[REPORT] MADlib - October 2018

["FENG, Xixuan (Aaron)" <xi...@gmail.com>]

## Description:

- Apache MADlib is a scalable, big data, SQL-driven machine learning
framework for data scientists.


## Issues:

- There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.


## Activity:

- Aaron Feng (PMC Chair) visited Pivotal in Palo Alto in
August and held discussions with a few other committers on
the topics of new features and testing infrastructure.

- A MADlib community call on the topic of the last 1.15
release occurred on 2018-Aug-23.  The presenters were project
committers Jingyi Mei and Frank McQuillan who reviewed
the main 1.15 features and gave some demos using Jupyter notebooks.
Demos included: variable importance in decision trees,
column/vector operations, and momentum methods for neural
networks (multi-layer perceptron).  Here is the link to the
community call:   https://youtu.be/9JpPWuiqweU

- Community is currently working on the 1.15.1 release which
will be 5th release as an Apache TLP project.  We expect
voting on release artifacts in Oct.

- Ideas for the 2.0 release are being discussed in the JIRAs
and mailing list and may include model management and deep
learning, depending on community interest and contributions.

- Apache MADlib has been referred by two 2018 VLDB papers:

“In-RDBMS Hardware Acceleration of Advanced Analytics”
http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol11/p1317-mahajan.pdf
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 11, No. 11

“A Comparative Evaluation of Systems for Scalable Linear
Algebra-based Analytics”
http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol11/p2168-thomas.pdf
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 11, No. 13


## Health report:

The community is relatively small but very engaged with robust mailing
list traffic, interest in doing frequent releases and new
functionality being developed by contributors.

The number of developers actively contributing to the code/documentation
is approximately 9 in the 3rd quarter of calendar year 2018,
which is about the same as the last report.

We will constantly be on a lookout for new community members to be
invited either as committers or PMC.


## PMC changes:

- No changes in PMC, currently 13 PMC members.


## Committer base changes:

- Currently 15 committers.

- Last committer additions were Jingyi Mei on 2018-06-14 and Nikhil Kak on
2018-06-27.


## Releases:

- Next release: v1.15.1 planned for October 2018

- v1.15.0 released on 2018-08-10

- v1.14.0 released on 2018-05-01

- v1.13.0 released on 2017-12-22


## Mailing list activity:

Average monthly mailing list activity was 169 posts to dev@
and 22 posts to user@ for the last 3 months Jul-Sep.


## JIRA Statistics:

- 7 JIRA tickets created in the last month

- 8 JIRA tickets resolved in the last month