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We received more than fifty talk proposals for Berlin Buzzwords as the call for presentations ended. Currently we are busy rating, ranking and selecting talks. Every single submission was of large quality, discussing a topic interesting for Berlin Buzzwords. So we will be well able to fill two days with two tracks each of awesome talks on storing, analysing and searching data.

We are planning to notify speakers and publish the final schedule in May. However, to give you a first impression of what was submitted we are starting to disclose information on speakers and topics now:

Robert Muir is working as a software developer for Abraxas Corporation. ms/cs from Johns Hopkins, bs/cs from Radford University. For the last few years he has been working natural language NLP problems. Robert is committer on Apache Lucene. There he was mostly concerned with developing analysers for various languages.

Robert will give a talk on "Finite-State Queries in Lucene". The talk will focus upon how in an upcoming version of Lucene, you will be able to do scalable 'inexact' queries such as pattern-matching, fuzzy, etc. In current versions of Lucene these queries are not very scalable.

Sean Owen is a committer for Apache Mahout and primarily developed its recommender engine support over the past 4 years. He was a software engineer with Google in New York, focusing on mobile search. Sean is currently co-writing the book "Mahout in Action" from Manning.

He will be giving a talk on "Simple co-occurrence-based recommendation on Hadoop": Recommender engines thrive on data -- lots of data. As such, scale inevitably becomes a challenge for recommenders. Distributed computing frameworks like Hadoop offer the infrastructure for applying many machines to such problems, and Apache Mahout has recently provided some first truly distributed recommender algorithms based on Hadoop. This talk explores the first such implementation, a simple algorithm based on item co-occurrence. We focus on how the algorithm is fit into a map-reduce paradigm, and how issues of scale inform the implementation.

Watch this space for information on further speakers accepted for Berlin Buzzwords.