Date:     Sep 09/03/15 8:36 AM
Subject:  NEJUG Meeting: Big Data in Practice with Cassandra and Spark
From:     Stevel Lintz


The next general meeting of the NEJUG is coming up soon and you are welcome to attend.
All you need do is register, show up for the meeting, relax and absorb.
Come by a bit early, and you'll have time for pizza and sodas - fully sponsored by Constant Contact
(who also provide our excellent meeting facility).

Register now to reserve your seat

Title: Big Data in Practice with Cassandra and Spark
Presenter: Vineet Sinha, Craig Lubin, and Brian Tarbox
Location: Constant Contact
Date: Thu, Sep 10

Here's the standard meeting agenda:

5:00 - Doors open for pre-meeting socializing (and seat claiming)
5:30 - Pizza, enough for two slices per person
6:00 - Start of Meeting (*)
- Welcome and NEJUG Announcements
6:10 - Announcements from the floor
- Upcoming events, e.g. workshops, meetings, space launches
- Job announcements - real jobs from real people (not head-hunter trolling)
6:20 - Lightning Talk
6:30 - Main Talk (part 1)
7:15 - Break
7:30 - Main Talk (part 2)
8:15 - Wrap Up & Q/A
8:45 - Adjourn - Clean Up & Get Out (*)

(*) All but the start and end times are approximate, depending on the flow of the meeting.

Register now to reserve your seat

Presentation Summary:

With the ever increasing need to extract information from large data sources, "Big Data" is becoming very hot.
We will have a set of presentations showing how the big data technologies line up for to solve problems.
We will cover industry use-cases, challenges driving technologies in this space, architectures for using these technologies, and what some of the main technology options are.

We will also dive into two particular technologies: We will introduce Cassandra as an option for storage -
in particular for when you need high scalability and for fault-tolerance on commodity hardware (or cloud infrastructure).
For processing options we will introduce Spark for fast large-scale data processing using an intuitive and unified API.

Speaker Background:

Vineet Sinha is the Director of Analytics Platforms at Cengage Learning, a large $1B+ company transforming to becoming an Educational Technology company.
In this role, Vineet is responsible for technology strategy to help the company, its users, and its software to become more data-driven.
Previously he has started multiple companies and has led efforts for building smart users interfaces around large data sources. Vineet has a PhD from the CS+AI Lab at MIT focusing on these challenges.

Craig Lubin is a Full Stack Developer and Functional Programming Evangelist. Combining a mix of passion, and love of software development,
Craig has designed and developed several software systems in the financial, e-commerce, and education sectors.
Craig specializes in leveraging best of breed open source software to create software infrastructure to drive efficient product creation.
Coding well, learning by doing, and building great teams are also his drivers for success. Craig holds a Masters in Physics from the City University of New York.

Brian Tarbox has been writing software since the days of PDP-11s and punch cards.  He holds four US Patents (with 6 more pending) and is a frequent contributor to SearchAWS.com,
Pragmatic Programmer magazine, No Fluff Just Stuff magazine, and LinkedIn Pulse News.  His log4jfugue project won the 2010 Duke's Choice award for innovation at JavaOne where
he also won a RockStar award for his presentation.  He also won the 2011 Atlassian award for Most Innovative Use of Jira.  Brian is a polyglot programmer who dabbles in Scala.

We look forward to seeing you on Thu, Sep 10.  Register now to reserve your seat


Stevel Lintz
NEJUG President