News

Mark your calendar for Berlin Buzzwords 2016!

dbe — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 15:28:55 +0000

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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 or click through some of the photos that we collected on Photo:

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!

Linux pour garder son PC propre!

map reduce explained - thx Dave Chapell

Surprises you find when reading through the SQLite code. Somebody must've received a lot of calls.

Here's a true gem.

Thank you!

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

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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 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: 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

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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 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:

Where?

This full-day hands-on workshop on 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 Where?
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

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:

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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

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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 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

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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 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

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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 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

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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 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

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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 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 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,

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

You can register here: Thomas Wegner

Speaker interview: Szehon Ho

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

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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 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:

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 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

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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 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

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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 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

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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

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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 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

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We're glad to announce that the complete
Eric Evans (engineer for the Wikimedia Foundation) – Andrew Clegg (data scientist at Etsy) –
Michael Busch (architect in Search & Content at Twitter) –

Speaker interview: Boaz Leskes

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

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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 Julien

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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 ...

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #8

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

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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 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 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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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".

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 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 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 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

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #6

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

Speaker at Bbuzz

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".

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

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #5

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

speaker_5_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".

"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

speaker_4_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".

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

Apache Flink.png

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

blogbeitrag_speaker_2.png

Michael on Twitter

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.

Till on Twitter

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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 are looking for hosts, idea contributors and space for our annual events.

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

speaker_2_bbuzz.png

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

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.

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #1

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

speaker_1_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".

Twitter

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 “

Boaz Leskes at #bbuzz 2014 on "

Spoilt for choice: book your accommodation now

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

eastside_gallery.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

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

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 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

EricEvans.png

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:

Meet the #bbuzz Keynote Speaker Ludwine Probst

dbe — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 14:04:18 +0000

Ludwine_Probst.jpg

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

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.

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

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
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!)

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!)

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

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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

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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

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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 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

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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:

• 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.

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 for € 399,- while stock lasts!
Hallway Track Ticket which allows access to the Barcamp, to the catering area on Monday & Tuesday and to all Meetups.

The CC BY-ND 3.0 Philipp Kaden

News

Mark your calendar for Berlin Buzzwords 2016!

Thank you!

Time for #bbuzz binge watching!

Closing Party and free side events

First impressions of #bbuzz 2015

Come along to the Barcamp today!

Application Performance Management with Open Source Tools

Scale with NSQ: a realtime distributed messaging platform

Speaker interview: Andrew Psaltis

Speaker Interview: Andrej Rosenheinrich

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #15

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

Cassandra at Yammer

Speaker interview: Tudor Golubenco

Speaker interview: Patrick Peschlow

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #14

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

Online learning, Vowpal Wabbit and Hadoop

Speaker interview: Konark Modi

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

Speaker interview: Szehon Ho

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #13

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

Hive on Spark

Speaker interview: Andrew Clegg

GameDuell Tech Talk: Boaz Leskes about Resilience in Elasticsearch

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #12

Fast Decompression Lucene Codec

Approaching Join Index for Lucene

The Earnestness of Being Important, by Grant Ingersoll

Speaker interview: Till Rohrmann

Speaker interview: Ameya Kanitkar

Speaker interview: Rafał Kuć

Apache Flink deep-dive

Signatures, patterns and trends: Timeseries data mining at Etsy

Change Data Capture: The Magic Wand We Forgot

Speaker interview: Ludwine Probst

Speaker interview: Mikhail Khludnev

Become a Volunteer!

Speaker interview: Boaz Leskes

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #10

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

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #9

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

Detecting Events on the Web with Java, Kafka and ZooKeeper

Real Time Big Data Analytics with Kafka, Storm & HBase

Speaker interview: Julien Nioche

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #8

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #7

Speaker interview: Georgi Knox

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #6

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #5

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

Diving into Elasticsearch Discovery

An introduction to Apache Kylin - Business Intelligence meets Big Data

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #4

Predictive Insights for IT Operations

Data Challenges with 3D Computer Vision

Apache Flink Workshop

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

Why organizing a hackathon or workshop?

Create an event!

Support #bbuzz, we support you

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #2

Speakers at #bbuzz 2015 – #1

Spoilt for choice: book your accommodation now

Announcement of event partnership with droidcon Berlin

Introducing Eric Evans - our second keynote speaker

Travel with 100% green power to Berlin Buzzwords

Meet the #bbuzz Keynote Speaker Ludwine Probst

Thanks for your input!

Diversity at Berlin Buzzwords

Call for Submissions – Be part of #bbuzz 2015

Ticket sale starts now

Mark your calendar for Berlin Buzzwords 2015!

Berlin Buzzwords 2014 - recap

Open Stage Program

Starting off with the Barcamp

5 things you should know about Berlin Buzzwords 2014

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