Data Scientists Descend Upon the HQ

Data Scientists Descend Upon the HQ

Last night, People Pattern HQ was delighted to play host to the inaugural Austin Data Meetup. As dusk approached and our courtyard filled with carefully locked bicycles and practically parked cars, over sixty Central Texas data scientists gathered inside to talk shop amongst boxes of local pizza and craft beer.

The event highlighted Professor Jason Baldridge, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at People Pattern, and Steve Blackmon, VP of Data Science at People Pattern. Both trailblazers in the field of data science, Jason and Steve spoke to a packed house, with the crowd squeezed onto couches, standing in corners and tucked into the elusive conference room chair.

Steve Blackmon discussed recent developments in Apache Spark, which completed its 1.0 release milestone and graduated from the Apache Incubator earlier this year. Spark has been generating attention in the big data community for providing modern, flexible, scalable tools and libraries for big data analysis. Steve trekked to San Francisco for Spark Summit last month and shared some takeaways from the sessions, tutorials and chatter with the group.

The Professor presented some of the recent research he’s been hard at work on with his colleagues and UT Austin students. He focused on text-based geolocation using Wikipedia, Twitter and other sources, and referenced a number of papers he has contributed to, including Text-Driven Toponym Resolution using Indirect Supervision, co-written with Mike Speriosu, and Supervised Text-based Geolocation Using Language Models on an Adaptive Grid, co-authored with Stephen Roller, Mike Speriosu, Sarat Rallapalli and Benjamin Wing.

Missed the event and interested in hearing more about what People Pattern is up to? Feel free to contact us for a demo.

In the meantime…welcome to the Edge of the Future.

See the slide show here.