"Machine learning" once implied PhD's and racks of servers. No more. With projects like EC2, Hadoop and Mahout, and accessible texts lining bookstore shelves, advanced distributed computing techniques are going mainstream. After introducing the basics of map/reduce and collaborative filtering we will ponder the possibilities of web-scale computing for everyone.
Questions Answered:
What is cloud computing?
What is Map/Reduce?
What is Hadoop?
What is machine learning?
How easy is it to setup a cluster of servers in Amazon's elastic computing cloud (EC2)?
What problems is map/reduce well-suited to solving?
What problems is map/reduce NOT well-suited to solving?
Can Hadoop replace my relational database?
What are some good resources to learn more about cloud computing?
What sorts of changes and opportunities can we anticipate from everyone having easy and cheap access to massive parallel computing power?