and am really looking forward to my visit.

Photo "Notes": cc-by 2.0 Brady

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #13

pbe_bbw — Sat, 16 May 2015 14:38:43 +0000

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Using Random Projections to Make Sense of High-Dimensional Big Data

Stefan Savev & Michael Kleen
Search – 40 min

Stefan used to work for Microsoft; at the moment, he works as a Senior Software Engineer at ResearchGate focussing on developing recommendation systems. He loves to discuss algorithms, search engine implementation and machine learning. Michael works as a Software Engineer at ResearchGate on real-time data processing for instance.

Together they will invite us on a journey into the rich area of random projections via many graphical illustrations and intuitive examples. They will make clear that a moderate number of simple one dimensional projections is enough to answer hard questions about the data via techniques such as visualization, classification and clustering. Their talk will nvestigate how and why random projections work and where they break and discuss several interesting properties of high dimensional data.

Hive on Spark

Szehon Ho
Scale - 40 min

Szehon Ho is a software engineer in Cloudera and an Apache Hive PMC member, based in Palo Alto. Prior to this, he was a principal software engineer in Informatica, gaining experience in enterprise software development and the field of data integration.

Apache Hive is a popular SQL interface for batch processing and ETL using Apache Hadoop. This talk and demo will circle mainly around the new executive engine option Spark for Hive, touching upon Hive user experience, streamlining, operational management for Spark shops and the comparison of MapRededuce and Spark.

Speaker interview: Andrew Clegg

pbe_bbw — Thu, 14 May 2015 11:00:40 +0000

andrew_clegg.jpg

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Andrew Clegg.

How did you get started with developing software?
I first started coding on a Sinclair Spectrum with 48KB of RAM in the early 80s.Yes, kilobytes.I was about 7 years old I think. You had to plug it into your TV, and into a domestic cassette recorder for loading and saving data. It had weird rubber keys that squished instead of clicking, but a crude form of context-sensitive autocomplete, for BASIC keywords at least. Good times.

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
I'd like people to come away with an understanding of the challenges of pattern matching and anomaly detection in timeseries data, and some idea of how they can take the tools we've developed to help with these tasks and apply them to their own data.

Have you enjoyed previous Berlin Buzzwords editions?
Very much! I tend to gravitate towards the quirkier talks in the smaller rooms which cover interesting algorithms, useful data structures etc... But always with an eye on scalability and real-world applicability.
Last time I went, it was at the Urania centre – so I'm really looking forward to returning, and seeing how the Postbahnhof compares.

Anything you are planning to hack on during Berlin Buzzwords?
I'm planning to release a library of high-performance timeseries algorithms, as part of our ongoing Kale project, which I'll talk about in my session. Hopefully, this will already be out before I arrive, but if not, then I'll be putting on the finishing touches for a first release. (And if it is out, I'll be dealing with the inevitable bug reports...)

What did you enjoy the most, when you in Berlin?
I'm a big fan of Berlin, its mix of old and new, and its blend of culture, history, and great parties. The Technology Museum and Computer Games Museum are great geeky days out -- the latter even has some old Spectrum games from my youth. The old air raid bunker underneath Gesundbrunnen station is a fascinating experience. And for the first-time visitor, the Wall is a must-see, of course.

GameDuell Tech Talk: Boaz Leskes about Resilience in Elasticsearch

pbe_bbw — Wed, 13 May 2015 12:35:37 +0000

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The Elasticsearch lead developer Boaz Leskes will participate in the so-called TechTalk series, organized by the Berlin based games company GameDuell. The free side-event of the Berlin Buzzwords will take place on Wednesday, June 3. Already a day before, Boaz holds a session on designing sequence numbers and their complexities; the TechTalk will take place from 3pm – 5pm dealing with Resiliency in Elasticsearch (and Apache Lucene). Boaz will discuss the popular search engine, its increasingly complex issues and failures. Participants will learn about the inner works of Elasticsearch and further questions can be answered in a session afterwards. Here, two more Elasticsearch engineers, Adrien Grand and Ryan Ernst, will step in to answer any possible questions ranging from architecture to practical use cases.

Where? Taubenstraße 24 - 25, 10117 Berlin
When? Wednesday, June 3, 15:00-17:00

You can register here: http://de.amiando.com/elastic_techtalk.html

TechTalk Schedule

14:30 – Doors open
15:00 – Presentation by Boaz Leskes incl. Q & A with Adrien Grand and Ryan Ernst
16:00 – Get Together with drinks and snacks

Listen up to the Open Stage Talk “Understanding What’s Important” by Grant Ingersoll

nsc_bbw — Tue, 12 May 2015 13:01:14 +0000

Workshop

Grant likes to step up on stage, especially during Berlin Buzzwords. The developer, engineer and co-founder of Lucidworks will not only give a talk on June 1, which you can find here, but you will also find him holding another talk at the Open Space at Stage 4 a day later, on Saturday, June 2, at 3:20pm. Grant will ask the question of how do we really determine what's important DATA? Tackling ‘the philosophy of big data’, he will enlighten us about challenges that come with having a lot of it - which data matters in terms of working effectively? Is more always better?
As he picks up those core questions, Grant tells us about more effective ways of developing and processing of data on both sides, be it creator or consumer.

photo: CC-BY-SA by Thomas Wegner

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #12

pbe_bbw — Mon, 11 May 2015 10:58:32 +0000

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Fast Decompression Lucene Codec

Ivan Mamontov & Mikhail Khludnev
Search – 40min

Ivan is a search engineer at GridDynamics and interested in low-level system programming, software platforms design and architecture. For the last few years, he has worked on eCommerce search platforms extending Lucene and Solr. Mikhail builds search and navigation engines for eCommerce, and mades contribution into Lucene and Solr from time to time.

Sorted lists of integers are commonly used in Lucene's implementation of inverted index. Those lists are often compressed in-memory as a trade-off between memory footprint and access speed and CPU utilization. Thus, encoding and, more important, decoding of these lists consumes significant CPU time. In this talk Ivan and Mikhail will show their prototype of Lucene Codec which uses a simple C library for compressing lists of integers using binary packing and SIMD instructions, which significantly improves decoding throughput.

Approaching Join Index for Lucene

Mikhail Khludnev
Search – 40min

Lucene works great with independent text documents, but real life problems often require to handle relations between documents. Aside of several workarounds, like term encodings, field collapsing or term positions, we have two mainstream approaches to handle document relations: join and block-join. Both have their downsides. Join lacks performance, while block-join makes is really expensive to handle index updates, since it requires to wipe a whole block of related documents.

This session presents an attempt to apply join index, borrowed from RDBMS world, for addressing drawbacks of the both join approaches currently present in Lucene. Mikhail will look into the idea per se, possible implementation approaches, and review the benchmarking results.

The Earnestness of Being Important, by Grant Ingersoll

nsc_bbw — Mon, 04 May 2015 12:32:51 +0000

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Importance is the most crucial aspect of the current data movement. Storing and aggregating all your data is great, but eventually you’ll run out of disk or the ability to look at and comprehend all those reports. You will always need to know what’s important in your data and how it impacts your organization.

Innovation in open source libraries is paving the way for a deeper understanding of what is important. Determining importance covers a broad number of aspects: timeliness, personalization, past behavior, social impact, content, meaning, and whether or not something is actionable.

Despite all these challenges, we’ve made great strides when it comes to identifying important data, thanks to open source. Gains made in search engine technology like Apache Lucene/Solr have revolutionized our ability to deal with multi-structured content at scale, rank it, and return results in a timely manner. Search engines have evolved significantly in recent years to seamlessly collect, collate, and curate data across a wide variety of data types and are no longer just about fast keyword lookups. Combined with large scale data processing frameworks, it is now possible to build sophisticated solutions that take in your data, model it, serve it up to your users, and then learn from their behavior.

Google, Amazon, Facebook and others have been doing this for years and the power of open source makes these techniques available to the rest of us.

The end goal of all of this work is to create a virtuous cycle between your users and your data. The more your users interact with your system, the smarter your system gets. The smarter your system gets, the more your users will want to interact with it.

Speaker interview: Till Rohrmann

pbe_bbw — Fri, 01 May 2015 13:58:06 +0000

till_rohrmann.jpg

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Till Rohrmann.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Till, a 27 years old software developer. Currently, I'm employed by dataArtisans to work on Apache Flink. I started working on Apache Flink while writing my master's thesis and somehow got stuck with it. At the moment, I spend most of my working time with developing the machine learning library for Flink. If I'm not in the office, you'll most likely find me on one of the numerous beach volleyball courts here in Berlin. I'm also really passionate about riddles. So if you happen to know a good one, then share it with me :-) Maybe I can even challenge you back.

How did you get started with developing software?
I started programming when I was 14. At that time, my older cousin showed me some games he "programmed", or at least I thought that he programmed them. I was kind of envious of him and wanted to do the same. Therefore I bought a C++ for kids book and started hacking. Only later I found out that he wasn't actually programming but using a simple editor. Thus, one could say that I started programming out of a misconception.

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
I want to demonstrate that Apache Flink is a really good platform to build highly scalable machine learning algorithms on top of it. But my talk will also show that a naive implementation of the algorithm seldom achieves good performance and that one has to spend some additional brain cycles to optimize the algorithm with respect to the underlying system.

Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
I'll talk about the implementation details of the alternating least squares (ALS) algorithm which is used to factorize matrices. The distributed implementation is mainly network-bound and thus, we can greatly speed it up by decreasing the size of redundant data. Additionally, I'll highlight the improvements we made to Apache Flink in order to support the optimized implementations.

When did you start contributing to Open Source projects?
I started contributing to Stratosphere, the predecessor of Apache Flink, when I wrote my master's thesis in 2013.

Many of the nowadays buzzwordly talks have come from the Apache Software Foundation. What do you think makes Apache projects so successful in particular for communities developing complex software?
The ASF especially offers guidance in form of mentors for young projects. This helps them to learn from the experience of other projects and to avoid common mistakes. Moreover, the ASF allows you to reach out to more people in terms of future contributors as well as media attention.

What was the first Apache project you got in touch with?
It was the Apache HTTP Server which I used to host my first own websites. It was at the time of myspace and GeoCities and my website would have perfectly fitted in there. I'm sincerely sorry for all the eye-pain I caused.

What are the risks of going Apache?
You have to use the Apache hosted JIRA infrastructure. And trust me JIRA can be painfully slow ;-) I'm just kidding. Actually, I think there are not many risks for an Open Source project by becoming part of the ASF. Of course, some of your project's processes might become more complex such as releasing new versions or voting schemes, but in my experience these changes helped us to become a more mature project and grow the community.

Speaker interview: Ameya Kanitkar

pbe_bbw — Fri, 01 May 2015 10:41:03 +0000

ameya_profile.jpg

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Ameya Kanitkar.

How did you get started with developing software?
I was fascinated by the concept of "programming" machines. I was also fascinated by the Internet and what it entails. This pushed me to start working in software. Also the barriers to entry are so minimum that you can start right away. I was also interested in launching rockets to moon - but software was easy to get started with :-)

Many of the nowadays buzzwordly talks have come from the Apache Software Foundation. What do you think makes Apache projects so successful in particular for communities developing complex software?
Its really a mystery how such fantastic software gets developed in open source manner. But I think it boils down to passion. Thankfully some good business models are developed around this allowing open source projects to be more sustainable :-) But having said that the overall ecosystem in place combined with top quality PMC team, and lot of love and passion, building software makes most of these projects fundamental building blocks of todays software.

What was the first Apache project you got in touch with?
I think apache MQ and zookeeper were the first projects.

What are the risks of going Apache?
This is not just with apache - but with any open source project. Sometimes projects go out of favor - or some new shiny thing comes along and people move away from the one you are using/ building. In such cases community support can dwindle fast.

Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
I'll be around after the talk - and of course at the happy hours!

Have you been to Berlin before?
I have not! But I am looking forward to visit Berlin and experience the most "tech friendly" city in Europe. It's really exciting to see this coming from Silicon Valley!

Speaker interview: Rafał Kuć

pbe_bbw — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 10:50:28 +0000

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We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Rafał Kuć.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I'm Rafał, living near the eastern border of Poland (in Białystok). I'm a consultant and a software engineer at Sematext, Inc. I am currently focusing mostly on Solr, Elasticsearch and Lucene based solutions and sharing the time between consulting, working on Logsene and blogging. I also happen to be a book author, with titles about Solr and Elasticsearch. And most of all, I'm a father of two great kids ;)

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
We would like how Solr and Elasticsearch scale both in terms of horizontal and vertical sides. We would also like to show similarities and differences that makes those projects so different in some areas and so close in others.

Have you enjoyed previous Berlin Buzzwords editions?
Of course I did. I think the 2015 edition will be my fifth in fourth in a row and I am always looking forward for the conference. It has great community, nice talks and very, very good atmosphere.

If you were the god of Berlin Buzzwords - what would you change?
Berlin Buzzwords each month ;)

Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
I'll be running around here and there, so all around the place probably. If anyone wants to catch me to have a talk I'll probably be at the talks listening, preparing for our talk or hanging around with people. If you have hard time finding me, ping me on Twitter and I'll get back to you :)

What's your favourite beer?
Depends on the mood actualy, but if I would be forced to choose two of them it would definately be Helles from Munich and Kriek lambic.

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #11

pbe_bbw — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 16:59:53 +0000

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Apache Flink deep-dive

Stephan Ewen
Scale – 40min

Stephan Ewen is a last-year PhD student at TU Berlin. He has been the primary architect and developer of the Stratosphere platform since its inception. and has worked at IBM Almaden Research Center (USA), Microsoft Research (USA) as well as at IBM Development Laboratory Böblingen (Germany).

Apache Flink is a distributed engine for batch and streaming data analysis and offers familiar programming APIs based on parallel collections that represent data streams, transformations and window definitions on these collections. Flink supports these APIs with a robust execution backend and implements its own memory manager and custom data processing algorithms inside the JVM. Stephans talk gives an overview of Flink’s APIs, the most important features of Flink’s runtime and the benefits for users, as well as a roadmap of the project.

Signatures, patterns and trends: Timeseries data mining at Etsy

Andrew Clegg
Search – 40min

Andrew joined Etsy in 2014 and has been involved in the redesign of their Kale platform for anomaly detection and pattern matching since he came on board. Prior to Etsy he spent almost 15 years designing machine learning workflows, and building search and analytics services, in academia, startups and enterprises, and in an ever-growing list of research areas including biomedical informatics, computational linguistics, social analytics, and educational gaming.

Kale is an open-source software suite for pattern mining and anomaly detection in operational data streams. In his talk Andrew will briefly cover the main challenges that traditional statistical methods face in this environment, and introduce some pragmatic alternatives that scale well and are easy to implement (and automate) on Elasticsearch and similar platforms.

Change Data Capture: The Magic Wand We Forgot

Martin Kleppmann
Scale – 40min

Martin is a software engineer and entrepreneur, specialising on the data infrastructure of internet companies. His last startup, Rapportive, was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. He is a committer on Apache Samza and author of the upcoming O'Reilly book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications".

Change Data Capture (CDC) is an old idea: let the application subscribe to a stream of everything that is written to a database – a feed of data changes. You can use that feed to update search indexes, invalidate caches, create snapshots, generate recommendations, copy data into another database. In this talk, Martin will explain why change data capture is so useful, and how it prevents race conditions and other ugly problems. Then he'll go into the practical details of implementing CDC with PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka, and discusses the approaches you can use to do the same with various other databases.

Speaker interview: Ludwine Probst

pbe_bbw — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 08:51:21 +0000

lprobst_bbuzz15.jpg

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know our keynote speaker Ludwine Probst.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I’m Ludwine, a Data Engineer working at Cityzen Data. I am deeply involved in the community with the Duchess France, an association to promote women developers, to inspire and encourage them to speak at conferences or technical events.

How did you get started with developing software?
After a Master’s degree in Mathematics, I unexpectedly joined the IT world as a software engineer. So I learned on the job by attending online courses and technical events organized in Paris.

Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
Time Series and how to collect, analyze and process them.

What was the first Apache project you got in touch with?
Hadoop.

Anything you are planning to hack on during Berlin Buzzwords?
Maybe try some stuff with Spark and Machine Learning.

Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
In the hallways or ping me via twitter @nivdul. And I like speaking in german ;)

What's your favourite beer?
Adelscott, a beer with whisky.

Have you been to Berlin before?
Yes I have been twice in Berlin. And I really enjoyed the Berlinische Galerie where I fell in love with the paintings of George Grosz.

The Open Stage is yours!

dbe — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 10:23:24 +0000

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Submit your proposal for a talk or workshop on the Open Stage until May 10, 2015!

Are you working on a new project that you would like to share with others and in order to get feedback? This year, we're having an Open Stage again giving you the opportunity to hold a talk or workshop for a topic of your choice. This is the place for your thoughts and ideas or maybe for your first speaking experience in front of a kind and very interested audience.

In parallel to the regular conference schedule, the Open Stage will be hosting talks and workshops on Monday and Tuesday from 11:30 am to 5:30 pm. The number of talks depend on their length and is based on the 'first come first served' principle. Just fill in the form here - we will get back to you with a confirmation and more information on the date and time. This stage will be moderated by session chairs who will supervise the set slot lengths.

We would like to invite everyone, no matter what experiences you've already gained, regardless of gender, physical appearance, sexual orientation or religion, to propose a talk or workshop and be part of a diverse Open Stage program! If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

Speaker interview: Mikhail Khludnev

pbe_bbw — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 08:46:17 +0000

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We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Mikhail Khludnev.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I'm a search guy.

How did you get started with developing software?
It's fun, it wasn't Java.

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
I'd like to bring up the interest in high performance join in Lucene

Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
Details of how current join implementations work, their advantages and limitations.

When did you start contributing to Open Source projects?
three years ago.

Many of the nowadays buzzwordly talks have come from the Apache Software Foundation. What do you think makes Apache projects so successful in particular for communities developing complex software?
I don't know, perhaps industry interest moves it forward, or just trolling in comments makes them interesting to watch.

What was the first Apache project you got in touch with?
Solr

What are the risks of going Apache?
You can't leverage vendor lock-in after that.

Anything you are planning to hack on during Berlin Buzzwords?
Anything around a search, searching for beer at least.

Become a Volunteer!

nsc_bbw — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 15:33:31 +0000

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Not even 2 months until the Berlin Buzzwords opens its doors at the unique Postbahnhof Berlin. You would love to take part and be involved in the organisation of this year's event? Buzzwords is not only about the conference program, the passionate and enthusiastic people make the difference – register as a volunteer and be part of it!

In exchange for ~ 8 hours of volunteering you will get a free ticket for the whole conference including food and drinks and a Berlin Buzzwords 2015 t-shirt - and of course our eternal gratitude!

Find more information and the registration on our volunteer page!

photo: CC-BY-SA by Thomas Wegner

#bbuzz schedule is now online!

dbe — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 09:08:28 +0000

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We're glad to announce that the complete schedule with more than 40 sessions and over 50 speakers is now available.

The line-up reflects the latest technological novelties dealing with storing, processing and distributing of large sets of digital data and gives unique insights into the innovation of open-source software. Keynote speakers include:
Ludwine Probst (data engineer at Cityzen Data) – Analytics in the age of the Internet of Things
Eric Evans (engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation) – It's All Fun And Games Until...: A Tale of Repetitive Stress Injury

The complete speaker line-up can be found here. Further highlights are:
Andrew Clegg (data scientist at Etsy) – Signatures, patterns and trends: Timeseries data mining at Etsy
Georgi Knox (back end engineer at Bitly) – Scale with NSQ: a realtime distributed messaging platform
Michael Busch (architect in Search & Content at Twitter) – A complete Tweet index on Apache Lucene

You don't wanna miss this. Purchase your ticket here: https://berlinbuzzwords.de/tickets

Speaker interview: Boaz Leskes

pbe_bbw — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 12:59:14 +0000

interview_boazleskes_bbuzz15.png

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Boaz Leskes.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
My name is Boaz Leskes, I am a Software Developer working at Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana. In the last two years, I’ve worked on various aspects of Elasticsearch, including it's discovery module and replication code. I’ve had some hand in the making of Marvel, our monitoring add-on of Sense, a developer console to the Elasticsearch's JSON API. When not behind a computer, I might be on a boat rowing on the Amstel - one of the rivers going into Amsterdam.

How did you get started with developing software?
Too long ago to remember. My father bought an old Texas Instruments computer. The kind you have to re-type the entire program every time. He wrote some simple math games on it and at some point, I guess I got the germ.

Have you enjoyed previous Berlin Buzzwords editions?
Absolutely. It’s one the best conferences out there. Content is always great and even if you feel like taking a rain check, there is always some interesting talk outside.

Anything you are planning to hack on during Berlin Buzzwords?
Well, life goes on at an extreme pace and it’s hard to say what will happen a month and a half from now. I usually tend to have some pet project lying around, ideas I want to try out and see where they lead. At the moment, it’s a combination of extending Sense to allow to replay a series of requests (think a full reproduction for an issue, or some sequence of calls to debug something) and an alternative Translog setup for Elasticsearch.

Photo: Philip Kaden CC-BY-SA 2.0

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #10

pbe_bbw — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 10:30:11 +0000

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Side by Side with Elasticsearch & Solr part 2: Performance & Scalability

Radu Gheorge & Rafał Kuć
Search – 40min

Radu is a search and logging consultant at Sematext, focused mostly on Elasticsearch-based projects. He loves to fiddle with logging tools, such as Logstash, rsyslog and Apache Flume, which work for so much more than just system logs. Rafał is the author of Apache Solr Cookbook series and Elasticsearch server books, Sematext consultant and co-founder of http://solr.pl blog. He is mainly focused on Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch, Hadoop and Mahout.

Together Radu and Rafał give a brand new take on their Solr&Elasticsearch talk from last year. They will show how to tune Elasticsearch and Solr for 2 common use-cases - logging and product search - and share some best practices for scaling out massive Elasticsearch and Solr clusters. For example: how to divide data into shards and indices/collections that account for growth, when to use routing and how to make sure that coordinating nodes don’t become unresponsive.

Real time analytics with Apache Cassandra and Apache Spark

Christopher Batey
Store – 40min

Christopher Batey is a Software Engineer by trade and is currently employed by DataStax as a Technical Evangelist for Apache Cassandra. Chris has also worked for Sky, where he helped build their online television platform, and IBM, where he helped develop a variety of messaging products.

IoT, sensor data, financial transactions. The industry has moved to databases like Cassandra to handle the high velocity and high volume of data that is now common place. That's where Spark combined with Cassandra comes in, what was one just your storage system can be transformed into your analytics system.

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #9

pbe_bbw — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 16:09:38 +0000

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You've got questions. We've got answers!

Grant Ingersoll
Search – 40min

Grant Ingersoll is the CTO and co-founder of Lucidworks as well as an active member of the Lucene community – a Lucene and Solr committer, co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine learning project, and a long standing member of the Apache Software Foundation.

QA and NLP technology have finally hit the mainstream and are making information access easier and more personalized every day. Open source technologies make it easier than ever to build and deploy question answering technology. In this talk, we'll lay the foundation of building a next generation QA system using open source like Apache Solr and various open source NLP libraries as well as demonstrate a working system able to answer real natural language questions.

Detecting Events on the Web with Java, Kafka and ZooKeeper

James Stanier
Scale – 40min

James is the VP Engineering, Product (Backend) at Brandwatch. He works on projects that try to analyse and make sense of large amounts of social media data.

Over the last year at Brandwatch, we have been building, experimenting and scaling a distributed cluster of JVMs that process the data from our client’s queries and detect influential mentions of their brands online and alert on unusual and important trends. We used Apache Kafka, ZooKeeper, and Spring to achieve this. This talk explains the architecture that we built, how it performs, scales and some of the difficulties we’ve faced along the way.

Real Time Big Data Analytics with Kafka, Storm & HBase

Ameya Kanitkar
Scale – 40min

Ameya Kanitkar is the lead architect building real time analytics infrastructure that powers Groupon’s real time relevance and personalization systems.Before personalization infrastructure, he also lead the design and development of global message bus infrastructure at Groupon.

This talk covers the use case and use of our Kafka-Storm-HBase-Redis pipeline to ingest over 3 million data points per second in real time which in turn brings in millions of dollars in additional revenue. Specially we will discuss how we scaled this system for hundreds of millions of users including solution choices, different techniques and strategies, traditional and innovative approaches. Solution includes some interesting algorithmic choices to reduce data size such as bloom filters and HyperLogLog, as well as use of big data technologies such as HBase, Kafka & Storm.

Speaker interview: Julien Nioche

nsc_bbw — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 15:07:06 +0000

julien.jpg

We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded …

Get to know Julien Nioche.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I live in Bristol, UK with my wife and 2 children. I started my own consultancy, DigitalPebble, back in 2007 and have been providing my expertise in web crawling, natural language processing, machine learning and search using open source software.

How did you get started with developing software?
Quite late. I studied Russian at uni but had always been interested in programming. I learned Java by reading books while doing my military service and later found a way of reconciling my interests in linguistics and programming when I started studying Natural Language Processing.

What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
Raise awareness of the storm-crawler project and Apache Storm in general.

Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
It will be a 20 min introduction. So I don't expect to go very deep, however people in the audience might learn a couple of useful Storm tricks and get a better understanding of the challenges of web crawling.

Have you enjoyed previous Berlin Buzzwords editions?
Definitely! I was at the very first edition back in 2010 then came back in 2011 and 2013. I've always been a fan of Berlin Buzzwords and have enjoyed meeting loads of great people there over the years.

If you were the god of [You name it!] - what would you change?
Abolishing religion would be a bit dangerous for a God so I'd do something different then and be the God of weather. I'd make sure people get the message that we have only one planet and need to look after it a lot better.

When did you start contributing to Open Source projects?
I contributed to Lucene back in 2002/3 in very small ways by reporting bugs and sending a few patches. My own first open source project was called LIMO and was a web app to the monitor Lucene indices.

What was the first Apache project you got in touch with?
Lucene

Anything you are planning to hack on during Berlin Buzzwords?
Storm-crawler, Nutch ...

Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
Nowhere specific but please do come and have a chat.

What's your favourite beer?
Berliner Weiße of course.

Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
Hard to name one place in particular, Berlin has so many different identities. What I like in Berlin is that you're always staring at History, distant or recent.

photo: Berlin Buzzwords (flickr) CC-BY-SA 2.0

Speaker interview: Adrien Grand

nsc_bbw — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 10:02:38 +0000

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We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded ...

Adrien Grand is based in Caen, France and working as a software engineer at Elasticsearch.

Bbuzz: How did you get started with developing software?
AG: At some point during my studies, I had to choose between engineering science and computer science courses. I hated engineering science so much that I took the computer science course by elimination. This is when I first got exposed to programming. We were taught some Caml and mainly used programming as a way to model mathematical problems. To be honest, I did not especially like it but after a couple of months, we were given an assignment to write a program that would draw a Mandelbrot fractal. This was the most interesting thing I had ever worked on!

Bbuzz: Which in-depth information is your talk going to provide?
AG: I am going to talk about how Elasticsearch and Lucene work under the hood! But instead if focusing on how it works on the high-level, I will pick some particular features and explain how they are implemented. Come to my talk if you would like to learn more!

Bbuzz: When did you start contributing to Open Source projects?
AG: I have been lucky to attend the engineering school where the VideoLAN project (known for VLC media player) started. Until then I had mostly used programming in the context of my studies and I figured out it would be a great way to start learning some actual coding since I had access to the sources of a software which is useful! I did not end up contributing much but just being exposed to an open-source project has been a very valuable experience.

Bbuzz: What's your favourite beer?
AG: Chimay Bleue.

Bbuzz: Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
AG: Yes I have, and what I enjoyed most was Berlin Buzzwords. ;-)

Find out more about Adriens session here.

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #8

nsc_bbw — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 13:23:12 +0000

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Jodok Batlogg
Store – 40 min
Understanding databases for distributed Docker applications

Jodok Batlogg is co-founder and CEO of Crate and has a decade of experience with Big Data and Open Source. He has successfully launched a few startups and as CTO, led the tech teams of large web companies, for example by far biggest German-speaking website in 2010, StudiVZ.

Jodok will talk at #bbuzz on „Understanding databases for distributed Docker applications“. He willl focus on the use of Crate alongside Weave in Docker containers, the technical challenges, best practices learned, and getting a simple web application running alongside it. Jodok will present why the shared-nothing architecture is so important when deploying large clusters and talk about the ways Crate have leveraged Lucene, Elasticsearch, and built an optimized distributed SQL planner. Attendees can learn how to deploy a Crate cluster within minutes in the cloud using Docker. The session will also give examples when to use Crate compared to other similar technologies such as MongoDB, Hadoop, Cassandra or FoundationDB. Jodok will close his session on how to architect an application that is easy to scale using Crate, Docker, Weave, and a simple web application.

Uwe Schindler
Search - 40 min
Apache Lucene 5 - New Features and Improvements for Apache Solr and Elasticsearch

Uwe works as managing director for SD DataSolutions GmbH in Bremen, Germany, a company that provides consulting and support for Apache Lucene, ElasticSearch, and Apache Solr. His main focus is on development of Lucene Java. He implemented fast numerical search and is maintaining the new attribute-based text analysis API. He is committer and PMC member of Apache Lucene and Solr.

His talk „Apache Lucene 5 - New Features and Improvements for Apache Solr and Elasticsearch“ will present the improvements and new features, but also some incompatible changes in the Lucene 5 release.
Lucene now uses all the brand new features (NIO.2) of Java 7 to make the indexing process more stable and resulting indexes durable. Checksums are used during merging to prevent bugs in the underlying JVM or data corruption due to networking errors (e.g., while distributing indexes during recovery in Elasticsearch) to persist in newly created index segments. In Lucene 5, the API around codecs will be cleaned up and will likely get more stable. There are also new features, like a common FilterCache that can be reused by Solr and Elasticsearch.
This talk will give an overview over the background of these changes and how to make the best out of it.

Konark Modi
Scale - 40 min
Designing NRT(NearRealTime) stream processing systems: Using Storm

Konark Modi works as a Software Engineer with Cliqz Gmbh (Munich), previously was working as a Senior Engineer with the DataPlatformTeam at MakeMyTrip.com (India’s leading online travel company). At MakeMyTrip.com he has handled multiple roles related to DevOps and DataPlatforms. Currently he is one of the organizers for PyCon India,the premier conference in India on using and developing the Python programming language.

Konark talks about „Designing NearRealTime stream processing system by using Storm. His session will focus on creating a pipeline for collecting huge volumes of data anfd processing near-real time using Storm. Storm is a high-volume, continuous, reliable stream processing system developed at BackType and open-sourced by Twitter. Storm is being widely used in lot of organizations and has variety of uses-cases like:
* Realtime analytics
* Distributed RPC
* ETL etc.

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #7

nsc_bbw — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 15:31:01 +0000

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Toke Eskildsen
Search – 40 min
Solr sparse faceting

Toke has been working with Lucene and Solr for 8 years, most of that time as technical lead on all things search at the State and University Library, Denmark. During that time he has developed a full hierarchical faceting system for Lucene (LUCENE-2369 / SOLR-2412) and written a patch for improving faceting performance for high cardinality fields in Solr (SOLR-5894). He is somewhat fixated on bit fiddling and search performance.
Toke will talk about the netarchive.dk, which maintains a historical archive of Danish net resources. They are indexing its 500TB of raw data into Solr. One of the requirements is to provide faceting on several fields, the largest having billions of unique String values. Stock Solr is not capable of doing that with satisfiable performance on their hardware. Inspection of Solr's core faceting code has led to multiple performance improvements for high cardinality faceting. The principles behind the improvements will be presented and their influence on the faceting performance curve will be discussed and visualized with data from tests and production systems.

Adrien Grand
Search – 40 min
Algorithms and data-structures that power Lucene and Elasticsearch

Adrien Grand is a Lucene/Solr committer at the Apache Software Foundation and a software engineer at Elasticsearch.
His talk is on making search fast with algorithms and data-structures that power Lucene and Elasticsearch. 80% of the job involves organizing data so that it can be accessed with as little work as possible. This is the exact reason why Lucene is based on an inverted index. But there are some interesting algorithms and data structures involved in that last 20% of the job. This talk will give insights into some internals of Lucene and Elasticsearch, and see how priority queues, finite state machines, bit twiddling hacks and several other algorithms and data structures help make them fast.

Ryan Ernst
Search – 40 min
Compressions in Lucene

Ryan is an Elasticsearch developer and enjoys working on anything with bits. He's an Apache Lucene/Solr committer and PMC member. Prior to Elasticsearch, he worked on Amazon's Product Search and AWS CloudSearch.
Ryan will give an introduction on how compression is used in Lucene, including recent improvements for Lucene 5.0. Modern search engines can store billions of records containing both text and structured data, but as the amount of data being searched grows, so do the requirements for disk space and memory. Various compression techniques are used to decrease the necessary storage, but still allow fast access for search. While Lucene has always used compression for its inverted index, compression techniques have improved and been generalized to other parts of the index, like the built-in document and column-oriented data stores.

Speaker interview: Georgi Knox

nsc_bbw — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 13:22:27 +0000

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We are introducing to you some of the speakers of the next Berlin Buzzwords conference 2015. Therefore, we are interviewing #bbuzz speakers ahead of the conference. See what they responded ...

We are starting with the software engineer Georgi Knox, who is currently living and working in New York City.

Bbuzz: Could you briefly introduce yourself?
GK: I am a software engineer at Bitly and my current nerd crush is on distributed systems and Go.

Bbuzz: What would you like to accomplish by giving this talk?
GK: I'd like to get the audience excited about NSQ which is an open source realtime distributed messaging platform written entirely in Go by the team at Bitly. It's now used by companies like Docker, Buzzfeed and Stripe. Come to my talk to find out more!

Bbuzz: Where can attendees meet you at the conference in order to ask questions?
GK: Im super friendly! Come and find me at the conference to have a chat about anything geeky. My twitter is @GeorgiCodes.

Bbuzz: What's your favourite beer?
GK: I really love Weissbier with my absolute favorite beer being Franziskaner.

Bbuzz: Have you been to Berlin before? What did you enjoy the most?
I lover Berlin! Some of the things I enjoyed most about my last trip were a late night out clubbing at K17, eating burgers at Burgermeister in Kreuzberg and cycling through the Tiergarten.

Find out more about Giorgis session here.

photo credit: Roger H. Goun (flickr) CC-BY 2.0

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #6

nsc_bbw — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 11:51:00 +0000

Speaker at Bbuzz

Andre Lynum
Search – 20min
Beyond significant terms

Andre is a Senior Consultant at Comperio AS specializing in advanced search technology and machine learning. He participated in several national and international research projects in Machine Translation and published several state of the art results in Natural Language Processing.

At #bbuzz he will talk about his work on projects, based on Elasticsearch and its significant terms technology, that aim to learn from documents and social activity published on the web. Andre shows how to expand on the base functionality provided in Elasticsearch to focus on areas such as immediate trends, entity identification and topic building using additional techniques from Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Julien Nioche
Search - 20 min
Low latency scalable web crawling on Apache Storm

Julien runs DigitalPebble Ltd DigitalPebble, a consultancy based in Bristol, UK, specialising in open source solutions for text engineering. He is a member of the Apache foundation and a committer on Apache Nutch and various other projects.

In his talk he will introduce Storm-Crawler, a collection of resources for building low-latency, large scale web crawlers on Apache Storm. He will compare it with similar projects like Apache Nutch and present several use cases where the storm-crawler is being used. His focus lies on the question how the Storm-crawler can be used with ElasticSearch and Kibana for crawling and indexing web pages.

Find Julien on Twitter

Michael Busch
Search - 40 min
A complete Tweet Index on Apache Lucene

Michael Busch is architect in Twitter's Search & Content organization. He designed and implemented Twitter's current search index, which is based on Apache Lucene and optimized for realtime search. Michael is a Lucene committer and Apache member for many years.

His session will present the architecture of the massive search engine Twitter. He will talk on how the search engine was developed, the challenges they faced and how the system scales as more and more tweets are composed.

Michael on Twitter

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #5

pbe_bbw — Tue, 24 Mar 2015 14:53:57 +0000

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"What's in the news?“ - or: why Angela Merkel is not significant

Andrej Rosenheinrich
Search – 20min

Andrej studied computer science at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, USA. Since 2010 he is a Java developer in the Research and Development department at Unister in Leipzig, mainly working on classic fulltext search and everything related to elasticsearch.

Watching hundreds of news sources, Bluekiwi.de, Unister's meta search engine, collects thousands of news every day - far too many to read or present concisely. So the question becomes how to aggregate, summarize and present the important news of the day.Andrej will present some strategies they use at Unister to aggregate news, figure out what is important and not just common, and what techniques can be used to come up with descriptive teasers.

Diving into Elasticsearch Discovery

Shikhar Bhushan
Search – 20min

Shikhar works on Search Infrastructure at Etsy, the global handmade and vintage marketplace. He has developed a popular SSH library for Java and a discovery plugin for Elasticsearch. Shikhar has a special interest in JVM technology and distributed systems.

Elasticsearch users will be familiar with Zen discovery. The Elasticsearch 'discovery' module actually encompasses a number of things - node discovery, master election, cluster state publishing, failure detection and handling. In his talk Shikhar will discuss implications of this model for Elasticsearch as a distributed system, drawing upon his experience building eskka, an Akka-cluster based discovery plugin.

An introduction to Apache Kylin - Business Intelligence meets Big Data

Fabian Wilckens
Search – 20min

Fabian works at MapR as a Solutions Architect in EMEA and helps enterprise companies with their data problems and with the adoption of open source technologies. Fabian has spent many years in enterprise software companies in both pre- and post-sales roles and was the responsible architect for the most advanced speech recognition platform in Germany.

Apache Kylin is an open source distributed analytics engine that provides a SQL-interface and multi-dimensional analysis for online analytical processing. In his session Fabian will provide an overview about Apache Kylin, how it works, what it does and will give an introduction to Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), how Business Intelligence works and how Kylin and Hadoop can help in analyzing extremely large datasets.

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #4

pbe_bbw — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 16:16:59 +0000

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Predictive Insights for IT Operations

Omer Trajman
Search – 20min

Omer brings fifteen years of front-line business and technical experience to Berlin Buzzwords. He most recently served as Vice President of Field Operations at WibiData, building the sales and marketing teams and previously was VP of Technology Solutions at Cloudera, focusing on technology strategy and communication.

Domains such as financial trading, advertising and marketing have been fertile breeding grounds for cutting edge data-driven applications. Yet the systems that power these services are still running on decades old technology. In Omers talk we will explore the application of machine learning in the domain of IT operations. In the datacenter there are thousands of sources of event data. By modeling the datacenter as a source of multiple data streams, we can apply techniques from other domains, modified to address the environments that now power much of our economy.

Data Challenges with 3D Computer Vision

Martin Scholl & Eugen Funk
Search – 20min

Martin maintained the billing system for a leading TelCo, wrote Linux kernel drivers, a distributed database, and lately data deduplication and data transport software. He is founder and managing director of Infinipool.
Eugen is a research associate at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin. He is working in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) from stereo cameras and 3D computer vision.

Automated 3D modelling from optical sensors became inevitable since this enables to replace the time consuming manual 3D modelling process. However, optical sensors deliver an extremely high amount of data which is required to be processed to information. An 8 bit stereo system with 9MPx colour images delivers 4GB of data per second. Being able to make sense out of this enormous flow of data is a huge and ongoing research and development task. In their talk Eugen and Martin will give an overview of the challenges which naturally involve efficient search, storage and scalable algorithms for information extraction from 3D data. Also an overview of practical implications on 3D reconstruction of cities, autonomous driving in public and industrial facilities, or inspection and monitoring as part of security strategies will be presented.

Apache Flink Workshop

dbe — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 14:04:16 +0000

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After our 2-days conference, Berlin Buzzwords features every year an open series of hackathons & workshops to strengthen the platform for developers, analysts and scientists who are involved in large scale computing projects.

We're excited to announce the first workshop on June 3rd. Join the full-day hands-on workshop on Apache Flink by our Startup Sponsor data Artisans. The workshop includes introductory tutorials and exercises for developers to get familiar with Apache Flink, and build Big Data applications using the platform.

For more information and to register visit http://www.meetup.com/Apache-Flink-Meetup/events/220557545/

Photo: flink.apache.org

Speaker at #bbuzz 2015 – #3

nsc_bbw — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 17:04:16 +0000

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Michael Hausenblas

Scale – 40 min

How to gain insights from a fleet of vehicles without breaking a sweat

Michael Hausenblas is Chief Data Engineer EMEA, for MapR, where he helps people tap the potential of Big Data by bridging the technical (reliability, scalability, etc.) and the business side (RoI, TCO, etc.). His background is in large-scale data integration, the Internet of Things, and Web applications and he's experienced in advocacy and standardization (World Wide Web Consortium). Michael is a contributor to Apache Drill.

One of the more mature areas of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the application of sensors in the context of vehicles. Going beyond the mechanical and electrical challenges of deploying the sensors and delivering their readings, we will discuss scalable architectures by means of reviewing three applications (connected car, trucks, and agricultural equipment). From a technological point of view we will be dealing with message queues (Kafka and fluentd), stream processing platforms (Storm and Spark Streaming) as well as time series databases (InfluxDB and OpenTSDB). A live demo from the automotive domain is included in this talk.

Michael's Homepage

Michael on Twitter @mhausenblas

Patrick Peschlow

Scale – 40 min

The Do's and Don'ts of Elasticsearch Scalability and Performance

Patrick works at codecentric and is Head of Development of the cloud startup CenterDevice where he builds a highly scalable platform to easily store, find and share data. He has a strong interest in Elasticsearch. Within codecentric, he has built up the Elasticsearch focus area and enjoys doing consulting work for search technologies, speaking and writing about his experience with Elasticsearch.

This talk builds on the combined experience that codecentric has gathered from developing and operating the Elasticsearchn based cloud service CenterDevice as well as various customer projects done over the last two years. It formulates important lessons learned regarding Elasticsearch scalability and performance as easy-to-remember Do's and Don'ts, backed up with anecdotes from actual events. The topics covered range from mapping and query definition over data modeling to cluster configuration and zero downtime re-indexing.

Scale – 40 min

Computing recommendations at extreme scale with Apache Flink

Till is a committer and PMC member of Apache Flink. He is currently working as a developer for dataArtisans, a Berlin based start-up dedicated to improve Apache Flink. His main work focuses on enhancing Flink's scalability as a distributed system and building a large-scale machine learning library with Flink. Till also contributed to Apache Mahout and helps presently to add Flink support to the Mahout DSL.

This talk details our experience with implementing three variants of the ALS (Alternating Least Squares) algorithm to train a latent factor model using the Apache Flink system and scaling them to large clusters and data sets. In order to scale these algorithms to extremely large data sets, Flink’s functionality was significantly enhanced to be able to distribute and process very large records efficiently. A preliminary presentation of the results, scaling ALS to 28 billion user ratings can be found here: http://data-artisans.com/computing-recommendations-with-flink.html

Till on Twitter @stsffap

Hackathons & workshops for #bbuzz 2015

nsc_bbw — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 11:43:25 +0000

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Berlin Buzzwords workshops and hackathons are about connecting local groups, organizations, companies and attendees. We run our events around the conference with different local organizers and with the help of (experienced) volunteers in different locations every year.

Why organizing a hackathon or workshop?

You want to establish your local group or company, be a community mobilizer and build relationships which last long after the event. Hackathons and workshops are community driven events and can play an important role to found a stable network. #bbuzz events offer a forum to meet, discuss, connect and inspire attendees in a collaborative, participative and open atmosphere.

Create an event!

Besides the people responsible for the venue and setting, it’s important to have people that are in charge of the idea and program of the hackathon. Topics of interest include everything related to scalable search, data-analysis in the cloud and NoSQL-databases. Our attendees are working in different enterprises with different technologies, e.g. Elasticsearch, Hadoop etc., all united in the Apache and Open Source structure.

You have some great ideas? For example a hands-on hackathon, a training or some beginner friendly or advanced technical discussions. Create an agenda and get in contact with us.

Support #bbuzz, we support you

All #bbuzz events are free!
You have already a complete event planned with an idea, room and you've got your team?
Are you are interested in providing space for a hackathon or workshop?
You have an idea and a team, but no room? – We are happy to connect you with our partners.

In all cases, get in contact with us, we're happy to promote your event. Write an email to partner [at] berlinbuzzwords.de.

photo: Thomas Wegner (flickr) CC-BY-SA 2.0

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #2

nsc_bbw — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 11:15:35 +0000

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Christoph Tavan

Scale - 40 min

From Machine Learning Startup to Big Data Company

In 2004 Christoph co-founded the web development consultancy némata and left in 2011 to co-found Berlin-based realtime bidding and machine learning company mbr targeting where he focuses on scalability, realtime processing and real-world application of machine learning techniques.

Christoph will share insights on founding a real-time bidding (RTB) company from a two-person startup to a leading technology provider. He will present real world examples of pitfalls, bad technology decisions and other things that can go wrong.

Buzzwords involved: Hadoop, Kafka, Spark, Impala, Redis, Aerospike, …

Twitter @ctavan

Nick Burch

Search – 40 min

What's with the 1s and 0s? Making sense of binary data at scale

Nick is heavily involved in a number of Apache projects, such as Tika, POI and Chemistry, while having the fortune to know many of the people involved in the Apache Big Data and Search space! When not helping out with Apache things, Nick works as the CTO of Quanticate, a Clinical Research Organization (CRO).

Nick will look what a given blob of 1s and 0s actually is – be it textual or binary – and show how to extract common metadata from it, along with text, embedded resources, images, and maybe even the kitchen sink! Therefore, he introduces Apache Tika, along with some other libraries. He will look at how to roll this all out for a large-scale Search or Big Data setup, helping to turn those 1s and 0s into useful content at scale!

Nick on Twitter

Ted Dunning

Search - 20 min

Practical t-digest Applications

Ted is PMC member of the Apache Mahout, Apache ZooKeeper, and Apache Drill projects and mentor for Apache Storm, DataFu, Kylin, Flink and Calcite projects. He was the chief architect behind the MusicMatch (now Yahoo Music) and Veoh recommendation systems. He also built fraud detection systems for ID Analytics (LifeLock).

Implementations of t-digest algorithm are easy to use and have been integrated in all kinds of software from ElasticSearch to Apache Mahout. Ted will describe the basic algorithm and demonstrate the effect of some variations of the algorithm.

Ted on Twitter

Ted's Blog

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #1

nsc_bbw — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:13:45 +0000

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Ellen Friedman
Scale - 20 min
Talk the Talk: How to Communicate with the Non-Coder

Ellen Friedman is a solutions consultant, speaker and author, currently writing mainly about big data topics. She is a committer to the Apache Mahout project and a contributor to the Apache Drill project.

Describing technical work in non-technical terms does not mean “dumbing it down”. Much to the contrary, it means having sufficiently clear conceptual understanding of your own work and communicating it them to people with a wide range of different background expertise. This talk will examine concrete steps to take to learn how to best communicate the strength of your work to other groups and best conceptualize your own roadmap.
Twitter personal account @Ellen_Friedman
Twitter Apache Mahout project
Twitter Apache Drill project

Andrew Psaltis
Scale - 40 min
Going deep with Spark Streaming

Andrew Psaltis is deeply entrenched in Streaming Data, Big Data Analytics and obsessed with delivering insight at the speed of thought. As the author of Streaming Data (http://manning.com/psaltis/) by Manning he spends most of his waking hours thinking about, writing about, and building streaming systems. Currently, he is the Lead Architect at Ensighten.

Andrew will peel back the covers and take a deep dive into the inner workings of Spark Streaming; discussing topics such as DStreams, input and output operations, transformations, and fault tolerance. After this talk you will be ready to take on the world of stream processing using Apache Spark.

Andrew on Twitter
Andrew Psaltis at #bbuzz 2014 on „Real-time Map Reduce: Exploring Clickstream Analytics with Spark Streaming, Kafka and WebSockets“

Boaz Leskes
Scale - 40 min
Desiging Concurrent Distrubted Sequence Numbers for Elasticsearch

Based in Amsterdam, Boaz Leskes background is diverse, ranging from C++ to C#, Python and Java and sometimes even Javascript. He's an Elasticsearch core developer, lead developer of Elasticsearch Marvel. He's a fan of faceting, Lucene, monitoring and search.

His talk will take the audience through the journey of designing distributed systems, starting by explaining the requirements; following the evaluations of solutions based on existing consensus algorithms, like ZooKeeper's ZAB and Raft. Leskes will discuss some alternate approaches, and close with an own proposed solution.

Boaz on Twitter
Boaz Leskes at #bbuzz 2014 on "Staying ahead of Users & Time - two use cases of scaling data with Elasticsearch"

Spoilt for choice: book your accommodation now

nsc_bbw — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 13:45:14 +0000

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Berlin offers many options for accommodation, so you're kind of spoilt for choice. To make it easy we made special arrangements for accommodation with 3 hotels in 3 different price categories.

Category 1: Fat Of The Land

Winters Hotel Berlin Mitte - The Wall at Checkpoint Charlie
You are coming from a rough week at work and really want to feel the luxury right in the middle of Berlin, check out our 4-star Winters Hotel Berlin Mitte. All modern and spacious rooms feature Smart TVs, Internet access, electronic safes and mini bars. The hotel is located at a truly historic site, just a few metres away from Checkpoint Charlie and Friedrichstraße. It is easily accessible by car or public transport and is in direct vicinity of the most important sights of Berlin and the booming Kreuzberg quarter.
Get a 24€ discount on regular room prices and make a telephone reservations using the booking code „Berlin Buzzwords“: +49 30 30 87 770.

Winters Hotel Berlin Mitte · The Wall at Checkpoint Charlie
Zimmerstraße 88
10117 Berlin · Germany

Tel.: +49 30 30 87 770

Category 2: Decently priced and comfy

InterCityHotel Berlin Ostbahnhof
You can't stay closer to the event, since the 3-star InterCityHotel Berlin is directly located at Ostbahnhof (the Berlin East Railway Station) next to Postbahnhof. All rooms are furnished with an own bathroom, TV, mini bar and hair dryer. Public transport tickets are inclusive! The excellent combination of the InterCityHotel know-how, friendly hotel staff, the attentive service and a pleasant modern ambiance ensures that you will feel comfy during your stay.

You can make a telephone reservations by using the booking code “Buzzwords 2015": +49 30 29368 300

InterCityHotel Berlin Ostbahnhof
Am Ostbahnhof 5
10243 Berlin Germany

T: +49 30 29368 300

Category 3: The Penny Pinchers

Hostelboats „Eastern and Western Comfort“
We found something special for you: The hostel boats “EASTERN COMFORT” and “WESTERN COMFORT” are mooring between two very lively districts ( Friedrichshain & Kreuzberg) in the centre of town. All cabins on the Eastern Comfort have their own toilet/shower. For the ones of you, who like it very comfy, the Eastern Comfort offes large 1st class single & double cabins. The Penny Pinchers can choose cabins on the Western Comfort with shared bathroom facilities.

Get a 10% discount on the latest room price by using the booking code "KONFERENZEN POSTBAHNHOF”. Book your room online here.

Eastern and Western Comfort - The swimming hostels in Berlin
Mühlenstraße 73
10243 Berlin

T: +49 30 66763806

photo: Gonzalo Malpartida (flickr) CC-BY 2.0

Announcement of event partnership with droidcon Berlin

nsc_bbw — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 15:10:27 +0000

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We happily announce the event partnership between Berlin Buzzwords and droidcon Berlin. Both conferences will take place in the unique event location Postbahnhof in Berlin. We start with Berlin Buzzwords in the period from May 31st until June 3rd which is instantly followed by droidcon Berlin taking place from June 3rd until June 5th. Both conferences share a common informal evening event on Tuesday, June 2: the good-bye party of Berlin Buzzwords is droidcon's welcoming party at the same time.

We are aiming at combining the best parts of both conferences in order to provide you with superior conference formats. The similarities between the two conferences are conclusive, the content of both events is provided by developers for developers. This participatory community event character creates a unique, harassment-free atmosphere which is reflected in the similar code of conduct of both conferences.

We believe that these similarities build a perfect foundation for a well-functioning, sustainable event partnership. The key word sustainability plays a major role in terms of the temporal course of events. In favour of saving longer construction periods, transportation ways and travel costs, the conceptional idea of a green conference unites both formats. By using the same event location and a direct temporal annexion, we want to simplify the participation of international attendees who are interested in both subject areas. It saves costs, CO2 emission and contains only advantages for you, for us and for our environment.

Concluding, we are looking forward to both conferences and are hoping to establish a supporting, long-lasting partnership. See you in May, June or both!

Introducing Eric Evans - our second keynote speaker

dbe — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 16:06:16 +0000

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We are very excited to announce that the 2nd keynote speaker for Berlin Buzzwords 2015 will be Eric Evans. Eric has been speaker at Berlin Buzzwords since the conference first kicked off in 2010. He has more than a decade of experience with the engineering and operations of large-scale distributed systems. He joined Rackspace as a startup, and implemented a global DNS infrastructure utilizing IP anycast (possibly the first), and a novel data-center-wide IDS for which a patent was awarded. As an avid open source hacker, Eric is a developer with the Debian Project and a member of the Apache Cassandra PMC. He resides in Texas and works on distributed systems for The OpenNMS Group.
This time his talk is neither about Cassandra nor NoSQL. Instead he's talking about "It's All Fun And Games Until...: A Tale of Repetitive Stress Injury". Unfortunately, he knows way more about long term health risks than he ever cared to, and sadly, it’s knowledge he could have used much earlier to avoid a lot of (literal and figurative) pain. Don’t miss out on this unusual bbuzz keynote.

Travel with 100% green power to Berlin Buzzwords

nsc_bbw — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 15:22:57 +0000

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We’ve partnered up with Deutsche Bahn! All conference attendees can travel from any DB railway station in Germany with a fixed price and 100 % green energy.
The ticket offer for the return journey is valid from May 30 until June 7, 2015.

Using a specific train costs 99 € (2nd Class) or 159 € (1st Class).
Flexible tickets cost 139 € (2nd Class) or 199 € (1st Class).*

Special ticket prices for international travel are available on request.
Order your ticket by calling the service number +49 (0)1806 31 11 53 and use the keyword “buzzwords”.** You will be called back to make a reservation and will need a credit card for payment.***

The same deal is also available online at: www.bahn.de/Veranstaltungsticket
The Deutsche Bahn service centre is looking forward to inform you about the ticket price for international journeys.

*An exchange or refund of the ticket is possible until one day before the first day of validity for an according fee. The exchange and refund conditions for reduced tickets are valid according to the time of booking; see the conditions of passenger transportation of Deutsche Bahn AG. An exchange or refund is excluded from the first day of validity. Tickets tied to a specific train need to be booked at least three days in advance, and are sold as long as the stocks last.
**The ticket hotline is available Monday to Saturday 7am – 10pm. Calls cost 20 cents per call from a German landline, and a maximum of 60 cents per call from a German mobile.
***Please note that since November 04, 2014, a fee is charged for credit card payments, in accordance with the conditions of passenger transportation of Deutsche Bahn AG.
Prices can be subject to change.

photo: Claus Weber

Meet the #bbuzz Keynote Speaker Ludwine Probst

dbe — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 14:04:18 +0000

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After a Master’s degree in mathematics, Ludwine unexpectedly joined the IT world as a software engineer. She currently works as a Data Engineer at Cityzen Data on their real-time data processing and machine learning platform.
She is deeply involved in the community Duchess France, a french association to promote women developers, to inspire and encourage them to speak at conferences or technical events.

In her keynote "Analytics in the age of the Internet of Things" she describes how we can build powerful intelligent applications from connected devices in today's big data ecosystem.

The Internet of Things is all the rage, as it promises to produce a massive amount of various data and represents real challenges for both technology and business. Building applications that leverage this coming flood of data will require a different approach, compared to how we build common data applications today. Most if not all of the data acquired from connected and intelligent devices is modeled as time series. Extracting value from time stamped data requires some thoughtful design in storage, processing and the type of algorithms necessary to extract insights from the said data.

Thanks for your input!

dbe — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 16:26:02 +0000

Call for Submissions closed

We are more than happy with the considerable number of 120 submissions for Berlin Buzzwords 2015. In the upcoming weeks, our program committee will review and select the most inspiring and creative session ideas for this year's Berlin Buzzwords. During a first quick review, we have ascertained that the subject areas Lucene, Elasticsearch, Spark, Solr and Cassandra have been among the most popular topics to choose from. We will let you know as soon as possible if your proposal has been accepted.

A huge thanks to all of you for your efforts in submitting your session ideas. Without your commitment, Berlin Buzzwords could not be as inspiring and diversified as it is.

Diversity at Berlin Buzzwords

dbe — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 15:05:27 +0000

bbuzz_diversity.jpg

Berlin Buzzwords aims for a diverse range of speakers and therefore, concentrates not only on the topics, but also on the people behind the talks. For us diversity means that we explicitly encourage submissions from people of color, genderqueer people, trans*people, women as well as people with physical disabilities. Berlin Buzzwords is an international conference but out of 130 submissions, only a few were submitted by female speakers.

Last year the keynote from Katherine Daniels “Devops is Dead: Long Live Devops” was well received by the audience. We also had a great talk on Exploring the Notability Gender Gap (Freebase, BigQuery, Maps) from Ewa Gasperowicz and Felipe Hoffa. We aim to overcome remaining barriers, motivate a diverse range of groups and especially hope for active participation. Therefore, we are providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion.

If you are working on exciting topics and projects with a special focus on Large Data Processing, NoSQL, IR/Search or related topics – Berlin Buzzwords is open for your ideas. Anyone, no matter if experienced or new to the stage, is welcome to propose a session. The most exciting topics will complete the program.

Be part of the sixth edition of Berlin Buzzwords!

Call for Submissions – Be part of #bbuzz 2015

dbe — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 16:52:29 +0000

Call for Submissions

We can't wait to read your proposals. Submit your session on innovative technologies for storing, analysing and searching today's massive amounts of digital data.

We listed all necessary information below. If you have further questions, take a look at our FAQs.

What do you get?

It's a geek to geek conference, but if we choose your session, you get to be the expert and answer questions from the audience. Besides entering the stage at #bbuzz, you get a free ticket for the conference, barcamp and the hackathons.

What topics are we looking for?

Berlin Buzzwords is looking for talks on:

IR / Search – Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch...
NoSQL – like Apache Cassandra, MongoDB, Hbase...
Large Data Processing – Hadoop itself, MapReduce, Cascading, Pig

Your Deadline

Berlin Buzzwords Call for Submissions ends on February 1st, 2015.

Hints For Successful Submissions

From our co-founder Isabel Drost:

Tell us what you are talking about. Provide some information on which direction you'll be heading
Don't be too detailed. Make sure the abstract correctly summarizes your talk, making it catchy and nice to read helps if the content is solid
We try to find those speakers that have not only an interesting topic to talk about but are also a pleasure to listen to, who can successfully get their point across. It helps us if you list which conferences you've spoken at in the past, any videos of previous talks as well
General piece of advice: If that's your first talk, get some practice at local meetups
Make sure your talk is novel
Finally: When drafting your bio make sure to include details that explain why you are the perfect expert to talk about the topic at hand

Registration

Please register here.

You've already registered for Berlin Buzzwords 2014? You only need to update your account. Log in with your details. On the main page you see the note “Berlin Buzzwords 2015: subscribe to event.” Click on it and join the group.

Are you in?

If your session gets accepted, we will inform you.

Good luck!

Ticket sale starts now

dbe — Thu, 11 Dec 2014 16:33:17 +0000

ticket sale

Get ready for the sixth edition of Berlin Buzzwords and safe your limited Trust Us ticket for only € 399 – for as long as stocks last. Early Bird tickets are available for € 499 until February 16, 2015.

Special offers for students, families and groups

Students will receive reduced tickets for € 150. You only need to show your valid student ID at the entrance and you will get the discount.

Groups of 5 and more attendees get a 20% discount off the regular ticket price.

For families we'll provide limited tickets for children, which will include child care to give parents the opportunity to attend Berlin Buzzwords and to take a deep-dive into their favorite topics.

All tickets include our traditional barcamp on May 31, followed by the main conference on Monday & Tuesday at Postbahnhof and finally, the different workshops & hackathons on June 3.

Get your ticket here.

Mark your calendar for Berlin Buzzwords 2015!

dbe — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 16:39:54 +0000

Welcome.jpg

We are back! And we are excited to announce that we’ll be organizing another edition of Berlin Buzzwords, which will be held from May 31 to June 3, 2015. On Sunday, May 31, Berlin Buzzwords starts with the barcamp, followed by the two main conference days on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday attendees can join several workshops, meetups & hackathons taking place all over Berlin hosted by Berlin Buzzwords and local companies.

We had great Berlin Buzzwords at Kulturbrauerei, but for 2015, we wanted to try a new space. And we have found a new home at the beautiful Postbahnhof. Hopefully, it's a venue that can do even more to inspire great discussions and progressive ideas on storing, processing and searching large amounts of digital data.

Ticket sales and the Call for Submissions will start soon. Don't miss it and join us on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Xing.

Berlin Buzzwords 2014 - recap

ako_bbw — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 12:10:47 +0000

thanks

It’s already a week since we celebrated the fifth edition of Berlin Buzzwords and we can honestly say: It was pleasure to welcome all of you at Kulturbrauerei! A big thanks to everyone for being part of it. We hope that you had an awesome time with lots of old friends and new people, as well as some inspiring talks and workshops. The #bbuzz team was responsible for all the organizational details, but our wonderful attendees, speakers and partners were the ones who shaped such an open-minded and communicative atmosphere. This year, our Barcamp was bigger than before, with more than 150 attendees and 16 spontaneous talks that were held and we had a relaxed start on a sunny Sunday afternoon. On Monday and Tuesday, the core conference days, there were around 600 attendees and more than 60 speakers. Last but not least, on Wednesday many of you took the chance to attend one of the #bbuzz meetups and hackathons at different locations in Berlin.

Photos
Check out our Flickr Set for lots of photos from the Barcamp, Conference days, Hackathons and Meetups.

Videos
Did you miss a talk? Would you like to share your favorite talk? You can find all video recordings of talks and sessions in our Youtube Playlist or with each session description on our website. (The two missing ones will be uploaded soon)

Slides
Most of the presentation slides are available on each session description as a pdf. The sessions can be found here.

Feedback
Is there anything you would like to tell us? Please feel free to share your impressions via info@berlinbuzzwords.de so we can keep improving the event. We appreciate your feedback! One really important topic is to help make Berlin Buzzwords more diverse. We are especially looking for ways to encourage more women to feel welcome and attend our event. Your thoughts and comments on this are very welcome!

Thanks again for coming! We look forward to seeing you at Berlin Buzzwords 2015.

Open Stage Program

ako_bbw — Fri, 23 May 2014 15:13:00 +0000

stage

In April, we announced, that we would have a open stage that would be open for everyone to submit a topic and hold a talk. We then received a number of interesting submissions that were scheduled into the program. The Open Stage will be located in the "Frannz Restaurant" in Kulturbrauerei, so right in the main area of our venue. Here's the list of presentations in an overview. You can find it in the normal conference schedule with links to more detailed descriptions.

Monday, May 26:

12:00 to 12:40
PISA a data block replication framework - Federico Mosca and Fabrizio Manfredi

12:50 to 13:10
Documented oriented Access to Graphs - Michael Hunger

14:10 to 15:00
Custom Solr Tokenizer in Action – Flexible Tokenizer mit JFlex erstellen - Markus Klose

15:00 to 16:30
Write plain text and get live, interactive Graph Models in your browser - Michael Hunger

16:40 to 17:00
What's new in MongoDB 2.6. - Marc Schwering

17:10 to 17:30
Cassandra and the Native Driver - Patrick Callaghan

17:40 to 18:00
Cutting Hadoop developer cycle time - David Whiting

Tuesday, May 27

11:30 to 11:50
SHARK ATTACK on SQL-On-Hadoop - Gerd König

12:20 to 13:00
Security and Privacy in Cloud Environments - Thomas Fricke

14:00 to 14:40
Lean Ranking infrastructure with Solr - Sergii Khomenko

15:15 to 16:00
Hadoop on OpenStack cloud - Dmitry Mescheryakov

16:10 to 17:30
Data Modelling in the New World - Patrick Callaghan

Starting off with the Barcamp

ako_bbw — Fri, 23 May 2014 09:09:45 +0000

barcamp

We're just a few days away from the start of our 5th ever Berlin Buzzwords, and preparations are in full swing! To help those of you who are arriving early, here's what's on this Sunday (our day zero).

Sunday's main event is our ever popular BarCamp. As usual, we'll be hosting a wide range of discussions, talks, presentations and debates about all things Search, Scale and Store. Everyone is welcome, whether to attend, speak, debate, ask smart questions, blog, tweet, help, or everything in between! If you're new to the BarCamp, or wondering exactly what to expect, then see our earlier blog post on the topic. The BarCamp is taking place in SODA Moon at Kulturbrauerei, and we'll have some signs up to help guide you in. Registration is open from 4.30 pm, and we kick off at 5 pm. Sessions run until about 9.30pm, so late arrivals are welcome! Don't forget to register for a "Sunday Barcamp and Meetups only" ticket though, so we know how many people to expect.

A big thanks to gutefrage.net for sponsoring food & drinks at the Barcamp! For those coming to the BarCamp, bring along your main conference ticket, and there'll be a chance to collect your conference badge and wristband on Sunday night. That way, you can skip the queues on Monday morning and instead spend more time enjoying the delicious breakfast. Otherwise, on Monday registration opens at 8:30 am, there's breakfast available from 8:30 until 10:00, and our welcome session kicks off at 10:00 am. We'll look forward to seeing you the Kulturbrauerei then!

5 things you should know about Berlin Buzzwords 2014

ako_bbw — Tue, 20 May 2014 14:52:27 +0000

bbuzz

1) This year we celebrate the fifth edition of Berlin Buzzwords Conference!
How time flies! Have a look at our small summary about the history of this event.

2) Berlin Buzzwords takes place at a former Brewery
For the second time, the conference will take place at Kulturbrauerei in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. The former brewery with its distinctive architecture from the end of the 19th century offers 25.000 sqm, 6 courtyards and more than 20 buildings. It is a fantastic open place, especially in summer.

3) How to get there
The address of Kulturbrauerei is Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin. The main entrance is via Sredzkistraße. Take the U-Bahn U2, the S-Bahn "Ringbahn S42", S4, S8 or the Tram M12, M1 or M10 to Eberswalder Straße. You can check all current train and bus connections on the BVG website. The number of a Taxi service is 030 210101 or 030 443322. Taxi bills will not be reimbursed by Berlin Buzzwords or newthinking.

4) It starts with a Barcamp on May 25
Come along for great discussions and knowledge sharing with your fellow attendees! Many people have already registered, but there are some spaces left. Plus: if you join the #bbuzz Barcamp you can bring your conference ticket to already check-in and save time on Monday morning.
Details:
- Where: Soda Moon at Kulturbrauerei
- Date: May 25, 2014 (the evening before Berlin Buzzwords Conference)
- When: 5.00 pm - 9.30 pm (registration starts 4.30 pm)
- Who: Eligible are all attendees of Berlin Buzzwords
- Registration: to guarantee you a place please register here for "Sunday Barcamp and Meetups only"

5) There are great Meetups and Hackathons around the conference
Before and after the two days of Berlin Buzzwords conference, it's time to get involved, make things happen and work on high quality and deep technical content. Besides the barcamp on Sunday we offer attendees the possibility of visiting meetups, workshops and hackathons for an intense and focused insight into their favorite topics. They are organised by volunteers and hosted by Berlin Buzzwords as well as local companies. Berlin Buzzwords attendees are free to go to any of these after successful registration.
For detailed information on meetups and hackathons please check out this list.

Join the Meetups and Hackathons!

ako_bbw — Fri, 16 May 2014 14:19:25 +0000

hackathon

Before and after the two days of Berlin Buzzwords conference, it's time to get involved, make things happen and work on high quality and deep technical content. Besides the annual barcamp on Sunday we offer attendees the possibility of visiting meetups, workshops and hackathons for an intense and focused insight into their favorite topics. They are organised by volunteers and hosted by Berlin Buzzwords as well as local companies. Berlin Buzzwords attendees are free to go to any of these after successful registration.

Below is a summary of all Hackathons and Meetups. For more detailed information please check out the extended list.

Cassandra 2.1 with Jonathan Ellis
Tuesday, May 27, 2014 7:00 PM (register here!)

Jonathan Ellis, co-Founder and CTO at DataStax and Cassandra Project Chair at Apache Software Foundation, will be speaking about Cassandra 2.1. This is a great opportunity to meet him and hear about his experience.

HitFox meets Berlin Buzzwords
Tuesday, May 27, 2014 (register here!)

HitFox is a startup incubator based in Berlin, with offices in San Francisco and Seoul. Since many people don’t associate them with building technological projects within the big data sphere, they are organizing an open house with drinks, food, and talks after the closing session of the Buzzwords Conference.

12th Recommender Stammtisch
Thursday, May 22, 2014 (register here!)

This May, the Recommender Stammtisch returns to ResearchGate. You can look forward to two exciting talks by Sebastian Schelter and Stefan Savev, followed by a happy hour.

Data Talk
Thursday, May 26, 2014 (register here!)

Common Crawl meets MIA – Gathering and Crunching Open Web Data
There will be two projects presented that set off to democratize the access to public Web data and provide the means of analysis to virtually anyone. Be our guest when Lisa Green and Jordan Mendelson present Common Crawl, a Web crawl made publicly accessible for further research and dissemination, and Peter Adolphs introduces MIA, a Cloud-based platform for analyzing Web-scale data sets with a toolbox of natural language processing algorithms.

Cascading Meetup
Monday, May 26, 2014 (register here!)

Simplifying Application Development on Hadoop
This session is about simplifying application development on Hadoop by using Cascading, an open source Java application framework that provides higher level data processing abstractions. This talk focuses on our experience in building complex data flow applications, that are enterprise-grade, through test driven development. The talk will also be showcasing, through live demo and code, how an application developed with Cascading can be extended to integrate with predictive models built with analytics tools, like R, and scaled-out on a Hadoop cluster.

HitFox meets Berlin Buzzwords
Tuesday, May 27, 2014 (register here!)

HitFox is a startup incubator based in Berlin, with offices in San Francisco and Seoul. Since many people don’t associate us with building technological projects within the big data sphere, we are organizing an open house with drinks, food, and talks after the closing session of the Buzzwords conference.

Meetup Java Usergroup Berlin-Brandenburg (in German)
Wednesday, May 28, 2014 (register here!)

Die Java Usergroup Berlin-Brandenburg und die iJUG laden ein zum Vortrag Wissenstransfer 2.0: Liest du noch oder programmierst du schon? mit Dr. Marcel Bruch von Codetrails UG.

Big Data Beers Meetup
Thursday, May 29, 2014 (register here!)

The Big Data Beers Meetup takes place at hub:raum and there will be two exciting speakers: Ted Dunning (MapR) and Sebastian Schelter (Mahout). The Hashtag is #bigdatabeers

(Graphs)-[:ARE]->(Everyhwere) Learn&Hack-Day
Wednesday, May 28, 2014 (register here!)

Join for a relaxed day of learning about the power of graphs, graph modeling and querying. Take a look into cool use-cases and applications, and explore how easy it is to get your own graph-model and -app going in just a few minutes.

Data Stream Mining Hackathon
Wednesday, May 28, 2014 (register here!)
At the last day of the Berlin Buzzwords 2014 conference retresco and developers from avantgarde labs and streamdrill invite up to 20 people to Hack one day on the topic of Stream-Mining. We will focus on on implementing algorithms like Sketching, Reservoir Sampling and Priority Sampling for Sliding Windows and will work with lot's of short text data to test the algorithms. Currently we think we will work in python, but other languages are welcome too.

Elasticsearch Hackfest
Wednesday, May 28, 2014 (register here!)

The monthly Elasticsearch Usergroup Berlin meet-up will be transformed into a day long Hackfest with a social gathering in the evening (including talks by members of the Elasticsearch team) on May 28. Members of the Elasticsearch Team will be present both at the Hackfest and the Social Gathering.

photo: CC-BY-SA by Matylda Czarnecka

Hadoop on OpenStack cloud

ako_bbw — Wed, 14 May 2014 09:14:10 +0000

rastermirantislogo_hires_tagline.png

On Tuesday, May 27, Dmitry Mescheryakov from Mirantis will talk about OpenStack cloud. OpenStack is a fast growing cloud platform. Hadoop was brought there a year ago by Sahara (ex. Savanna) project. The Project's aim is to remove the entry barrier for running Hadoop on OpenStack. Sahara eases the move to OpenStack, as it hides details unneeded for the end user to deploy Hadoop cluster on OpenStack. It can not only deploy the cluster, but also scale an existing one. Another Sahara advantage is the provisioning speed: it can bring up a cluster of vanilla Hadoop in five minutes.
This talk is sponsored by Mirantis, a pure-play OpenStack Company. They deliver all the technology, integration, training and support required for companies to succeed with production-grade open source cloud. Companies rely on Mirantis to scale out OpenStack without the compromises of vendor lock-in. Their bench of 400+ open source infrastructure experts helped make them one of the top 5 contributors to OpenStack’s upstream codebase. Please find more information on the time and content of this talk here.

Speaker Interviews

dbe — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 09:12:26 +0000

Speaker Interviews

This year we've conducted interviews with our Berlin Buzzwords Speakers to get to know them better. How did they get started developing software? What will their talks be about? What do they hope to accomplish by giving their talk? What do the expect?

You can find the interviews here.

On track to Berlin Buzzwords

dbe — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 15:12:16 +0000

Bahn

Acting today for tomorrow: Travel by train for Euro 99 with 100% green power to Berlin Buzzwords 2014!

In cooperation with newthinking communications GmbH and Deutsche Bahn you travel safely and conveniently to Berlin Buzzwords.

Your way to save the environment: Travel with 100% green power to Berlin Buzzwords with Deutsche Bahn long-distance services. Deutsche Bahn guarantees to get the energy you needed for your journey in Germany from 100% renewable sources.

The price for your Event Ticket for a return trip* is:

2nd class Euro 99
1st class Euro 159

The Deutsche Bahn service centre is looking forward to inform you about the ticket price for international journeys.

In order to book call +49 (0)1806 - 31 11 53** and quote “buzzwords” as reference. Have your credit card ready please.

From now on, every time you purchase an Event Ticket with your BahnCard or bahn.bonus Card you can collect valuable bonus and status points. Redeem your bonus points by selecting attractive offers such as free journeys or first-class upgrades. For more information go to www.bahn.de/bahn.bonus

newthinking communications GmbH and Deutsche Bahn wish you a pleasant journey!

* An advance booking of at least three days is required. Changes and reimbursement before the first day of validity are possible. Changes and reimbursement conditions at the time of the ticket booking are according to Conditions of Carriage of the DB of Sparpreis fares. Changes and reimbursement are excluded from the first day of validity onwards. Passengers restrict themselves to a particular train and travel times. For a supplement of Euro 40 full flexible tickets are also available for domestic travels within Germany.
** The booking line is available from Monday to Saturday 07:00 am to 10:00 pm. Calls will be charged at Euro 0.20 per call, from mobiles Euro 0.60 per call at maximum.

5 years Berlin Buzzwords!

ako_bbw — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 12:33:29 +0000

5.jpg

How time flies: This year we celebrate the fifth edition of Berlin Buzzwords Conference! It all began in 2010 with an announcment at FOSDEM: Berlin Buzzwords - a conference focusing on scalable search, storage and processing - was to take place in early June in Berlin.

The first Berlin Buzzwords Conference presented speakers like Grant Ingersoll, Eric Evans, Doug Judd, Michael Busch, Steve Loughran, Frank Scholten and Sean Owen. The conference featured talks from the NoSQL community, Lucene, Apache Mahout and Hadoop. More than 300 attendees filled the venue "Kosmos Berlin" to join presentations of international speakers specific to the three tags "search", "store" and "scale".

In 2011, the second edition took place at Urania in Berlin. Once again, with the goal of bringing together developers, scientists and analysts working on innovative technologies for storing, analysing and searching massive amounts of digital data. Have a look at all the amazing speakers of 2011 here.

In 2012 Berlin Buzzwords took place at Urania again, but we gave the event a new design, a fresh look that stayed until now. Watch the video to hear some speakers and attendees talk about their experience.

Last year, we moved into a great new venue. Kulturbrauerei Berlin is a former beer brewery. Its inner courtyard is the heart of the venue, where people meet and have a drink together, while the different rooms provide enough space for several talks and workshops. If you're interested in last year's topics, check out our youtube playlist that contains video recordings of the sessions!

So how does one celebrate the fifth birthday of a conference? We'd say: with another great conference, with the most interesting sessions and lot's of additional activities that make Berlin Buzzwords a special experience. Don't miss the Barcamp on Sunday and check out the workshops and hackathons!

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 Henrik Becker

Call for Help

ako_bbw — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 13:20:17 +0000

call_for_help.jpg

7 weeks to go until Berlin Buzzwords 2014! We're already busy with preparations and planning and we're excited about the upcoming fifth edition of the event. For the conference days, we need some additional support. That's why we're asking you for help. We're looking for a few people who would like to be part of our team as a #bbuzz volunteer, assisting us and helping to make Berlin Buzzwords a great experience.

These are the different tasks and areas where you can support us:

1) Be a stage manager: support our speakers and keep the schedule in time
2) Help with Set-Up before the conference and be a "runner"
3) Be a "runner" and help us with cleaning up
4) Accreditation: welcome our attendees and speakers and check their tickets

In each of these positions you'll work for ~8 hours and in return you'll receive a ticket for Berlin Buzzwords that includes access to the conference program, catering, the barcamp and the workshops.

If this is something for you, then please don't hesitate and contact Daniela via e-mail (dbe@newthinking.de)! If you have special preferences regarding the time and area of your voluntary shift, please let us know. We'll try to consider this in our planning and contact you directly to talk about the details.

Thanks a lot for your support. We're looking forward to get in touch!

Speakers and Sessions are now online!

ako_bbw — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 16:27:57 +0000

speakers

We're happy to publish the list of speakers and sessions for Berlin Buzzwords 2014 conference program!

You can find the speakers here and browse the sessions here.

This year's program is full of interesting topics. There is a good amount of machine learning/data analytics that makes a whole program track. Then we have a lot of search topics, some Hadoop talks. Storage/NoSQL talks are also in, although a bit less. We have great talks that offer background insights, e.g. "Scoring for human beings" by Britta Weber, "Randomize your tests and it will blow your socks off" by Dawid Weiss and "Consensus and Consistency" by Neha Narula.

What's also a little different this year is that Search and Data Analytics are more closely connected. Talks do not only cover full-text search but also include aggregations, Solr on Hadoop (e.g. the talk by Mark Miller), percolation and geo search - features that directly enable real time data analysis. We also have Uwe Schindler on "The Apache Lucene Infrastructure", Steve Loughran on "The Secrets of YARN application development" and Chris "Hoss" Hostetter on "Hidden Gems: Getting More Out Of Apache Solr" - just to name a few, but please make sure to check out all of our great speakers!

The next step of our program planning will be the arrangement of those sessions into a schedule, which we will publish soon on this website. If you don't have a ticket yet, get it here - and join us in May for Berlin Buzzwords 2014!
Get updates via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Xing or subscribe to our newsletter (on this site).

The Open Stage is yours!

dbe — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:21:59 +0000

Open Stage

tl;dr - We're inviting you to submit your proposal for a talk or workshop on the Open Stage until May 8, 2014!

Are you working on a new project that you would like to share with others and get feedback? This year, we're having an Open Stage again, giving you the opportunity to hold a talk or workshop for a topic of your choice. This is the place for your thoughts and ideas or maybe for your first speaking experience in front of a kind and very interested audience.

In parallel to the regular conference schedule, the Open Stage will be hosting talks and workshops on Monday and Tuesday from 12:00 to 17:30. The number of talks depends on their lenght and is based on the first-come-first-serve principle. Just fill in the form here - you'll then hear back from us with a confirmation and more information on the date and time. This stage will be moderated by session chairs who will supervise the advertised slot lengths.

We would like to invite everyone, from all experience-levels, regardless of gender, physical appearance, sexual orientation or religion, to propose a talk or workshop and be part of a diverse Open Stage Program! If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us. We're always glad to help and assist.

As an additional incentive, we're giving away two free tickets for this years GOTO conference in Berlin. All proposals for the Open Stage that reach us before the end of this month (March 31th, 2014, 23:59 CET) will take part in the raffle, so be quick!

Please have in mind that you need a ticket for Berlin Buzzwords to present on the Open Stage.

Get involved - Join our Barcamp!

dbe — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 11:40:54 +0000

Berlin Buzzwords Barcamp

While planning your trip to Berlin Buzzwords, it's well worth trying to arrive on the Sunday 25th May. Firstly because that'll mean you get a chance to see some of the lovely city of Berlin, but more importantly so you can attend the Sunday evening pre-conference BarCamp!

Old hands can skip this paragraph, but for many other people, BarCamps can be a slightly strange and intimidating beast, but they needn't be! Run along unconference lines, there is no set schedule before the event, only the main themes of the evening (those of the conference itself). The evening begins with a blank schedule, but after the welcome is filled in based on what people want to learn about, what people want to share, and who's present. Some people participate by leading a session, others by asking interesting questions, and the most popular are those who take notes to be shared online! Everyone takes part as best they can, sharing their knowledge where possible, learning lots otherwise.

If you don't know what's going to be covered, how do you know if you should come? How do you convince people to let you arrive a day early? Well, we can't promise you any given session, but we can tell you a little bit about what we've had in previous years, to hopefully whet your appetite. Last year's most popular sessions included:

* Hadoop: The good, the bad
* Which NoSQL to use when, as based on real world experience? Couch, Mongo, Cassandra etc
* Twitter Storm
* Parsing logs at scale
* Elastic Search vs SOLR, in theory and production
* Elastic Search + Raspberry Pi demo

Some sessions tend to work more like mini talks, typically for something very new and popular where we've an expert. Some are round table discussions, such as around picking solutions based on the experience of everyone. Some are people trying a live demo of a system. Some are a debate, such as the time we invited the SQL standards body and set them loose on the NoSQL crowd, or when we put two solutions head-to-head. There's normally 2-3 session in parallel, so you can pick what works for you. We can't promise what'll be there, but we can be sure it'll be a great night!

The Berlin Buzzwords BarCamp will take place on Sunday 25th May, at Soda Moon at Kulturbrauerei. Registration starts at 4.30 pm, and all attendees of Berlin Buzzwords are invited to participate. Just sign up for a "Sunday Barcamp and Meetups only" when you book your bbuzz ticket, and we'll see you in Berlin in May!

- by Nick Burch

Foto CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden

The Call for Submissions is now closed

dbe — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 09:54:16 +0000

Call for Submissions is closed

We are excited about more than 120 submissions for Berlin Buzzwords 2014! What an amazing finish: Nearly half of the talks were submitted on the last day of the Call. Every year it is really thrilling for us to observe the proposals coming in at the last moment. Again it seems that we have a huge amount of inspiring and terrific session ideas. In the next weeks our program committee will review and evaluate the numerous proposals. We will let you know a s soon as possible if your submission is accepted.

Thanks to all who submitted their great session ideas. Without you Berlin Buzzwords wouldn't be as awesome as it is.

Fotos CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden

New Keynote Speaker: Katherine Daniels

dbe — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 17:01:18 +0000

Katherine Daniels

Today we are glad to announce our next keynote speaker for Berlin Buzzwords 2014: Katherine Daniels.

Katherine Daniels is an operations engineer at GameChanger.io, where she focuses on automation and monitoring while occasionally dabbling in beer-driven development. Before escaping to the world of operations at NYC-based startups, she spent a few years doing QA and systems engineering in the corporate world.

She lives in Brooklyn with a perfectly reasonable number of cats, and in her spare time can often be found rock climbing or making hot sauce.

We are looking forward to Katherine's keynote at #bbuzz 2014!

Introducing our First Keynote Speaker: Ralf Herbrich

dbe — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 09:53:49 +0000

ralf_herbrich.png

We are proud to announce our first keynote speaker for Berlin Buzzwords 2014.

Ralf Herbrich is Director of Machine Learning at Amazon. From 2011 to 2012, he worked at Facebook leading the Unified Ranking and Allocation team building large-scale machine learning infrastructure for learning user-action-rate predictors that enabled unified value experiences across Facebook products.

From 2009 to 2011, he was Director of Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab UK working on the development of computational intelligence technologies on large online data collections. From 2006 to 2010, Ralf was co-leading the Applied Games and Online Services and Advertising group at Microsoft Research Cambridge which engaged in research at the intersection of machine learning and computer games and in the areas of online services, search and online advertising combining insights from machine learning, information retrieval, game theory, artificial intelligence and social network analysis. Ralf joined Microsoft Research in 2000 as a Postdoctoral researcher and Research Fellow of the Darwin College Cambridge. Prior to joining Microsoft, he obtained both a diploma degree in Computer Science in 1997 and a Ph.D. degree in Statistics in 2000 from Technical University of Berlin. Ralf has published over 80 papers and holds over 30 patents. His research interests include Bayesian inference and decision making, kernel methods, statistical learning theory, distributed systems and programming languages. Ralf is one of the inventors of the Drivatars™ system in the Forza Motorsport series as well as the TrueSkill™ ranking and matchmaking system in Xbox 360 Live. He also co-invented the adPredictor click-prediction technology launched in 2009 in Bing's online advertising system.

Berlin Buzzwords is really glad to have Ralf as a keynote speaker. We are excited and look forward to the conference in May.

Hackathons & Workshops at Berlin Buzzwords

dbe — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 16:38:23 +0000

Hackathons & Workshops

Collaboration, participation and openness. Although Berlin Buzzwords is evolving and changing, it will always remain a community event and not just a conference with lectures. Berlin Buzzwords wants to provide a forum to meet, discuss, connect and inspire attendees with problems and topics on storing, processing and searching large amounts of digital data.

Before and after the two days of conference, the Berlin Buzzwords attendees want to be more active. They can't wait to make things happen and work on high quality and deep technical content. Besides the annual barcamp on Sunday we offer attendees the possibility of visiting meetups, workshops and hackathons for an intense and focused insight into their favorite topics. They are organised by volunteers and hosted by Berlin Buzzwords as well as local companies. Berlin Buzzwords attendees are free to go to any of these after successful registration.

Are you are interested in providing space for a hackathon or workshop? Please contact partner [at] berlinbuzzwords.de. Do you want to co-locate a meetup or hackathon with Berlin Buzzwords? We're happy to promote your event. Please use our Call for Submissions form for your proposal.

We are looking forward to lots of interesting workshops & hackathons that will help to get people started with all the fascinating Berlin Buzzwords topics.

Foto CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden

More Diversity at Berlin Buzzwords

dbe — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:33:29 +0000

Ariel Waldman

Berlin Buzzwords always wanted to have a more diverse speaker talent pool. Last year we received over 120 submissions, but only a few were by women. Looking back on two great keynotes by Leslie Hawthorne and Ariel Waldman we realized once again that the female potential is an important factor for the success of an inspiring and strong conference. Especially Ariel Waldman's keynote "The Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy" in 2013 made a big impression on the attendees. Therefore, we want to overcome remaining barriers, motivate the female audience and hope especially for active participation of women.

If you are working on exciting topics and projects with a special focus on Large Data Processing, NoSQL, IR/Search or related topics - Berlin Buzzwords is open for your ideas. Anyone, no matter if experienced or new to the stage, is welcome to propose a session. The most exciting topics will complete the program.

Be part of the fifth edition of Berlin Buzzwords! You have something to say!

Foto CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden

The Call for Submissions is now open!

dbe — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:17:07 +0000

Call for Submissions

We want you on stage!

Berlin Buzzwords is looking for speakers who submit talks on the following topics:

• Information Retrieval / Search – Lucene, Solr, katta, ElasticSearch or comparable solutions
• NoSQL – like CouchDB, MongoDB, Jackrabbit, Hbase and others
• Large Data Processing – Hadoop itself, MapReduce, Cascading or Pig

Closely related topics not explicity listed above are welcome as well.

If you would like to co-locate a meetup or hackathon with Berlin Buzzwords, we're happy to promote your event. You can also use our Call for Submissions form for your proposal.

The Call for Submissions will be open until February 9! Please register here

Foto CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden

Your idea on stage!

dbe — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 14:55:05 +0000

Suggest a Topic

Do you have an idea for a great session but don't want to be a speaker yourself? Tell us your suggestion!

If you missed your favorite topic at Berlin Buzzwords last time or want to hear more about a specific theme, you can fill in our form. Add the title and abstract of the session you would love to see and feel free to add a speaker wish, too.

Please note that this is not the official Call for Submissions! Proposals will not be automatically considered in the selection program!

Foto CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden

Call for Submissions starts in January

dbe — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 10:35:47 +0000

Barcamp

In 2014, Berlin Buzzwords once again offers everyone the chance to become a speaker and present their ideas in front of a large international audience.

Berlin Buzzwords is looking for speakers who submit talks on the following topics:

Closely related topics not explicity listed above are welcome as well.

Talks and workshops should concentrate on the implementation of systems, technical topics, real world applications and case studies. Berlin Buzzwords is known for its eclectic program: In 2013, the conference presented more than 30 talks by international speakers specific to the three tags "search", "store" and "scale". Presentations ranged from beginner friendly introductions on hot data analysis topics to in-depth technical presentations about scalable architectures.

Foto CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden

Ticket sale for #bbuzz 2014 starts on December 16!

dbe — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 16:46:19 +0000

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Limited "Trust us"-Tickets for € 399,-!

Get one of the limited "Trust us"-Tickets for € 399,- while stock lasts!
Early Bird Tickets will be available for € 499,- until February 16, 2014. Students still get their ticket online for € 150,-. Just make sure to show your valid student ID at the entrance.

Berlin Buzzwords offers a special rate for groups of 5 and more attendees with a 20% discount off the regular ticket price. All tickets include our traditional barcamp on May 25, followed by the main conference on Monday & Tuesday and finally, the different workshops & hackathons on May 28.

New Ticket Categories available!

We want Berlin Buzzwords to be more family-friendly: In 2014 we'll offer a special ticket category for children, to give parents the opportunity to attend Berlin Buzzwords. We will also provide conference child care so every attendee can take a deep-dive into their favorite topics. The conference child care is included in your child's ticket (limited availability).

If you don't have time to join the whole conference, but you would like to meet friends and familiar faces, there's a solution for you: This time there will be a Hallway Track Ticket which allows access to the Barcamp, to the catering area on Monday & Tuesday and to all Meetups.

The ticket sale will start on December 16 at 2 pm (CET)! We are looking forward to seeing you in May 2014!

Foto CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden