The Download: Tech Talks by the HPCC Systems Community, Episode 1

Join us as we continue this series of webinars specifically designed for the community by the community with the goal to share knowledge, spark innovation, and further build and link the relationships within our HPCC Systems community.

Featured speakers have been pulled from some of our most attended and favorite Tech Talks. Join us to hear more on:

Dapper – A Bundle to Make Your ECL Neater from Rob Mansfield, Senior Data Scientist at Proagrica. Rob has worked in ECL since 2016. As a Data Scientist he has helped design complex logic and statistical models that all pull from Proagrica’s HPCC Systems platform. Rob also works in Python and R, skills he picked up in a previous life as a college lecturer.

Deep Sequence Learning in Traffic Prediction and Text Classification from Jingqing Zhang, PhD Candidate, Imperial College London. Jingqing Zhang is a PhD (HiPEDS) at Department of Computing, Imperial College London under supervision of Prof. Yi-Ke Guo. His research interest includes Text Mining, Data Mining, Deep Learning and their applications. He received his MRes degree in Computing from Imperial College with Distinction in 2017 and BEng in Computer Science and Technology from Tsinghua University in 2016

The Top Ten Common ECL Compiler/Runtime Errors, and How to Correct Them from Bob Foreman, Senior Software Engineer at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Bob Foreman has worked with the HPCC Systems technology platform and the ECL programming language for over 5 years, and has been a technical trainer for over 25 years. He is the developer and designer of the HPCC Systems Online Training Courses, and is the Senior Instructor for all classroom and Webex/Lync based training.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Taghi Khoshgoftaar, Motorola Endowed Chair professor of the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University and the Director of NSF Big Data Training and Research Laboratory

Join us as we continue this series of webinars specifically designed for the community by the community with the goal to share knowledge, spark innovation, and further build and link the relationships within our HPCC Systems community.

Featured speakers include:
Itauma Itauma,PhD, Keiser University, HPCC Systems Community Innovator - Cervical Cancer Risk Factors: Exploratory Analysis using HPCC Systems
Cervical cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related death among women with about half a million new cases worldwide in 2018. 90% of cervical cancer deaths occur in low resource settings. This mortality could be reduced through effective prevention, screening and treatment programs. I will explain how an exploratory analysis of a cervical cancer database was performed using HPCC Systems with data visualizations and how the findings could be beneficial.

Itauma Itauma has a PhD in Instructional Design and Technology from Keiser University and is a student in the Harvard Business Analytics Program.

Lili Xu, Software Engineer III, LexisNexis Risk Solutions - Automatically cluster your data with the HPCC Systems massively scalable K-Means machine learning bundle
Imagine you are sitting in front of thousands of articles and trying to organize them into different folders. How would you accomplish it and how long would you expect to finish it? If you have some sort of data but have no clue how to efficiently cluster them, then Lili's talk will provide insight on a great place to start.

Lili Xu is in the final stages of completing her PhD in Computer Science at Clemson University. Now an employee, Lili has completed three internships with HPCC Systems on machine learning.

Richard Taylor, Chief Trainer, HPCC Systems, LexisNexis® Risk Solutions - ECL Tips and Tricks: DICTIONARY does it!
Richard Taylor has worked with the HPCC Systems technology platform and the ECL programming language for over 15 years.

Join us as we continue this series of webinars specifically designed for the community by the community with the goal to share knowledge, spark innovation, and further build and link the relationships within our HPCC Systems community.

Featured speakers include:
Jeremy Meier and David Noh, both Undergraduate Students at Clemson University - An Investigation into Time Series Analysis
Over the past several months, our team has worked closely with a dataset having roughly 16,000 total observations, recording both the date and balance in financial data. Focusing on individual accounts with a size of around 400 observations, our first goal was to compare statistical metrics and techniques used commonly in time series analysis on the given data sets. We dove deep into two major industry standard methods for understanding and predicting on a dataset. Using insights learned from these observations, we hope to better predict future balances in the dataset, as well as find any anomalies or misbehavior in the data in order to provide business value.

Roger Dev, Sr Architect, LexisNexis Risk Solutions - TextVectors - Machine Learning for Textual Data
Text Vectorization allows for the mathematical treatment of textual information. Words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs can be organized as points in high-dimensional space such that closeness in space implies closeness of meaning. HPCC Systems' new TextVectors module supports vectorization for words, phrases, or sentences in a parallelized, high-performance, and user-friendly package.

Allan Wrobel, Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions - ECL Tips and Tricks: Leveraging the power of HPCC Systems. Using AGGREGATE.
The ECL built-in function AGGREGATE has been seen by many in the community as ‘complex’ and as such has been underused. However in using AGGREGATE you can be sure you’re playing to the strengths of HPCC Systems.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Jo Prichard.

Join us as we continue this series of webinars specifically designed for the community by the community with the goal to share knowledge, spark innovation, and further build and link the relationships within our HPCC Systems community.

Featured speakers include:

Vincent Freeh, Professor NC State University, HPCC Systems as a Service (Haas)
There are numerous reasons to use an IaaS for HPCC Systems instead of dedicated hardware, especially if the workload does not execute 24/7. We developed a CloudFormation Template and an AMI for HPCC Systems and a reference architecture for HPCC Systems in AWS. Significant effort was expended to determine the best set of resources for HPCC Systems clusters. Furthermore, we created a program to create and manage HPCC Systems clusters in AWS from the command line. This talk will present the tools we created and also explain the reference architecture and many of the configuration options.

David de Hilster, Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, New ECL IDE Features in 7.0
The ECL IDE is an integrated development environment for ECL programmers to create, edit, and execute ECL code within the HPCC Systems platform. The latest 7.0 version includes new features and enhancements such as a more comprehensive autocomplete, tooltips and F12 capabilities. In this talk, David will discuss how users can leverage these features and more.

Bob Foreman, Senior Software Engineer, HPCC Systems, LexisNexis Risk Solutions - ECL Tip: A Tiny Trove of TABLE Tidbits
This month’s ECL Tip of the Month will focus on the ECL TABLE Function. Common (and some not so common) use cases will be discussed. Code example demonstrated will also be available for download.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Anupam Sengupta.

Anupam is a co-founder and the CTO of GuardHat.

Join us as we continue this series of webinars specifically designed for the community by the community with the goal to share knowledge, spark innovation, and further build and link the relationships within our HPCC Systems community.

Featured speakers include:

Adwait Joshi, CEO DataSeers - HPCC Systems - An IoT use case for Payments
Traditionally we all have used Thor for data processing and ROXIE indexes for data pulls. Think about using ROXIE for a data ingest and Thor directly pulling data into the back end repository. This talk will explain about how DataSeers has designed a realtime transaction monitoring system using HPCC Systems, Kafka, ElasticSearch and MySQL pushing the envelope for a typical use case. Learn the roadblocks we encountered, how we worked around them, and how we hardened the system to be truly disaster resistant with all open source technologies.

Yanrui Ma, Software Architect, LexisNexis Risk Solutions - Dynamic ESDL Has Become More Dynamic In 7.0
In this talk, Yanrui will talk about some of the major changes with Dynamic ESDL in 7.0, with a focus on the mechanisms and enhancements that have made it even more dynamic. He’ll give a demo of creating a DESDL service with the improved “esdl” command line to show you how easy and quick it can be. He’ll also go over DESDL related ECL Watch changes in 7.0, and some of the upcoming DESDL features.

Bob Foreman, Senior Software Engineer, HPCC Systems, LexisNexis Risk Solutions - ECL Tip: All About the ECL SET
This month’s ECL Tip spotlights the ECL SET definition, value type, and other supported functions that use it. Several code examples and best practices will be demonstrated.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Richard Chapman.

Richard has been with LexisNexis Risk Solutions for more than 25 years. He is the VP of Research and Development and the leader of the HPCC Systems development team. Richard wrote the code to create the HPCC Systems query cluster, also known as ROXIE which stands for Richard’s Online XML Inquiry Engine. He was one of the original designers of ECL which was created as a data centric programming language for easily expressing problems involving large quantities of data.

Join us as we continue this series of webinars specifically designed for the community by the community with the goal to share knowledge, spark innovation, and further build and link the relationships within our HPCC Systems community.
Featured speakers and topics include:

•Rob Mansfield, Senior Data Scientist, Proagrica - Dapper - A bundle to make your ECL neater
Have you ever written a long project for a simple column rename and thought, this should be easier? What about nicely named output statements? Yeah they bother me too. Oh, and DEDUP(SORT(DISTINCT()))? There is a better way! Learn how dapper can help!

•Bob Foreman, Senior Software Engineer, HPCC Systems, LexisNexis Risk Solutions - ECL Tip: The Seven Faces (Forms) of Dr. LOOP (Function)
The LOOP function has always been a powerful, yet tough ECL function to understand and use. Bob will review and examine the upcoming major changes to this documentation and showcase new examples.

•Lorraine Chapman, Consulting Business Analyst, LexisNexis Risk Solutions - Update on Academic Collaboration
Lorraine will share an update on recent collaboration, upcoming academic events and the 2019 HPCC Systems Internship Program.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Lil Xu.

Lili is in the final stages of completing her PhD in Computer Science. She has worked in the DICE lab directed by Dr. Apon in the school of computing at Clemson University.

Lili has completed three internships with the HPCC Systems team, working on machine learning applications. Her research area is machine learning, natural language processing and high performance computing. We are pleased that Lili has joined the team as a LexisNexis employee.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Amy Apon, Ph.D.

Dr. Apon maintains an active research program at Clemson. Areas of research interest include cloud computing, performance modeling and analysis of parallel and distributed system, data-intensive computing, emerging parallel architectures, and impact of high performance computing to research competitiveness. Her research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, BMW, HPCC Systems, LexisNexis, Elsevier Scopus, RELX Group, and Amazon.

In the season finale of Focus on FinTech we look at the topics on the minds of FinTech professionals at Money 20/20.

From how FinTech's and traditional Finance can work together, to the importance of data and innovation, discover the to top trends in FinTech from industry experts like Peerstreet and Dataseers.

Speakers and topics for this episode include:

Jayashree Ukkinagatti, Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering, India
Set up Automatic Builds for the continuous integration of ECL queries stored in GIT using Jenkins

Software developers work in an isolated team. If they need to integrate their changes with different code base, waiting for days to integrate their code may create many merge conflicts , may get hard to fix the bugs or may lead to duplicate efforts. In this presentation, Jayashree will speak about the setting up of automatic builds to integrate ECL queries stored in Git using the Jenkins deployment pipeline techniques, when the pull request is made on additions or changes to ECL queries stored in Git.

Nicole Navarro, New College of Florida
Measuring the geo-social distribution of Opioid Prescriptions

Drug overdose was the leading cause of accidental death in the US in 2015, and the number of drug overdoses involving opioids in 2016 was 42,249 – an increase of 18% per year since 2014. In this talk, Nicole will explain how she utilized the open source HPCC Systems capabilities around knowledge engineering to create data features and interactive visualizations. These were designed to allow research into Drug Socialization across social groups and geographical regions with a focus on opioid prescription rates.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with David Dasher.

David Dasher is the Chief Technology Officer and Founder of CPL Online, the leading provider of e-Learning and digital services to the UK’s hospitality sector, that since 2018 has been part of CGA Group.

With over 25 years’ experience within the IT sector, he has worked extensively in the UK’s corporate sector developing database, marketing, and management solutions. Under David’s leadership, CPL Online has established itself as a market leader and enjoyed several years of strong year on year growth.

Speakers and topics for this episode include:

Farah Al Shanik, Clemson University - Equivalence Terms for Text Search Bundle
Text Search Bundle (TSB) is an open source project for searching on XML text documents & contains many subtasks, one being equivalence terms. We can consider equivalence terms as strong synonyms for TSB. Several term equivalences: initialism, abbreviation, synonyms & similarity based on context. We used HPCC Systems to develop a Text search tool via Moby thesaurus to return a set of synonyms, word2vec algorithm to return similar words, then built a dataset for state names & its abbreviation to return the set of related documents while improving the initialism for TSB to find strings with or without the punctuation.

Soukaina Filali, Georgia State University - Fraud Detection on Transactional Data using a Time Series Mining Approach
The project consists of detecting fraudulent pre-paid cards from non-fraudulent ones using mined patterns on their respective historical bank transactions data. There are numerous types of card programs, each of which comes with different fraud risk levels. Every fraud category has representative patterns that a human manually monitors on a daily basis. The goal here is to combine the domain expert engineered features with time series shapelets mining techniques to provide an automated fraud detection solution, which can potentially help in early fraud detection.

Lili Xu, Clemson University & Gus Reyna, LexisNexis - Using HPCC Systems ML to Map Thousands of Public Records Data Descriptions to Standard Codes
There is a challenge of incorporating public records data into business processes given disparate descriptions across states for similar events, and finding standards giving a consistent meaning for use. This session tells the story of how HPCC Systems ML addressed the problem of mapping thousands of disparate public record data descriptions to a corresponding set of standard codes.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Itauma Itauma.

Itauma Itauma is a doctoral candidate at Keiser University and a computer science instructor at Wayne State University. His interests lie in learning analytics and utilizing HPCC Systems for educational research. He has an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ilorin and two Masters Degrees, a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, majoring in human-robot interaction and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Wayne State University where his thesis was based on leveraging HPCC Systems for Big Data analytics.

This episode will feature our 2018 HPCC Systems summer interns:

Shah Muhammad Hamdi, PhD student, CS at Georgia State University - Dimensionality Reduction and Feature Selection in ECL-ML

Hamdi will discuss the parallel implementation of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) using the Parallel Block Basic Linear Algebra Subsystem (PBblas) library and ECL implementations of feature selection algorithms for the HPCC Systems platform.

Robert Kennedy, PhD student in Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University - Parallel Distributed Deep Learning on HPCC Systems

Robert will cover what he implemented during his summer internship. Combining HPCC Systems and Google’s TensorFlow, Robert created a parallel stochastic gradient descent algorithm to provide a basis for future deep neural network research and to enhance HPCC System’s distributed neural network training capabilities.

Aramis Tanelus, programmer and senior at American Heritage High School where he is the lead programmer for the Advanced Robotics Team - Developing HPCC Systems Data Ingestion APIs for Common Robotic Sensors.

Aramis’s project will make it easy for anyone in robotics around the world to ingest data from common robotic sensors into an HPCC Systems platform for use in data analysis. Aramis will be speaking about his work on the autonomous agricultural robot and implementing new packages for the Robotics Operating System to interface with HPCC Systems for big data analysis.

Saminda Wijeratne, Masters student, Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta - MPI Proof of Concept

The built-in "Message Passing" library in HPCC Systems is designed to handle these communications among dissimilar components and perform non-trivial communication patterns among them. Saminda will explore how this library currently operates and how we can introduce a different implementation such as an existing popular library called MPI.

Join us as we continue this series of webinars specifically designed for the community by the community with the goal to share knowledge, spark innovation and further build and link the relationships within our HPCC Systems community. This episode will feature three speakers on the following topics:

Jingqing Zhang, Imperial College of London
Deep Sequence Learning and Text Classification

Bob Foreman, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
ECL Summer Code Camp Review
On May 16th, five HPCC Systems Ambassadors along with Flavio Villanustre met with eight iRISE2 members for a two-hour ECL Code Camp. The event was a great success, and I thought I’d share with the community what we did and some of the ECL ideas that came out of it. Tips from Data Ingestion to ECL to Data Evaluation will be included in this segment.