We are delighted about the success of the first Spark Summit East, held in New York City on March 18th. The summit was attended by a sold-out crowd of over 900 people from more than 300 organizations.
Databricks is proud to make all talk videos, slides, training talk videos, and training materials available online for free as a service to the Apache Spark community. Slides are already available on the Spark Summit East agenda page and videos will be published there too as soon as we finish editing them.
Keynotes
Matei Zaharia, the creator of Spark, opened the summit with a talk titled New Directions for Spark in 2015. In it he presented work on higher level interfaces for machine learning, work enabling new external data sources to connect to Spark, and more.
During the next keynote Ion Stoica, CEO of Databricks, highlighted two companies that are using Spark in Databricks Cloud to create innovative data products. MyFitnessPal is utilizing Spark in a variety of ways to understanding the behavior of their customers. Automatic Labs is using Spark to analyze data collected from sensors in vehicles.
Next Brian Schimpf who is Director of Engineering at Palantir spoke about some of the data challenges Palantir faces related to trader oversight in the financial industry and the technology they’ve built in response with Spark at the core.
In the final two keynotes Matthew Glickman, managing director at Goldman Sachs, spoke of Spark as the “lingua franca” platform for scalable Big Data computation and Peter Wang from Continuum, a creator of the PyData Conference, spoke about the advantages of using Python and Spark together.
Community Talks
Beyond the keynotes, the summit showcased dozens of community talks across three parallel tracks covering a broad array of use cases from startups and large enterprises. Gauged by the diversity of talk topics, Spark is being used in a wide range of industries and organizations. Some highlights include:
- Finance: Tresata is revolutionizing the detection of money laundering
- Retail: Gilt and Shopify are using Spark to improve overall customer experience through better personalization
- Media: Comcast is offering real-time recommendation to their viewers
- Health and wellness: MyFitnessPal is providing more accurate food information to its 80 million users
- Pharma: Novartis is accelerating Genomics research with Spark
Training
The day following the Summit we trained over 500 students to use Spark in three parallel classes. You can download the course material for free via the links below:
Learn more about Spark training classes run by Databricks on the training portion of our website.
Learn More
For Spark enthusiasts on the West Coast, the next Spark Summit will be in San Francisco from June 15th to 17th. Register now before it sells out.
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