Research and Education in the Clouds: Experience at the Univ

Google Tech Talk May 6, 2009 ABSTRACT Research and Education in the Clouds: Experience at the University. Presented by Jimmy Lin. Hadoop, the open-source implementation of MapReduce, provides unprecedented opportunities for both research and education. On the research side, academics are now able to explore problems at scale with modest resource investments, either with inexpensive commodity clusters or through utility computing services. On the education side, Hadoop provides a nice vehicle to teach students about large-scale distributed processing. In this talk, I will present "cloud computing" activities at the University of Maryland, in collaboration with Google/IBM under the Academic Cloud Computing Initiative and in partnership with Amazon Web Services. Efforts include semester-long Hadoop courses, as well as research projects in text processing and bio-informatics. I will specifically focus on my attempts to integrate research with education, to the benefit of both. Jimmy Lin is an Associate Professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland, with affiliations in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, as well as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004. Dr. Lin's research primarily lies at the intersection of information retrieval and natural language processing, but his interests extend to human-computer interaction, bio-informatics, medical informatics, and large-scale distributed systems.