Big Data course at CVUT

Thanks to IBM support we will open new course in Big Data at CVUT FEL. The course will offer hands on experience in using the standard Big Data methods such as Hadoop. To exercise the hand on experience we have prepared several text processing tasks. 

Why is important to teach Big Data? The size of processed data is constantly growing. Internet portals, insurance companies, banks, GSM providers, health industry, automotive etc. are accumulating enormous data on their servers. The data contains lot of various information. The new methods for processing the data, understanding the data are being developed at similar pace. It is clear that companies without a large analytical departments and access to the Big Data will not be able to make good decisions. They will not be competitive. This is leading the companies to look for a new experienced people capable of processing and interpreting the data. The role of the university is to be ahead and react on these demand.

The motivation for this course is clear to IBM and the university too and this was the reason to join forces.

The objective of our course is to teach the students the Big Data basics and offer some hands-on experience. The course will focus on methods for extraction, analysis as well as selection of hardware infrastructure for managing persistent data. In the second half of the course we will show how to process streamed data, such as data from social networks. As exercise we will introduce standard analytical methods for text processing.

The course is split in to 13 weeks. We want to cover five main topics:

1. Hadoop overview - all components and how they work together. Install Hadoop, HW requirements, SW requirements, how to administer, introduce to the basic setup of our cluster.
2. MapReduce, how to use pre-installed data. The bag of words notion, TF-IDF,  SVD, LDA. 
3. HDFS, NoSQL databases, HBase, SQL access, Hive,  How to upscale-downscale HDFS. 
4. What is Mahout, what are the basic algorithms. Run random forest classification task using the Mahout algorithms.
5. Streamed data – Storm or InfoSphere, real time processing using the Twitter data, simple sentiment algorithm

We will put all the presentations on the web with public access, they all will be in English. You can follow us on the course web pages. Keep the fingers crossed for us, it will be a lot of work but we all are looking forward to play with the latest technologies.

eClub Demo Day

The eClub Demo Day starts on Tuesday at ERA Svet. Join us with your project. We will award scholarships in two categories: the best Technology Transfer (TT) and the best Startup Plan (SP). First place 30k, second 20k, third 10k CZK in both categories.

Everybody is welcomed see the conditions for participation. How to prepare:
First of all register, we need to know how many teams will compete to plan properly.

The Google presentation manager format is welcomed. Presentations with an Internet link will save us time while eliminating the hassle with PC or flash memories. We have Internet connected iPad, which you can share. Certainly, if you chose different format we will handle it too.

Some more advices. The presentation must not be longer than 10 minutes. Be crisp, explain the most important points only. The first page should contain the project name, the team members names and the category (TT or SP).

How to put together the best presentation? I usually recommend the NABC approach:

• Explain the NEED. What problem do you solve. Is it for industry in the TT category or for customers in the SP category.
• APPROACH. How do you suggest solving the problem? What technologies can be used, how complicated it is, what is your experience in solving such problem, what is the trick!
• BENEFIT. What is the benefit. The best approach is to quantify benefits. For example: how much faster is your solution, how much cheaper, is it easier to use. In TT what is the benefit for companies, in SP how would your startup benefit.
• COMPETITION. Tell us who is your competition, how they solve the problem today and how much better is your idea.

If all goes fine, we plan to announce the list of winners at the end of the Demo Day. Bring your friends to support you during the presentation. I am looking forward to see all of you on Tuesday.

Win scholarship for your disertation

The eClub competition will have two categories in this semester. The first, for the best startup idea and a new category for the best students project idea with an industrial impact. We will award scholarships in both categories.

The main eClub target is to introduce students to entrepreneurship. Show how to turn their ideas to successful products. There are basically two ways how to achieve it. Startups for those who are interested in business and technology transfer for those who are more interested in inventing new stuff and less interested in business. Both must have strong vision and need to keep in mind their customers. To invent a new product is a process of matching the product hypothesis with the customers. Startupers have to do all. The company receiving the technology will become responsible for the customer search. Startup is bigger bet but you can earn more money.

Our students impact and cooperation with the industry is still very small. We want to help. We have been so far funding statups and neglecting those who have good ideas but are less adventures. We will fix it in this semester. We are introducing a new category for students working on industrial ideas. It can be a BSc, MSc, PhD theses or any other school work, but it must be aimed at solving some practical problem. This means during the presentation you will have to prove that your idea is practical and useful for companies.

We will award projects in both categories. The first startup team or student work with industry impact will collect 30k, the second 20k and the third 10k. Contrary to many competition for the best theses we want to support students in both categories during the development, while working on the new idea.

How to enter the competition? Simply go to eClub pages, read the rules, and fill-in the registration. Prepare a ten minutes long presentation explaining the main idea. Do  not forget who are your customers and why they need your solution. Then show up for the dry run session on November 12th. Test your presentation skills and gain a valuable feedback from your peers.  Before the dry run, do not miss the opportunity to learn how to write a good theses or technical paper. Tomas Pajdla, an experienced researcher will share with us how to do it in the next eClub session. Join us! Do not miss your chance, there is nothing to lose!

CVUT Students get cheep phone with school timetable

CVUT student’s team has developed KOSeek showing the school timetable on your Android. You do not have an Android phone? Currently, Samsung is offering deeply discounted cell phones with preinstalled KOSeek at CVUT, Faculty of Electrical Engineering.

Last week we have officially introduced the KOSeek application during the eClub meeting. We also have released new version displaying the school timetable. We reacted to students demand - the timetable was the most requested feature by many users. In addition, we list peers attending the same course allowing easily starting a discussions, helping each other, etc.

Some caveats:  We apologise, but we support only the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEL) and Information Technologies (FIT). Some of the faculties and students are still using the older versions (2.3), but the latest version of KOSeek supports only Android 4.0 and newer. Based on the number of requests we do not plan the older versions support. There are some additional reasons, such as the 4.0 simplifies the tablet version development.

We were very lucky CVUT financially supported the development. Smart decision guys! These days we can observe the growing number of downloads. As of today, we crossed 10% of the total population of FEL+FIT.  We do not have exact numbers but we know that Android is the most popular smart phone operating system at CVUT. Currently, we are closely watching the discussion to carefully select the additional features we will implement. If you have any preferences or wishes send me an email or comment this blog.

Samsung is helping us a lot. This and the next week at the entrance of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Dejvice you will find a small exhibition of new Samsung mobile products. You can run KOSeek on any of the phones or tablets. You can also play with the very new Note 3 with connected Samsung watch. Pay attention specially to the latest watch, this is a device of the future. You can also enjoy the latest tablets and test the screen quality and agility.

Samsung has also prepared a great offer for those who still do not have an Android phone. Stop by and pick a leaflet with a discount code for S3 or the Node 3. Great devices!

Keep us posted, place a comment, request new features for KOSeek and stay tuned, we will introduce other new surprises.

New eClub competition

eClub is preparing a new competition. This time we want to support students of the Czech technical universities interested not only in creating a startup but also students interested in solving industrial problems.

So far eClub focused on early startups. During the five competitions we have attracted around fifty teams competing for scholarships. We have invested around 1 million crowns in scholarships. Some of the teams had a very short life. Some of the teams created a company and are on the market till today. Some teams had dramatically changed their business ideas but are still on the market.

The Czech startup scene is also changing. There are many different competitions supporting starting entrepreneurs. Some of the teams are joining them one by one competing for the prices to get support for further development instead of asking VCs to invest. Other teams are engaging to various contracts to fund their favorite project. Neither is ideal but the entrepreneurship is not an easy road. We want to differentiate, the eClub ambition is supporting technical universities students and the high tech projects. We are also want to support students long term, creating conditions for continuous development. Sometimes good stuff takes long to develop. Ideally we would like to support the top students researching new technologies and converting them to industrial products. There are two ways to a product:

• Startup
• Technology transfer

So far eClub was supporting just the startupers. This semester we want to make another step ahead and support also the technology transfer, support students working on great projects with clear industrial impact. Therefore we will have two categories in the competition:

• Startup projects
• Technological projects. 

We invite all students working on PhD, MSc or BSc theses or other school projects with a vision of a clear technological impact to the technological projects category. The startup rules will be the same. The rules for the technological projects will be also very simple. I will publish the exact rules on the eClub pages soon. The panel of judges will select the best projects based on the following criteria:

• Innovation
• Feasibility
• Industrial impact
• Special points for existing industrial partner
• Existing supervisor - extra points

To balance the university and industry views we will select the judges from industry as well as the university faculties.

The competition will have two stages as usual. First the entrants will meet during the dry run Demo Day planned for Nov 11, which is a chance to test the ideas in front of viewers and learning to mediate the ideas. To deliver the best results there will be a presentation by Tomas Pajdla about how to write a technical document giving you some hints on how to put the structure of presentation together. The second presentation will be shortly before Christmas presenting your ideas to a panel of judges.

The judges will select top three projects in the startup as well as the technological projects and the MediaLab will award scholarships for the three winners in both categories. The total of the prices will be in the order of hundreds of thousands. Talk to your friends and get ready. It will be beneficial and will help you in the competition if you get good supervisor and contact in the industry. If you are already preparing your theses think about the industrial impact. Everybody is welcomed! Our aim is to help shaping the ideas and people who are willing to take new challenges and develop new technologies.

KOSeek

is a new mobile information system for Android for students of the Czech Technical University. This is also an invitation for an official introduction of KOSeek along with Samsung watch presentation. What a coincidence: check on your watch what is going on at your university.

Thanks to CTU support students of the CTU Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Faculty of Information Technology developed a simple mobile application for Android. It allows searching students and employees allowing direct call or email. Students can access the courses information, business hours in the student’s office, get in touch with dean's office. The application also shows the recent RSS feeds for CTU, FEE and FIT. Once you get hungry check the menu at the cafeterias.

The KOSeek beta version was launched one week ago and the Google Play Market already shows 100+ downloads. We have not advertised the application properly yet, and we know we have more downloads. The rating is approaching 4. We also have some crashes but we work on debugging them. We are also happy to report there is already a discussion and many students are sending us comments and suggestion. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no faculties comments. Wait, my boss had commented!

The whole app was developed thanks to CTU. It is based on a long time project at FIT developing KOS API, which was essential for the KOSeek. This API is allowing to access the basic databases in the main information system called KOS. By the way KOS in Czech == blackbird and KOSeek == little blackbird! The FIT students are working with the Computer Information Center of CTU and it is definitely not a smooth ride, but it is hard to beat a person who never gives up. We keep the fingers crossed to get more out of KOS API and enable further functionality. Thanks guys!

The fronted, the Android application was developed at FEE. Three students, MSc, BSc, and a freshman, Adam, Dusan and Tomas joined together to design a great UI. Along the lines they have put together a reasonable development environment using standard tools, git, Android Developers Studio, Play Market. We have now a reasonably organized development and product threads in git, build system with Unit Tests and other tools. This is allowing newcomers to join effectively and get fast productive. I am sure there will be many other students joining. Are you interested, let me know. The build includes also an automatic User Database generation, which is part of the download allowing for KOSeek incremental search support. We use the Android build-in SQLite db.

KOSeek is still in its beta version, there is still lot of work required to make it perfect. We are receiving many suggestions for improvements from users as well as from developers. We have created a wishlist and we try to prioritize based on demand. It will be a hard task to keep the number of features at a reasonable, most useful level. Yes, most of the users are people of technical background, they will handle it, but anyway simpler is better!

Currently, the team is busy debugging, adding the most requested feature and some more goodies. We would like to introduce this features during the official KOSeek kickoff in the eClub meeting on Tuesday Oct. 8th at 5:00 pm in ERA Svet. Come and join us, you will also have a chance to see the latest Samsung watch and Note 3. Samsung representatives will bring the gear with them to let you enjoy a sneak preview. We also be very happy to answer questions and we are expecting further questions and suggestions. In the mean time enjoy KOSeek.

Check, what we prepare in eClub

EClub starts on Tuesday first of October in ERA Svet at 5:00pm. Michal Pechocek will open the series with the Cognitive Security story. Join us to learn how to replicate their success.

We will meet Zdenek Paskevic in the next meeting (Oct 8). This will be a unique opportunity learning all about the new Samsung watch. Zdenek is the mobile devices program manager in Samsung and will introduce the whole line including the latest flagship phablet Galaxy Note 3. Zdenek and his colleagues will be ready to answer all questions and we will try to let you play and test the gear. In addition, with Samsung we plan to run a small presentation at two stands in Karlovo nam and in Dejvice. For two weeks starting October 10, all the latest devices will be displayed. But that is not all eClub, CVUT and Samsung are together with some more partners busily working on a New Academic Year Surprise for all students. Wait, I will soon report!

Let me quickly mention the next meeting topic. Microsoft will visit eClub after Samsung (Oct 15). Stepan Bechynsky will deliver an Internet of Things presentation. He will discuss the new opportunities of this technology and will share with us the Microsoft perspective. This is a great opportunity for a discussion not only about the new contextual oriented applications but also about the future mobile and wearable devices and applications in general.

We have many other presentations in preparation. Check our web page for the program. The first three presentations are confirmed but we may still need to do some changes. Check carefully the location and time, because of space limitations in ERA Svet we will run some of the presentations from CVUT at Karlovo nam. Stay tuned we will inform you as soon as we complete the next presentations.