GraphLab in Budapest

 

This week I was visiting the Hungarian National Academy of Sciences. I was invited as part of our newly formed collaboration with the Lawa FP7 EU research project. Lawa stands for "Longitude Analytics for Web Scale Data". As part of this collaboration, GraphLab will be used for running algorithms on web scale data collected and analyzed by the Lawa project. My host was András Benczúr's who hosted us superbly. Scott Kirkpatrick from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is heading this collaboration and create the link between the projects.

I gave a talk about GraphLab and I got a crowd of about 30 researchers with a lot of interesting questions and comments. One pleasant surprise was that several people from Gravity showed up in my talk. Gravity was one of the leading teams in the Netflix prize. Specifically I had a nice discussion with Levente Török from the Gravity team. Levente has installed GraphLab not long ago and started to play with it.

An interesting research performed as part of the Lawa project is done one joining range queries by Peter Triantafillou from University of Patras, Greece. Join range queries are very useful when querying large datasets. Some cool bay area startup called quantiFind have some really impressive demo of which kinds of data you can gather using join range queries. Here is a video I got from Ari Tuchman their co-founder:

While staying in Budapest, and "stealing" wireless internet from some coffee shops I was still busy arranging our first GraphLab workshop. Piero P. Bonissonem chief scientist in General Electric Global Research has emailed me and kindly agree to participate in our program committee. Gilad Shainer from Mellanox, is the chair of the High Performance Computing Advisory Council, a non-profit organization promoting HPC computing with over 300 worldwide companies and university participating, has kindly agreed to help us organize the event.

I got the following encouraging note from John Marc Agnosta, a reseacher at Toyota InfoTechnology Center USA:

I just came across your blog post on the first Graphlab workshop planned for this summer, and I'd like to join the list of participating individuals & companies.

Let me introduce myself. I have been a member of Intel Research, where I gotten to know some of the other folks mentioned in the program committee. After leaving Intel Research last year, I've just recently joined a small Bay Area lab that is a Toyota joint venture. I am their machine learning lead. We are planning some efforts this coming year where the GraphLab could be employed.

I've heard about GraphLab at UAI and in discussions with other research folks, and I'm excited to see it progress.

I want to deeply thank Piero, Gilad and John, and all the others who are actively helping to promote and organize our workshop - without your great help it was simply not possible to make it happen.