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Jon Tirsen, CTO Triposo

Jon Tirsen

Biography: Jon Tirsen

Jon has built stuff for computers most of his life. Before starting Triposo he worked as tech lead for Google Wave and was one of the founders of ThoughtWorks Studios. He's never been able to pick a single thing he loves in computing and has therefor worked with a wide area of things like: UI (both web and mobile), scaling websites, large data, natural languages, geo and so on. An avid traveller having travelled and lived in many places all over the world he's now temporarily settled in Berlin waiting for his 2-year old son to get old enough to get back on the road again.

Twitter: @tirsen

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.