A quick recap of SPARK + AI SUMMIT 2018

Spark + AI Summit was the world’s largest big data event focused entirely on Apache Spark assembling 4,000 people(best engineers, scientists, analysts, and executives) from over 40 countries attending to share their knowledge and receive expert training on this open-source powerhouse. If you didn’t make it, don’t worry; We’ve got you covered!

Vikas Hazrati and Ram Indukuri from Knoldus Inc. attended the Spark+AI Summit 2018, hosted in beautiful San Francisco on June 4th — 6th, 2018. This event offered a day of training sessions on June 4th followed by two days of conference activities on 5th and 6th June. The conference was packed with technical deep dives and demos from experts around the different countries.

We learned a lot from insightful keynotes, which I would like to share:

Keynote: Democratizing Apache Spark for the Enterprise

Jonathan Gole from Capital one presented this keynote. It was about the Confidential Unifying Analytics with Apache Spark for the Enterprise. Jonathan described how they’re are innovating to disrupt an industry, and solving infrastructure challenges that have slowed down digital transformation at banks leveraging unifying data and AI through Apache Spark.

Here are the talk slides and you can watch the whole keynote from here.

All of the sessions were recorded and are available at https://databricks.com/sparkaisummit/sessions

Open source project announcements:

1. MLflow: MLflow (currently in alpha) is a cross-cloud open source framework designed to manage the entire machine learning lifecycle and work with any machine learning library.
2. Databricks Runtime for ML: Based on customer demand, Databricks announced the new native and deep integration of popular ML libraries as part of the Databricks Runtime, including xgboost, scikit-learn, numpy as well as TensorFlow, Keras and Horovod. You can find more information here.
3. Analytics-ready Data with Databricks Delta: Simplify data reliability and performance of Apache Spark™ with Databricks Delta. Ensure your data is ready for analytics. Watch the keynote by Apple and demo to learn more.
4. Unified Analytics Platform for Genomics: Accelerate discovery with a collaborative platform for genomic data processing, tertiary analytics and AI at massive scale. Read the blog and sign-up for our private preview.

Knoldus Booth at Spark + AI Summit

Besides the training sessions and insightful keynotes, the Knoldus team at Spark+ AI Summit with Vikas Hazrati and Ram Indukuri had a great time discussing Spark and Data Science innovations and the larger technology landscape with the business stakeholders at the event.

Once you get talking, you realize that there are a lot of positive changes and diverse range of opportunities to be leveraged with Spark and Databricks.

The Spark + AI Summit is also about fun giveaways by participating companies, and this year, we had a few of our own. We had an exciting visitors at our booth where visitors can grab the camera blockers. We have also distributed our service overview brochures and flyer which you can download from here.

So that’s it from Spark+AI Summit. Now it’s time to get back to work and see how these proposed changes and improvements materialize to make Spark and Databricks more appealing to businesses.

Drop us a line and let’s discuss how we leverage these technologies and bring business outcomes for your organization.