Learning Spark

Jules S. Damji is an Apache Spark Community and Developer Advocate at Databricks. He is a hands-on developer with over 20 years of experience and has worked at leading companies, such as Sun Microsystems, Netscape, @Home, LoudCloud/Opsware, VeriSign, ProQuest, and Hortonworks, building large-scale distributed systems. He holds a B.Sc and M.Sc in Computer Science and MA in Political Advocacy and Communication from Oregon State University, Cal State, and Johns Hopkins University respectively. Denny Lee is a Technical Product Manager at Databricks. He is a hands-on distributed systems and data sciences engineer with extensive experience developing internet-scale infrastructure, data platforms, and predictive analytics systems for both on-premise and cloud environments. He also has a Masters of Biomedical Informatics from Oregon Health and Sciences University and has architected and implemented powerful data solutions for enterprise Healthcare customers. His current technical focuses include Distributed Systems, Apache Spark, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Genomics. Brooke Wenig is the Machine Learning Practice Lead at Databricks. She guides and assists customers in implementing machine learning pipelines, as well as teaching Distributed Machine Learning & Deep Learning courses. She received an MS in Computer Science from UCLA with a focus on distributed machine learning. She speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently and enjoys cycling. Tathagata Das is an Apache Spark committer and a member of the PMC. He's the lead developer behind Spark Streaming and currently develops Structured Streaming. Previously, he was a grad student in the UC Berkeley at AMPLab, where he conducted research about data-center frameworks and networks with Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica.