Radoop team wins the first big data hackathon in Boston

Nov. 28, 2012 - PRLog -- A team of data analysts working with Radoop finished first at the hack/reduce big data hackathon in Boston. Their demo and results were based on a data set from an online dating site.

The goal of the first big data hackathon in Boston was to bring data analysts, programmers and business users together to work on huge amounts of data across a wide range of fields. The fields included genomics, music and entertainment, shopping, social graph, stock markets, transportation, travel discovery, online dating and Web search queries. At the start of the event, participants pitched their project ideas, formed teams, and then worked on their projects all afternoon to finally present their results.

During the 10-hour hackathon, over 15 users have tried Radoop and created more than 200 analytics processes running on TBs of data. The team found relationships in dating preferences by using cluster analysis on attributes like body type, gender, hair and eye color. Other team members tried to figure out how true love depends on age by analyzing age requirements of different genders.

“Radoop makes working on Big Data as easy as drag-and-drop, no coding required”, said Giuseppe Taibi, CEO of Rapid-I North America who led the Radoop team in Boston. “It was incredible seeing how fast our team members were building and launching Map/Reduce jobs, even though most of them had never worked before with RapidMiner or Radoop”

“The Hackathon was a great opportunity to see how users are working with Radoop in real-time. It is always a pleasure to get instant feedback from a product you are developing”, said Gabor Makrai, Chief Software Engineer and co-founder of Radoop. “It was really interesting to see users' first steps and we've learned a lot where we have to put effort to make Radoop better and better. I have absolutely enjoyed the event and I'm happy to see that the Big Data community is so vivid in Boston.”

The hackathon participants have used Radoop Standard Edition, which is powered by RapidMiner, the most popular open-source data mining tool, and it provides a simple and flexible data flow interface for defining big data analytics processes. It integrates with existing Hadoop clusters and works seamlessly with many different Hadoop distributions: Apache Hadoop, Cloudera Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). Radoop Enterprise Edition is further powered by RapidAnalytics, an open-source analytics server that adds user management, collaboration and process sharing for analysts, scheduled execution of analysis processes, and web access to reports and results.

More details on the results and experiences are available in a blog post by Giuseppe Taibi at www.radoop.eu/blog.

About Rapid-I

Rapid-I provides software, solutions, and services in the fields of predictive analytics, data mining, and text mining. Its flagship product RapidMiner is the world-leading open-source system for knowledge discovery, data mining and sentiment analysis. RapidMiner is praised for being extremely easy to use, blazing fast, and very simple to integrate with any IT infrastructure, from the smallest text file to Hadoop clusters via Radoop, our Big Data extension partner. For more information, visit www.rapid-i.com.

About Radoop

Radoop is a big data analytics company with the goal of lowering the barrier for using distributed data analytics systems. Radoop products allow even non-technical people to access and analyze big data, but also provide scripting and advanced predictive analytics for experts. The Radoop Standard and Enterprise Edition are integrated into RapidMiner, the most popular open-source data mining tool, and push computations to a Hadoop cluster. Radoop also offers training and support on its products, as well as big data analytics consulting services. For more information, visit www.radoop.eu.