TerraSwarm Investigator Carlos Guestrin Talks about GraphLab's New Machine-Learning Software

TerraSwarm investigator and GraphLab co-founder / CEO Carlos Guestrin, was recently interviewed by gigaom.com about the release of their new machine learning commercial software, GraphLab Create.   GraphLab was launched in 2013 to develop an open-source software platform for high-performance, scalable machine learning and graph analytics.  The new software they have developed allows users to run a number of popular machine learning tasks on data stored in graphs or tables.

The article quotes Guestrin:

The goal of Create is to help savvy engineers or data scientists take their machine learning projects from idea to production. It includes a handful of modules for building certain types of popular workloads, including recommendation engines, graph analysis and clustering and regression algorithms.

One of Create’s main benefits is simplicity. Users write, test and deploy their jobs in Python, and the jobs execute in GraphLab’s C++ engine to step up the speed. Jobs can execute on a laptop or across a cluster of servers running Hadoop (with YARN), and built-in management tooling lets users monitor running jobs. 

The way iOS did for mobile applications, Guestrin wants GraphLab Create to make it so anybody with the inclination and a modicum of coding skills can start building machine learning applications without worrying about all the hairy details around optimization, deployment and other historically time-consuming processes. 

Can a software product like GraphLab Create democratize machine learning?  To read more of Guestrin's comments and what capabilities GraphLab plans to include in future versions of their software, go to: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/15/graphlab-wants-to/.