Monthly Archives: September 2012

AMP Camp Follow-up and Preview of What’s Next

Posted on by Andy Konwinski
Andy Konwinski

In August, we hosted the first AMP Camp “Big Data bootcamp” and it was a huge success, with a sold-out auditorium and over 3,000 folks tuning in to watch via live streaming!

However, hosting the AMP Camp was only one part of our plan to engage you and your peers in the Big Data community. Many of you heard about BDAS, the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack (pronounced “bad-ass”), for the first time at AMP Camp. Well, we are busy working on new releases of the existing BDAS components (e.g., Spark 0.6.0 is just around the corner) as well as entirely new components that we will announce soon. Additionally, in the spirit of AMP Camp, we will continue releasing free online Big Data training materials, videos, and tutorials. And of course, we have already begun planning the next AMP Camp.

We archived videos of all of the AMP Camp talks and their corresponding slides; find links to both on the AMP Camp Agenda page. We also published the hands-on Big Data exercises we released during AMP Camp, that walk you through setting up and using the BDAS stack on EC2 to perform a parallel machine learning algorithm (K-Means Clustering) on a real Wikipedia dataset.

During the actual event, we used a Piazza class to answer questions immediately as they were asked. The Piazza class from the first AMP Camp will remain available for archival purposes. If you are not already enrolled in the class (required in order to access the Q&A archive) and would like to be, please let us know by sending an email to ampcamp@cs.berkeley.edu.

Just how successful was the first AMP Camp? Check out some of the event statistics for yourself:

  • 27,594 people visited the AMP Camp site in the 4 day window surrounding the event
  • 4,969 people registered to view AMP Camp live streaming
  • Over 3,000 people tuned into the AMP Camp live stream
  • 1,277 people enrolled in the AMP Camp Piazza class
  • The average AMP Camp teacher/TA response time to questions asked in Piazza was 7 minutes

If you are interested in staying up to date with what we’re working on, join the AMP Mailing list. We look forward to being in touch with you again soon!

Can Social Networks Rapidly Transmit Knowledge?

Posted on by Ken Goldberg
Ken Goldberg

How many of our friends and neighbors are aware of California’s Proposition 30? Despite the high stakes and its potential impact on everyone from students and parents to business leaders, many Californians are not yet aware of it. Can social networks rapidly transmit knowledge about timely issues like this?

In 2009, the DOD launched an experiment to see if social networks could be mobilized to address time-critical tasks. Within three days, a team from MIT recruited thousands of people to help, and they successfully located the DOD’s 10 red weather balloons within nine hours. One key to their success was their recursive incentive mechanism.  These are well-known in marketing as pyramid schemes, but they are also useful to extract information from social networks. A Nature article published last week shows that social media, in particular messages from close friends, can have a small but significant influence on voting behavior which can make a difference in tight races. Polls show that voters who are aware of Proposition 30 are split at close to 50/50.

Can an intangible incentive structure be designed to rapidly mobilize citizens to learn about a pressing issue? Working with the AMP Lab and the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative, we are studying this question with a project to study how activity spreads across populations.

The website for the Proposition 30 Awareness Project allows visitors to register their awareness, then receive a custom web link to share with their friends and family using email, Facebook or Twitter. Visitors can return at any time to monitor their growing influence graph and track their influence score.   Influence is computed using a variant of the Kleinberg and Raghavan algorithm.

This experiment is the first step toward a general-purpose tool that will allow citizens to initiate their own awareness campaigns on any issue. The first example emphasizes awareness of Proposition 30 and does not advocate a position. It includes links to the California Voters Guide and to campaigns on both sides of the issue. Visitors may also indicate their position for or against the proposition and join an online discussion afterward.

We welcome you to participate in the study by visiting: http://tinyurl.com/prop30p