Blue Star, high performance network cyber security services, engineering and software solutions, has announced the formation of four teams of employees to study technologies, concepts and methodologies that are important to the IT direction of its customers. Each team will focus on one core area of expertise: cloud computing, all things data, Ruby on Rails, and machine learning.
“We are excited about forming these teams,” said Dan Sherwell, president of Blue Star. “Our employees will become even more knowledgeable about technologies that are important and current in the commercial area, and can share information with clients about how to use these technologies to solve problems, as well as providing details about the technology’s direction and implementation best practices.”
“Our employees are enthusiastic about the teams too,” added Sherwell. “They provide a way for people who are already experts to demonstrate and share that expertise, and it helps everyone learn about areas which will be critical to their careers in the future.”
The teams are self-managing; membership is voluntary. Employees who participate will share information gained from attending conferences and training, personal experience, outside reading, and online research during brown-bag lunch sessions. Collaboration and document management tools will support the groups’ efforts and store the collected information.
Information will be shared with Blue Star’s customers upon request, either as part of normal project execution or in scheduled briefings.
The four teams will address:
- Cloud Computing: delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, with software applications, infrastructure and platform all provided over the Internet.
- All Things Data: as the volume of data increases exponentially, the issues involved in storing, analyzing and searching it become more complex. Technologies studied here include Hadoop, Cassandra, and HBase, as well as traditional relational database systems.
- Ruby on Rails: an open-source web development framework that has become one of the most popular programming languages in the world.
- Machine Learning: a branch of artificial intelligence, machine learning involves the creation of algorithms that allow computers to learn and make intelligent predictions. The Mahout open source machine learning library will be an area of focus here, with uses cases that include recommendation mining, clustering, classification, and frequent itemset mining.
