The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® MADlib™ as a Top-Level Project

[Sally Khudairi <sk...@apache.org>]

[this announcement is available online at https://s.apache.org/BSrW ]

Big Data machine-learning library used for scalable in-database
analytics

Forest Hill, MD –22 August 2017– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF),
the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350
Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache®
MADlib™ has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level
Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have
been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache MADlib is a comprehensive library for scalable in-database
analytics. It provides parallel implementations of machine learning,
graph, mathematical and statistical methods for structured and
unstructured data.

"Graduating as a Top-Level Project is a very important milestone for
Apache MADlib," said Aaron Feng, Vice President of Apache MADlib.
"During the incubation process, the MADlib community worked very hard to
develop high quality software for in-database analytics, in an open and
inclusive manner in accordance with the Apache Way."

MADlib grew out of discussions between database engine developers, data
scientists, IT architects and academics interested in new approaches to
scalable, sophisticated in-database analytics. These discussions were
written up in a paper from VLDB 2009 [1] that coined the term "MAD
Skills" for data analysis. The MADlib software project began the
following year as a collaboration between researchers at UC Berkeley and
engineers and computer scientists at Pivotal (formerly EMC/Greenplum).
In September 2015, MADlib joined the ASF community as an incubating
project.

MADlib is deployed on a wide variety of industry and academic projects
across many different verticals, including automotive, consumer,
finance, government, healthcare, and telecommunications.

"MADlib was conceived from the outset as an open-source meeting ground
for software developers, computing researchers and data scientists to
collaborate on scalable, in-database machine learning and statistics,"
said Joe Hellerstein, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley,
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Trifacta, and one of the
original authors of MADlib. "It has been great to witness the growth of
the MADlib community and codebase as an ASF incubating project, and I
look forward to this continuing as a Top-Level Project."

"At Pivotal, we have seen our customers successfully deploy MADlib on
large scale data science projects across a wide variety of industry
verticals," said Elisabeth Hendrickson, Vice President, R&D for Data at
Pivotal. "As MADlib graduates to a Top-Level Project at the ASF, we
anticipate increased adoption in the enterprise given the mature level
of the codebase and the active developer community."

"The potential of the Apache MADlib project is unbounded," said Jim
Jagielski, Vice Chairman of the ASF. "The ability to perform in-depth
and detailed analytics, on both structured and unstructured data, using
SQL enables MADlib to be applicable in scenarios where others simply
can't compete. As not only interest in, but real-world usage of, machine
learning becomes common place, MADlib joins the growing roster of Apache
projects that define innovation."

"Apache MADlib is a great example of the diversity at Apache," said Ted
Dunning, Apache MADlib Incubator Mentor and Member of the ASF Board of
Directors. "MADlib does state-of-the-art machine learning, but does as
an inherent part of a database. This is a radical approach that can
provide important design flexibility. I am excited to see MADlib become
a fully fledged project at Apache."

"New participants are more than welcome to join the project," added
Feng. "We enthusiastically look forward to working together with all
contributors to Apache MADlib in order to advance the state-of-the-art
of scale-out data science tools."

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1687576

Availability and Oversight
Apache MADlib software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is
overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project.
A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day
operations, including community development and product releases. For
downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache
MADlib, visit http://madlib.apache.org/ and
https://twitter.com/ApacheMADlib

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases
wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation.
All code donations from external organizations and existing external
projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1)
ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and
2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles.
Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further
review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision
making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other
successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a
reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does
indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For
more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350
leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's
most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process
known as "The Apache Way," more than 650 individual Members and 6,200
Committers across six continents successfully collaborate to develop
freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users
worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the
Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing
lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official
user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3)
charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate
sponsors including Alibaba Cloud Computing, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget
Direct, Capital One, Cash Store, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook,
Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, iSigma, LeaseWeb,
Microsoft, ODPi, PhoenixNAP, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat,
Serenata Flowers, Target, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information,
visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "MADlib", "Apache MADlib",
and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache
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other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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