Clemens Wolff

Running Parallel Apache Spark Notebook Workloads On Azure Databricks

January 18th, 2019

Background and Problem Definition In today’s fast-moving world, having access to up-to-date business metrics is key to making data-driven customer-centric decisions. With over 1000 daily flights servicing more than 100 cities and 42 million customers per year, JetBlue has a lot of data to crunch, answering questions such as: What is the ...

Using Otsu’s method to generate data for training of deep learning image segmentation models

May 17th, 2018

Background Partnering with Microsoft, golf performance tracking startup Arccos has set out to use artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to build apps that help golfers step up their game. Last year, they gifted golfers a new ace in the hole – their own “virtual caddie” app, powered by Microsoft’s cloud and machine ...

Continuous Delivery for Service Fabric via Github, Travis CI and Docker Compose

January 18th, 2018

We recently worked with Ascoderu, a small tech-for-good non-profit registered in Canada and the Congo DRC. Ascoderu is currently developing the Lokole project, which includes a hardware access point and suite of open source Linux cloud services to enable communities to have rich communications via email for just $1 per community per day. ...

Deploying a Linux Python web application to Service Fabric via Docker Compose

January 9th, 2018

Background We recently partnered with Ascoderu, a small non-profit using technology to help bridge the digital divide in rural communities in the Congo DRC. Ascoderu is building "Lokole", a hardware access point and suite of open source Linux cloud services that enable people to have rich communications via email for as little as US$0.01 ...

Comparing Image-Classification Systems: Custom Vision Service vs. Inception

December 5th, 2017

We recently worked with Reverb, an online marketplace for music gear. Musicians and music retailers use Reverb's platform to buy and sell items such as guitars, keyboards, effects pedals, etc. A key element that aids discovery of items listed on the Reverb site is accurate metadata. For example, the manufacturer's official name for the finish ...

Permissively-Licensed Named Entity Recognition on the JVM

November 20th, 2017

Fortis is an open source social data ingestion, analysis, and visualization platform built on Scala and Apache Spark. The tool is developed in collaboration with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) to provide insights into crisis events as they occur, via the lens of social media. A key part ...

Building a Custom Spark Connector for Near Real-Time Speech-to-Text Transcription

November 1st, 2017

The Fortis project is a social data ingestion, analysis, and visualization platform. Originally developed in collaboration with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), Fortis provides planners and scientists with tools to gain insight from social media, public websites and custom data sources.  UN ...