Prev
Ajay Ohri: Describe your career from your student days to the President of ACM (Association of Computing Machinery www.acm.org/ ). How can we increase the interest of students in STEM education, particularly in view of the shortage of data scientists.
Alain Chesnais
... In the merged company: Alias|wavefront, I was director of engineering on the Maya project. Our team received an Oscar in 2003 for the creation of the Maya software system.
Since then I've worked at various companies, most recently focusing on social media and Big Data issues associated with it. Mark Zohar and I worked together at SceneCaster in 2007 where we developed a Facebook app that allowed users to create their own 3D scenes and share them with friends via Facebook without requiring a proprietary plugin. In December 2007 it was the most popular app in its category on Facebook.
Recently Mark approached me with a concept related to mining the content of public tweets to determine what was trending in real time. Using math similar to what I had developed during my graduate studies to model the performance of distributed databases in the presence of locking, we built up a real time analytics engine that ranks the content of tweets as they stream in. The math is designed to scale linearly in complexity with the volume of data that we analyze. That is the basis for what we have created for TrendSpottr. ...
Ajay: What sets Trendspotter apart from other startups out there in terms of vision in trying to achieve a more coherent experience on the web.
Alain:
The basic difference with other approaches ... is that we have developed an incremental solution that calculates the results on the fly as the data streams in. ... Think of it as signal processing where the tweets are the signal and our evaluators are like triggers that tell you what elements of the signal have the characteristics that we are filtering for (velocity and acceleration). ... our unit cost per tweet analyzed does not go up with increased volume. Using more traditional data analysis approaches involving an implicit sort would imply a complexity of N*log(N), where N is the volume of tweets being analyzed. ...
Read more.