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

Join us as we continue our webinar series 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 topics and speakers include three of our 2020 HPCC Systems summer interns

Nathan Halliday, Hills Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge, UK, presenting on his project, "The Parallel Workflow Engine", an upgraded feature to the HPCC Systems Workflow Engine to make query run times shorter and will also allow queries performing several related tasks to run concurrently, which will be of particular interest to ECL developers.

Jefferson "Jeff" Mao, Lambert High School, Suwanee, GA, will speak about how to establish HPCC Systems on the Google Cloud Platform, covering the steps required to use HPCC Systems on the Google Cloud platform and how he designed a web application for creating a new HPCC Systems cluster on this cloud service.

Jack Fields, American Heritage School, Delray Beach, FL, will share his project findings on using the HPCC Systems Generalized Neural Network (GNN) Bundle with TensorFlow to train a model to find known faces leveraging the Robotics API.

Join us as we continue our webinar series 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 topics and speakers include:

Shamser Ahmed, Senior Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, speaking about the Workunit Analysis Tool. This talk discusses the latest developments for the Workunit Analysis Tool and shares its roadmap plans.

Jeremy Clements, Software Engineer III, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, speaking about the ECL Cloud IDE, a zero-configuration, collaborative environment for creating ECL code.

Greg Panagiotatos, Software Engineer III, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, speaking about his new series of short training videos.

Join us as we continue our webinar series 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 topics and speakers include:

Integrating Prior Knowledge with Learning in Biomedical Natural Language Processing -
Jingqing Zhang, PhD Candidate, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
It has been seen a rapid progress of natural language processing (NLP) research last year including significant performance improvement in a variety of NLP tasks. However, the research of NLP techniques in biomedical domain relatively falls behind. In this talk, I will share our recent research on biomedical NLP especially the integration of prior knowledge with deep learning models.

Universal Workunit Scheduler-
Allan Wrobel, Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
There are many scenarios when multiple dependent jobs (or workunits in HPCC Systems Thor parlance) need to run in a particular sequence to complete a task. This talk introduces a mechanism for accomplishing this, which has been recently shared in the ‘Tips & Tricks’ section of the community HPCC Systems Forum.

HPCC Systems / ECL Training Update -
Bob Foreman, Senior Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
We are excited to announce some great new content that’s available now for our HPCC Systems training courses. Senior instructor Bob Foreman will outline the new lessons in more detail, and tell you how you can get access to them now. We have new lessons for Data Patterns, Visualization and multiple lessons for Machine Learning with more on the way! Bob will also reiterate the option of Remote Training for your small groups for any course or topic that you might have a need. Remote Training is a great option while many of us are working at home. We can schedule sessions to fit your time zone and location.

Join us as we continue our webinar series 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 topics and speakers include:

Jessica Skaggs, Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
HPCC Systems Thor Monitor - Using Workunit Services and Power BI to Monitor Thor Activity
The ECL Workunit Services standard library functions can be used to capture details about workunits running on Thor including processing time, errors, current state, and more. Capturing these details allows for monitoring, trending, error analysis, degradation, and other data points that can help improve the efficiency of your Thor environments. We will look at how to use this information to monitor the system with visualizations in Power BI.

Sarah Fabius, Systems Engineer III, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Diversity and Inclusions in HPCC Systems
This talk will cover how we are working to bring HPCC Systems to underrepresented groups through events like ECL Code camp for Irise2 and Women in Tech events.

Join us as we continue our webinar series 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 topics include project work presented by two interns from our HPCC Systems academic community:

André Felipe Santos Martins, Student
Federal Institute of Espírito Santo (IFES) - Campus Serra, Brazil
Infrastructure analysis of elementary schools in Brazil using HPCC Systems

This study has leveraged the HPCC Systems platform for data manipulation and analysis. The datasets utilized are public, provided by the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP), between the years of 2015 and 2018. The database is composed of data referring to the schools, its classes, teachers and enrolled students.

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Yash Mishra, PhD Student
Clemson University
Deploying HPCC Systems on Microsoft Azure

Massive computation workflows utilize High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) Systems environments that require significant resources, but these resources are only needed for the time of the actual processing. Many commercial cloud resources are available to deploy HPCC Systems. The existing HPCC Systems® Instant Cloud for AWS offers flexibility to instantly create, manage and terminate cluster resources on AWS cloud.This project is a new effort to provision and deploy HPCC Systems on Microsoft Azure Cloud.

View more information about these talks at
https://wiki.hpccsystems.com/display/hpcc/Tech+Talk+31+-+February+20th+2020

Join us as we continue our webinar series 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 topics include project work presented by two interns from our HPCC Systems academic community:

Elimar Macena - Federal Institute of Espírito Santo (IFES) - Campus Serra, Brazil - Studying Crime Patterns in São Paulo state between 2006 and 2016.

Intelligence led policing (ILP) refers to technology-driven crime data analysis activities to support the design of effective crime prevention and prosecution strategies. This is a new approach to fighting crime that has been gaining strength due to the convergence of two technological streams: the digitization and release of public information related to the occurrence of crimes and the development of technological platforms that allow the proper handling of such information, such as the HPCC Systems platform. Elimar's project used the HPCC platform to analyze crime patterns in the state of São Paulo in Brazil between the years of 2006 and 2016.

Muiredach O'Riain - Goldsmiths, University of London - Machine Learning and the Forensic Applications of Audio Classification: An exploration of the forensic applications of sound classification using Artificial Neural Nets

Muiredach will present how he used HPCC Systems to help build a reliable classification model that is able to accurately classify an input sound file to its location. His project intends to not only demonstrate a proof of concept for this technology, but also to lay the groundwork for what could be the next step in forensic audio analysis and a new means of gathering information through sound.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Anthony Fishbeck, Senior Architect at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Anthony created the ESP (Enterprise Services Platform) HPCC Systems component, a highly adaptive and extensible component, which serves as the front end to HPCC Systems. In 2019, he was recognized by LexisNexis Risk Solutions for his innovative contributions to the Technology organization and HPCC Systems development.

Join us as we continue our webinar series 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 topics include the work presented by two of our 2019 summer interns:

Huafu Hu - Georgia State University
Analyzing Telematics Data to Support the Connected Cars Industry

Huafu's HPCC Systems intern project involves analyzing Telematics Data using the processing power of HPCC Systems to find a solution that provides the Connected Car industry with an optimized infrastructure.

Huafu Hu is a student at Georgia State University, studying a Masters in Computer Science.


Christopher Connelly - North Carolina State University
Cleaning and Analysis of Collegiate Soccer GPS Data in HPCC Systems

Chris will present how he built an athlete data monitoring platform for the Strength and Conditioning department by using HPCC Systems to collect GPS data on NCSU athletes.

Chris has already been using HPCC Systems in his work on the Athlete 360 project, which is led by Dr Vincent Freeh, who is the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Programs & Associate Professor at NCSU.

Join us as we continue this webinar series 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 topics include the work presented by three of our summer interns and one of our security architects from the platform team:

Vannel Zeufack, Masters Student, CSE, Kennesaw State University
Developing and Assessing Unsupervised Anomaly Detections Methods using HPCC Systems
Vannel has been researching various log analysis techniques to detect abnormal activities on computing/network systems.

Farah Alshanik, PhD Student, CS, Clemson University
Domain Based Common Words List Using High Dimensional Representation of Words
Farah received her B.S from Jordan University of Science and Technology. She works with Dr.Amy Apon as a Research Assistance in Data Intensive Computing Ecosystems (DICE) Lab. Her interest is focused on applying high performance computing to machine learning problems.

Robert Kennedy, PhD Student, CS, Florida Atlantic University
Create HPCC Systems VM on Hyper V
Robert has research interests in Deep Learning and parallel and distributed computing. His current research is in improving distributed deep learning by implementing and optimizing distributed algorithms.

Russ Whitehead, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Security and HPCC Systems

Russ Whitehead (William) is an HPCC Systems Software Architect and has a BS degree in Computer Science from University of Florida, and an MBA from the University of Miami. His background is operating systems development, network management and voice recognition, Russ has been a LexisNexis employee and a platform team member since May 2008

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Luke Pezet, Vice President of Software Architecture at Archway Health. Luke is a successful entrepreneur and solution and software architect with over 10 years of experience in pioneering web analytic tools and complex data management projects. His expertise includes designing and implementing big data solutions to process millions of data inputs on a daily basis to monitor, assess, and improve performance.

Join us as we continue this webinar series 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 topics include the work presented by four of our summer interns:

Yash Jain, University of Mumbai: Cluster Deployment with Juju Charm
Yash is a student at the University of Mumbai, studying for a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Engineering). The aim of this project is to write reactive charms using the charm helper framework along with tests in amulet.

Akshar Prasad, RVCE: Fraud Detection in Value Based Cards
Akshar is a student at the Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering (RVCE), studying a BTech in Computer Science whose project entails 'Detection of fraud in stored-value cards by applying CNN and Random Forest machine learning models on transactional data to classify a transaction as “Fraudulent” or “Not fraudulent'. These methods will be compared for efficacy.

A Suryanarayanan, RVCE: Evaluation of Machine Learning Algorithms
Surya is a student at the Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering (RVCE), studying a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Science). His project involves providing additional evaluation methods for our Machine Learning Library, including running comparisons with existing benchmarks, the addition of new evaluation metrics and enhanced performance checking.

Sathvik K R, RVCE: Interfacing Octave with ECL
Sathvik is a student at the Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering (RVCE), studying a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Science). The aim of this project is to support Octave by allowing the embedding of Octave database queries within ECL code. This will be done with the help of simple wrapper classes to handle scalar values and structured data, including multi-threaded access from the ECL side.

In this session, we are highlighting some of the rock stars of the HPCC Systems Community. Today's session is 5 Questions with Yash Jain. Yash Jain is a student at the University of Mumbai, studying for a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Engineering). Yash joined the HPCC Systems team in May 2019 to work on a project entitled Cluster Deployment with Juju Charm. The aim of this project is to write reactive charms using the charm helper framework along with tests in amulet.

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.