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Douwe Osinga, Co-Founder of Triposo

Douwe Osinga

Biography: Douwe Osinga

Before joining Google as a software engineer in 2004, Douwe started various companies in his native Netherlands. After stints in California, Zurich, India and Sydney working on Search, Mobile and finally Google Wave, he's now in Berlin as one of the founders of Triposo - Travelguides on mobile devices. Douwe heads up the data-analysis group where he tries big data tricks learned at Google at medium sized datasets on cheap hardware.

Twitter: @dosinga

Presentation: Architecture of the Triposo travel guide

Track: Architectures of the Small & Beautiful / Time: Friday 15:40 - 16:30 / Location: Fleming Room

Triposo is a living, breathing travel guide for mobile phones. Started by two Googlers it uses clever algorithms to distill travel guides for the entire world out of content crawled online. This talk will present the story of how we got from a little hobby project to the slightly bewildering architecture we have now. We will talk about things such as:

  • the Python-based pipeline and our home cooked map-reduce framework.
  • clever NLP tricks that gives result but doesn't require a PhD to understand.
  • geo spatial processing on the cheap.
  • our clever "suggestion algorithm" which uses time of day, weather, location and other things to suggest things out of our guides to travelers.
  • the distribution mechanism based on a Google Spreadsheet.
  • how we data mine social media to find the best burger in Berlin (it's from The Bird).
  • the syncing protocol for user contributions and sharing.