Ken Krugler
About
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Teaching nonprofits how to effectively & responsibly use AI.
Nevada City, California, United States
Résumé
Jobs
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FounderAI for CommunityMar 2025 - Current (1 year 8 months)I founded AI for Community in 2025, to train as many nonprofits as possible how to effectively and responsibly use AI to fulfill their missions.- Flink InstructorVervericaMay 2019 - Oct 2025 (6 years 6 months)
- ASoftware EngineerApollo FusionApr 2017 - Dec 2018 (1 year 9 months)All Things Software that don't require a PhD in nuclear engineering.
- SCTOSales HeroApr 2017 - Dec 2017 (9 months)
- Hadoop EngineerDatameerApr 2016 - Jul 2017 (1 year 4 months)Integrating real time big data analytics into Datameer's platform.
- Member and Tika committerThe Apache Software FoundationJan 2011 - Current (15 years 10 months)I'm a committer on the Tika content extraction project, focusing on HTML parsing, character encodings and language detection.
- SPresidentScale UnlimitedJul 2009 - Nov 2025 (16 years 5 months)We provide design, development and training to help companies solve big data problems using Flink, Pinot, Cassandra and Solr.
Our clients range from Fortune 50 companies to early stage startups. We’re experts in large-scale data processing, text analysis, machine learning, search and focused web crawling. We know how to take a project from concept to reality, and we can train your team how to do the same.
We provide training on the open source technologies we use, including Hadoop, Cascading and Solr. We know how to mentor the client’s team, ensuring a smooth and successful hand-off at the end of the project.
Finally, we build and run both broad and focused web crawls. We can extract structured data from uns - KCo-founder & CTOKrugle IncSep 2005 - Jan 2009 (3 years 5 months)Took concept of "Search as a development tool" from scribbles on paper to a successful product. Krugle enterprise is used by Fortune 500 companies to increase code reuse, improve developer productivity and reduce bug propagation.
• Key developer on RESTful API to back-end services.
• Extensive use of Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Hadoop.
• Filed 7 patents on search, vertical web crawl and code analysis
• Built core engineering team.
• Managed development through prototype phase.
• Helped raise $10M from four VC firms.
• Wrote articles and spoke at industry events.
• Co-authored use case for next Lucene in Action book. - PConsultantPalmSource Inc formerly Palm IncJan 1997 - Dec 2005 (9 years)Architected OS-level support for internationalization. Developed Japanese and Chinese (Simplified & Traditional) versions of Palm OS.
- OwnerTransPac Software IncJan 1987 - Sep 2005 (18 years 9 months)Founded software consulting and product development company. Recognized as a leader in Far East text processing and operating system internationalization.
• Responsible for corporate sales, finance, and management.
• Spoke at industry events about internationalization & globalization.
• Co-founded localization company with major Japan software distributor.
• Managed and led development efforts:
- Japanese, Chinese and Korean versions of Mac OS for Apple.
- Word processors for Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Tibetan markets.
- Input methods (FEPs) for Japanese and Chinese.
- Multilingual dictionary for Japanese, Chinese, and Thai.
- Expert system for Japanese & US fitness clubs.
- Software ArchitectAppleJun 1983 - Jan 1987 (3 years 8 months)Member of core Lisa and Macintosh operating system teams. Designed and implemented initial releases of Japanese and Chinese versions of Mac OS. Helped on Thai, Arabic, and Indic versions of Mac OS.
Education
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- BS, Computer Science and EngineeringMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyJan 1979 - Dec 1983 (5 years)Winner, Clapp & Poliak engineering design award.
Projects (professional or personal)
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- FFlink Web CrawlerAug 2016 - Current (10 years 3 months)A continuous scalable web crawler built on top of Flink and crawler-commons, with bits of code borrowed from bixo.
- SSuicide prediction from social media activityFeb 2012 - Current (14 years 9 months)Use social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) activity to predict which military personnel have the highest risk of suicide. Uses Gigya to collect social media activity, stores it in Cassandra, and then applies multiple predictive analytics models via Hadoop/Cascading to calculate risk.
- DDisplay advertising analyticsJun 2011 - Current (15 years 5 months)Provide back-end support for an analytics web site that helps advertisers and publishers optimize display advertising. Process millions of crawled pages each day with Hadoop/Cascading, to build an OLAP (on-line analytics platform) using Solr indexes. Apply classification and clustering algorithms to enhance results with IAB codes, similar advertisers, recommended publishers, ec.
- NNear real time web page similarityOct 2010 - May 2011 (8 months)Find pages in a 20M+ corpus that were similar to an arbitrary target page. Do it in a few milliseconds, and support hundreds of requests/second on a single server. This used a Cascading/Hadoop workflow to extract key terms from the corpus, and built a Solr index and "corpus map" for the near-real time similarity engine.
- FFocused crawl/index for market analyticsMay 2010 - Current (16 years 6 months)Provide back-end support for market research platform that is used by analysts to define & create brand and topic-tracking reports. System uses a focused crawler (with SVM classifiers) to find and extract content, particularly conversations about products on the web. The pipeline then does key term extraction, additional classification and clustering, and finally builds topic-specific search indexes that incorporate pipeline results for augmented search functionality.
Publications
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- FBuilding a scalable focused web crawler with FlinkFlink Forward SFApr 2018Is it possible to build an efficient, focused web crawler using Flink? That was the question that led to the creation of the flink-crawler open source project. In this talk I’ll discuss how we use Flink’s support for AsyncFunctions and iterations to create a scalable web crawler that continuously and efficiently performs a focused web crawl with no additional infrastructure. I’ll also discuss some of the testing and debugging challenges encountered when using features such as AsyncFunctions and iterations.
- AFaster Workflows, FasterApacheCon Big Data NAMay 2016Slides from my talk at ApacheCon Big Data 2016 in Vancouver. I described how we're defining complex ETL workflows using the Cascading API, then running them on Flink (using AWS Elastic Mapreduce).
- CFuzzy Entity MatchingCassandra SummitSep 2014I discuss in-depth a real-world use case for combining Hadoop, Cassandra & Solr to solve the problem of quickly matching a target person (entity) against a large corpus of hundreds of millions of potential matches.
- HSimilarity at ScaleHadoop SummitJun 2014In this talk I describe use cases for both batch & real-time similarity, and discuss my experience using Hadoop and Solr to generate high quality results at scale for several different clients. I cover entity resolution (people & places), false identity detection (fraud), real-time recommendation systems and automatic document linking. These are all based on past projects for real customers. Techniques I discuss are feature extraction from text, distributed SimHash, and Solr-based real time similarity scoring.
- CSuicide Risk Prediction using Social Media and CassandraCassandra SummitJul 2013I describe a portion of an early-phase project that uses social media data (tweets, Facebook posts, etc.) from service personnel to predict suicide rates. There’s a lot of motivation to provide better data for military psychologies, since more military wind up taking their own lives than are killed in the line of duty. By analyzing social media data that is voluntarily provided by personnel, plus a predictive analytics system, we can provide assessments that help mental health workers focus their time and energy on the most at-risk individuals. This project uses Cassandra as the scalable storage system for this social media data, which is then analyzed in a distributed environment using Hadoop. The project also uses the Solr search support
- HFaster, Cheaper, Better - Replacing Oracle with Hadoop and SolrHadoop SummitJun 2012This talk is a distillation of experience with clients, where we use Hadoop to do off-line pre-processing of data, which then lets us use Solr as a NoSQL solution that provides faster query processing on less hardware, while adding additional search & faceting functionality.
- BA (very) short intro to HadoopBigDataCampNov 2011A very short introduction to Hadoop, from the talk I gave at the BigDataCamp held in Washington DC. Some of this content is also covered in the various big data classes we offer via on-site training (see http://www.scaleunlimited.com/training/)
- BA Very Short History of Big DataBigDataCampNov 2011My lightening talk from the BigDataCamp in Washington, DC.
- SThinking at Scale with HadoopSDForum SAM SIGSep 2010Presentation I gave at the SDForum SAM SIG (Software Architecture & Modeling) meeting. This talk provides a brief introduction to Map-Reduce & Hadoop, then discusses challenges of implementing complex data processing using low-level Map-Reduce support, and a number of solutions.
- AElastic Web MiningACM Data Mining UnconferenceNov 2009PDF version (with notes) of my talk at the ACM Data Mining Unconference. How to use an open source stack (Hadoop, Cascading, Bixo) in EC2 for cost effective, scalable and reliable web mining.