March 2010

03/16/2010 at 07:00 PM

For our March meeting we’ll be hosting Randall Thomas of Engine Yard for this talk, “Artificial stupidity, adding smarts to yer kode with a little machine learning”. Here’s a more in depth description -

Machine Learning and data mining have long been seen as “black arts” – partly because they sit squarely between various rigorous disciplines (statistics, linear algebra, analysis, geometry), partly because of PhD level practitioners, and partly because any meaningful analysis required access to expensive computing clusters. This exploration will cover a basic (and gentle) introduction to machine learning, and a brief overview of what sort of problems fit well into the machine learning bag. We’ll walk through a few examples (running on Engine Yard Cloud) of how this might fit into your project, and the drastically lower economics of cloud-enabled machine learning analysis.

Randall is a friend of several of our members and it’ll be great to have him visit us.

February 2010

02/16/2010 at 07:00 PM

We have two presentations tentatively scheduled. First, Paul Sadauskas will be previewing his talk on HTTP that he’ll be giving in March at Mountain West RubyConf. Second, Tiffany Fodor and Charley Baker will be presenting on Watir, a web automation library driven by Ruby.

January 2010

01/19/2010 at 07:00 PM

The January meeting will be centered around NOSQL data stores. Primarily we’ll be talking about MongoDB and Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant. Several members will be going over these systems, how we talk to them with Ruby and sharing lessons learned. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive tutorial on these systems as that would take too much time and you could easily Google for such information on your own. Any of you who have used these or other similar stores are welcome to come and share with the group.