Jeff Eastman, Windward Solutions

Dr. Jeff Eastman is an engineer, mentor and entrepreneur with many years of experience building advance software applications. He was a long-time engineer and architect at HP and left to start his own software consulting practice in 1994. Jeff was the core developer of HP Distributed Smalltalk and Smalltalk Broker ORBs. He co-authored Object Data Management Group ODMG standard in the late 90s. He has developed large systems for telecommunication management, internet service billing as well as lead large scale Agile Development projects. Most recently he has focused on cloud computing. Jeff is a committer on the Apache Mahout project developing scalable machine learning algorithms for the Hadoop supercomputing platform.

http://jeffeastman.blogspot.com/

Presentation: "Machine Learning Over Petabytes: Apache Mahout"

Time: Tuesday 11:15 - 12:00

Location: To be announced

Abstract: The Apache Mahout project is dedicated to the production of open source Machine Learning tools on the Apache Hadoop supercomputing platform that can orchestrate thousands of computers to analyze huge volumes of data in reasonable time. Mahout currently offers highly scalable programs for classifying (is this spam?), clustering (are these similar?), recommending (if you like X you might also like Y) and other tasks that can improve their performance by learning from past experiences. Coupled with cost-effective cloud computing infrastructures such as Amazon's EC2/S3, this means that it is now practical for even small companies to distill Business Intelligence from Internet-sized datasets. The speaker will give an overview of the Mahout project and will show some illustrative examples of their work.

Presentation: "Net Promoter(TM) in the Cloud: An Experiment on the Force.com(TM)"

Time: Tuesday 14:00 - 14:45

Location: To be announced

Abstract:

The Force.com Platform is a powerful, scalable and secure application development platform that is an offshoot of the popular Salesforce.com CRM SAAS system. It offers a web-based development platform that can be used to construct new business objects, define rules and events, trigger and automate business work flows. It occupies a recognized position as a Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) product. Intrigued by the promise of the Force.com platform, the author integrated a set of Net Promoter business objects and business processes into the platform's CRM environment. In this talk, Jeff described his experiences and illustrate the results of this experiment in cloud computing.

The Net Promoter Score is a simple customer loyalty metric that was introduced by Frederick F. Reichheld his 2003 Harvard Business Review article "The One Number You Need to Grow." It maintains that the single most important indicator of customer satisfaction is their answers to the question: "Would you recommend this product (service) to a colleague or friend?" Proponents claim this simple metric is easier for organizations to utilize than more complicated statistical analysis and that it correlates exceedingly well with company growth.