Hadoop Summit: Call for Papers

There's a CFP out for papers for this summer's (US) Hadoop summit.




Having reviewed one of the tracks for the forthcoming Hadoop Summit EU, we -Johannes Kirschnick, Bill de hÓra and myself- had to go through 30+ abstracts, and pick under 10 of them. That's a 2:1 rejection rate -so we had to be ruthless. Rather than pick abstracts based on author, employer, whether or not they were on the review committee (i.e. me), whether they were a world class public speaker people would willingly travel to hear speak (i.e. me), or whether they were friends or colleagues, we had one basic critera: "would this be interesting and relevant for the audience", where the audience were people who had paid to come to Amsterdam to hear about the future of Hadoop."

That translated into:

1. Does it show the future of a core component of the Hadoop stack? (HDFS, YARN, HBase, ... )?
2. Or : Does it show the future of a new-but-potentially essential part of the stack?
3. Does it sound interesting?
4. Is it going to be relevant to the audience within the next 18 months ?

That focus on near-line futures (the stuff where you'd discuss using the present tense in French), meant that some of the sessions that would be so profound they'd be memorable for decades (specifically, Hadoop: Embracing Future Hardware, by S. Loughran), had to be left out.  Which is a shame, because there were some really interesting things I'd like to hear about -but I'm not representative of the audience. Here I am, at an in-law's house in London, laptop out, headphones on with Underworld playing loud enough to avoid the whining sound coming from an 11 year old complaining that the lockdown of the other laptop and consequent upgrade to JDK 7 has stopped minecraft. The IDE is showing the code for a converged HADOOP-8545 SwiftFS Filesystem;  a terminal building Hadoop locally so that Maven doesn't decide to pull a Hadoop-snapshot from the Apache repos, even though I built one locally myself only yesterday. Today's trunk benefits from a review and commit by Suresh od my HADOOP-9119 patch, one that verifies that when you overwrite a file in the FS with a new file, you get the contents of the new file back. (Because eventual consistency may not be what you want).  My notion of "Hadoop future" is not that of people who don't have spreadsheets full of JIRA issues to hand -and with them in mind, we have had to be pragmatic about what people want to know about.

We've also had to go through those proposals and sift those more-immediate future talks based on which ones sound the best. Which was done based on the abstracts.

The better the abstract, the better rank your paper got.

Some of the talk proposals had proposals competing directly with others for the same area and theme. When that happened, the one with the most compelling abstract got in. When there were some up and coming parts of the Hadoop stack, we had to select between them, again based on the abstract"

This is important because a vague one "we will show some interesting developments in Project XYZ"  isn't going to get in based on (speaker, org). That's for keynotes. For the technical talks, we needed to know enough about the talk to decide whether or not it was interesting and compelling for the audience.

The result of that is, we hope, an excellent set of talks for the audience, even though the limited space meant that coverage of all that is going in the Hadoop world is incomplete, and there will be some late-breaking features coming along. The should be some space for lighting talks, demo sessions, and presumably when I'm loitering by the Hortonworks booth I'll give demos of what I've been doing. There will be ways to see really new stuff.

What you won't get is full talks on such topics -which is why if you are working on something that you think is excellent and compelling to the audience of the next Hadoop Summit:

Submit a proposal with a really compelling abstract

[Photo, Sunset on Mount Shasta, CA, August 26 2012 -overnight stop on our return from Crater Lake to Mountain View[