Originally published on Wired Innovation Insights, 3-12-14. There is a growing interest among mainstream consumers to learn more about who they are and where they came from. The good news is that DNA tests are no longer reserved for large medical research teams or plot lines in CSI. Now, the popularity of direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA tests Read More
Headed to SXSW Interactive? Join EVP of Product, Eric Shoup and Senior Director of Product at Tableau, Francois Ajenstat, for an engaging Core Conversation about how using big data can tell personalized stories. Big Data is a game changer for storytelling. Too often, the data we pull is cold, factual and dehumanized. Technologies can now Read More
In my previous post, I outlined some of the problems and strategies we use at Ancestry.com to determine if two people who appear in the same household are related. As promised, I want to focus this time on how to resolve ambiguous results. In my early days of doing family history research, I made an Read More
Jeremy Pollack, a lead engineer at Ancestry.com, answers questions on the technical backend of AncestryDNA in a video interview with InfoQ. The interview took place after his presentation with Bill Yetman on scaling AncestryDNA using Hadoop and HBase at QConSF in 2013. Check it out!
Ancestry.com to Host HBase Meetup on March 12th at our SF office If you are thinking about starting a Big Data Initiative, you may want to consider its affect across the organization. At Ancestry.com, we have been a very traditional Microsoft .NET and SQL Server shop for a long time. Several Initiatives, two which involve Read More
In my last post, I introduced our first steps in creating a scalable, high volume messaging system and would like to provide an update on our progress. We have built out a 0.7.2 Kafka cluster to start ingesting data from our servers. The cluster consists of the following: 5 x Kafka nodes • Dual 6 Read More
This series of essays will explore IT transformation (“futurization”) as a functional discipline of the business. IT transformation has clear business purposes. The transformational activity works to: increase speed to market for the business’s products and services, provide new and fulfilling career paths to IT engineers, increase reliability, availability and performance of systems and Read More
A company’s data set is a unique asset and it is very advantageous for companies to know what one of its most valuable assets looks like to make product and business decisions. That is where data scientists come in: we like to study data. At Ancestry.com, we have a large and unique set of data, which Read More
Ancestry.com becomes more and more aware of the value of the data our website generates every single day. We have a lot of customers coming to the website to discover, preserve and share their family history. They come from different parts of the world and are looking for information that helps them tell the story Read More
In the recent uncovering of NSA activity revealed by Edward Snowden, we see that the relationships between people can be some of the most valuable data that can be inferred from big data. The knowledge of who a person knows, who they have contacted, and who they are related to is apparently critical information for Read More