HPCC Systems Digital Badges – Recognising our Community Contributors
HPCC Systems went open source in 2011 and our community continues to grow thanks to the support of our community members. At our annual Community Day Summit, it is always a great pleasure to announce our Community Recognition Awards and present certificates and prizes to our Technical Poster Contest participants and winners. During the year, we also recognise the contributions of students joining our intern program and award certificates to learners completing our training courses.
Towards the end of 2020, we announced the introduction of a series of digital badges that can be displayed on social media profiles. They recognise the involvement of community members and provide a way to display and promote the valuable achievements and contributions they make to our open source project. We awarded the first of these badges at our 2020 Community Day Summit and look forward to awarding more digital badges in 2021 and beyond.
There are 15 badges in total, covering a range of commitments, contributions and achievements.
Community Badges
There are five awards in this category. If you join us at our Community Day Summit, read our blog, join us at our Tech Talks etc, you will know that our community members use HPCC Systems in many innovative and sometimes surprising ways. Colleagues, business partners, academic program members and our student contributors push the boundaries of big data analytics, finding new ways to research and deliver solutions to real world problems using our platform.
HPCC Systems Community Recognition Award
Recipients of this award are community members outside of RELX and LexisNexis Risk Solutions group, who demonstrate innovative use of HPCC Systems in research, solutions and open source projects. They are strong advocates of the platform across their organization, including academia and business, contributing time, knowledge and talent back to the HPCC Systems Open Source Community.
The 2020 Community Recognition Award was presented to Dr G Shobha, Computer Science and Engineering Department, RV College of Engineering, India at our 2020 Community Day Summit (Watch Award Ceremony). Find out more about our collaboration with Dr Shobha and her team.
HPCC Systems David Kan Ambassador Award
The HPCC Systems Ambassador Program was established to help expand the HPCC Systems open source community through our talented and passionate colleagues. Recipients of this award are RELX or LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group colleagues who are strong supporters and proud evangelists. They have significantly promoted and contributed to the growth of our community, serving as mentors, event speakers, subject matter experts, and champions. They represent HPCC Systems, pushing the brand and platform capabilities to help promote and grow internal and marketplace awareness and preference. In 2016, this award became the David Kan Ambassador Award in memory of one of the first, and very dedicated HPCC Systems ambassadors.
The 2020 David Kan Ambassador Award was presented to Tim Humphrey, Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group at our 2020 Community Day Summit (Watch Award Ceremony).
2020 HPCC Systems Poster Competition Winner Badge
Awarded to the 2020 poster participants who placed in the top spots in the 2020 HPCC Systems Poster Competition. The selected winners are judged among the following categories: Best Platform Enhancement, Best Data Analytics, Best Use Case.
A fourth winner, selected by majority votes from the 2020 HPCC Systems Community Day attendees, received our new Community Choice Award.
In 2020, this award was presented to the following Poster Contest Winners:
- Best Poster: Platform Enhancement
The Parallel Workflow Engine
Nathan Halliday, High School Student - Best Poster: Data Analytics
Distributed GPU Accelerated Neural Networks with GNN
Robert Kennedy, PhD Candidate
Florida Atlantic University - Best Poster: Use Case
HPCC Systems on Google Anthos
Jefferson Mao, High School Student
Lambert High School, GA, USA - Community Choice Award Winner
Using HPCC Systems GNN Bundle with TensorFlow to Train a Model to Find Known Faces Leveraging the Robotics APIJack Fields, High School Student
American Heritage School, FL, USA
Our 2020 Technical Poster Wiki provides details of all our poster contest participants and their posters, as well as links to video presentations by the students speaking about their work.
2020 HPCC Systems Intern Badge
Recipients of the 2020 HPCC Systems Intern Badge complete a 12 week internship program, meeting all expected criteria in contributing to the HPCC Systems open source project. To join the program, students submit a proposal identifying the tasks involved for their chosen project, including a timeline of tasks to be completed each week. They work alongside a mentor, using the same tools and working practices as our HPCC Systems Platform developers.
Seven interns joined the program in 2020:
- Jack Fields, High School Student
American Heritage School, FL, USA - Jefferson Mao, High School Student
Lambert High School, GA, USA - Matthias Murray, Masters of Data Science
New College of Florida - Nathan Halliday, High School Student
- Robert Kennedy, PhD in Computer Science
Florida Atlantic University - Vannel Zeufack, Masters of Computer Science
Kennesaw State University - Yash Mishra, Masters of Computer Science
Clemson University
Find out more about the application process for our intern program.
Learn more about our Class of 2020 interns and contributions they have made to the HPCC Systems open source project.
2020 HPCC Systems Mentor Badge
Recipients of this badge served as mentors to our interns in the 2020 HPCC Systems internship program, providing guidance and direction to their designated intern towards the successful completion of their open source projects. Our mentors in 2020 were a mixture of LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group Colleagues, university professors and school teachers.
This award was presented to our 2020 mentors from LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group:
- Ming Wang
Senior Consulting Software Engineer - Godson Fortil
Software Engineer I - David Dehilster
Consulting Software Engineer - Gavin Halliday
Enterprise/Lead Architect - Lili Xu
Software Engineer III - Arjuna Chala
Senior Director Operations - Roger Dev
Senior Architect - Dan Camper
Senior Architect - Tim Humphrey
Consulting Software Engineer
This award was also presented in 2020 to the following mentors representing our academic partners:
- Dr Amy Apon
PhD Professor and Chair, Division of Computer Science, Clemson University - Dr Taghi Khosgoftaar
Motorola Professor, Department of Computer Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University - Tai Donovan
Robotics Program Director and Instructor, First Robotics Competition Team # 5472 Coach and Founding Mentor, American Heritage School
Find out more about the support our mentors give to students in this blog.
HPCC Systems Training Achievement Badges
Our training courses deliver comprehensive content for learning how to use the ECL language alongside the HPCC Systems Platform. Courses are available for beginners to advanced ECL users, managers and system administrators. A badge is awarded on the completion of a course and there is an additional badge for those who manage to compete all the courses in our training program.
Badges are also awarded to the instructors who deliver these training courses.
HPCC Systems Certified Trainer
- Richard Taylor, Senior Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group
- Bob Foreman, Senior Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group
- Hugo Watanuki, Senior Technical Support Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group
Core ECL Competency Badges
The following courses are included in the ECL Core Classes section of our online training course catalog.
HPCC Systems Introduction to ECL Parts 1 and 2
Awarded on the successful completion of all lessons and labs in the HPCC Systems Introduction to ECL Parts 1 & 2 courses. Part 1 focuses on concepts and queries and Part 2 moves on to look at the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) Process.
HPCC Systems Advanced ECL Parts 1 and 2
Awarded on the successful completion of all lessons and labs in the HPCC Systems Advanced ECL Parts 1 & 2 courses. Part 1 focuses on working with relational data and Part 2 moves on to look at super files, working with XML and free form text parsing.
HPCC Systems ROXIE ECL Parts 1 and 2
Awarded on the successful completion of all lessons and labs in the HPCC Systems ROXIE ECL Parts 1 & 2 courses. Part 1 focuses on indexes and queries and Part 2 moves on to look at complex query development.
HPCC Systems All Core ECL Competency
Awarded on the successful completion of all the lessons and labs in the HPCC Systems ECL Core Class catalog. This includes, Introduction to ECL Parts 1 & 2, Advanced ECL Parts 1 & 2, and ROXIE ECL Parts 1 & 2. This is a major milestone achievement in the ECL language learning journey.
HPCC Systems Applied ECL: Code Generation Tools
Awarded on the successful completion of the Applied ECL Code Generation Tools course, which provides the opportunity for ECL users to extend their knowledge by using the ECL code generation tools to automate operational tasks. This course covers creating and using macros, the ECL template language and automating processes.
HPCC Systems Applied ECL – Machine Learning with HPCC Systems
Awarded on completion of the Applied ECL Machine Learning course which explores the fundamentals of machine learning with ECL, including the Myriad Interface. Learners are also introduced to a number of the currently supported HPCC Systems open source machine learning bundles such as Learning Trees, Deep Learning, Generalised Neural Networks (GNN), KMeans and DBSCAN.
This course is an extension to the core ECL classes, requiring the completion of the Introduction to ECL classes parts 1 and 2.
HPCC Systems Managers Course
Awarded on completion of all lessons and labs in the Introduction to HPCC Systems for Managers course, which is ideal for anyone who wants to gain a basic understanding of HPCC Systems and how ECL can be used to build powerful data queries. An overview of Thor and ROXIE is provided as well as introduction to ECL concepts and syntax, using ECL IDE and ECL Watch, progressing on to give some basic knowledge about how to create simple ECL queries.
Systems Administration Course
Awarded on completion of all lessons and labs in the Systems Administration course for learning methods and best practices to maintain and manage an HPCC Systems environment. This course is aimed at those who wish to maintain and manage HPCC Systems Clusters, focusing on daily administrative operations. An architectural overview is provided along with advice about routine maintenance, using Preflight on core components and clusters, using the Configuration Manager for setup as well as troubleshooting tips.
HPCC Systems Ultimate Master Badge
Awarded on completion of all the HPCC Systems ECL core competency courses, applied ECL courses, Machine Learning, Manager and Systems Administration courses. As the name of this badge suggests, this award is the ultimate milestone in the ECL learning journey provided by our training catalog. But the learning doesn’t stop here. Our Ultimate Masters will go on to use and extend their knowledge all the time by completing projects and knowledge sharing with others.
Congratulations to all our 2020 Badge Winners
So far, we have made almost 200 awards using our new badges.
The 2021 Community Recognition Award winners will be announced during our 2021 Community Day Summit alongside the Poster Contest Winners. We will announce the list of those joining the 2021 HPCC Systems Intern Program during the summer.
As you can see from the number of awards presented so far, there are many more community members who have received badges for their achievements, particularly those who have completed courses offered in our training catalog. We have yet to award the Ultimate Master Badge, but the list of those who have received the All Core ECL Competency badge is getting longer every day, which must be an inspiration to learners working towards achieving that goal.
Who will be the first Ultimate Master? Maybe it will be you!