Scotland on Rails Registration is Open 1

Posted by ch0wda on February 15 2008 at 08:29 AM

While I’m not going to be able to attend myself, I did want to mention on behalf of fellow Twitterer, Alan Francis that Scotland on Rails registration is open. It really looks like a dynamite group of speakers including a couple of Ohioans, Joe O’Brien and Jim Weirich. Of particular interest to me would be the talk by Paul Dix on creating some collective intelligence in Rails applications. The blurb:

Take advantage of user data to create intelligent Rails applications! This talk will focus on data mining to create complex application behavior and gain insight into the patterns and habits of your users. Examples of these techniques can be seen with recommendation systems like those created by Amazon, Netflix, last.fm, and others. Additional examples include spam filtering systems for email or comment filtering provided by Akismet.

I will focus on techniques for gathering data, specific gems and plugins for performing various data mining and machine learning tasks, and performance issues like how to distribute the work to separate servers. Theory in this talk will be light and the specific algorithms will only get a mention by name. We’ll be looking at real world Ruby and Rails code examples for building recommendation, ranking, and classification systems.

Sounds fascinating. I also found it interesting that one of my former employers, JPMorganChase is a sponsor. If you have the means to attend, I’d really recommend it. I’ll wager there will be scotch, but probably not any Highland Games.