In this episode of the Data Show, we look back to a recent conversation I had at the Spark Summit in San Francisco with Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley professor and executive chairman of Databricks) and Matei Zaharia (assistant professor at Stanford and chief technologist of Databricks). Stoica and Zaharia were core members of UC Berkeley’s AMPLab, which originated Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, and Alluxio.

We began our conversation by discussing recent academic research that would be of interest to the Apache Spark community (Stoica leads the RISE Lab at UC Berkeley, Zaharia is part of Stanford’s DAWN Project). The bulk of our conversation centered around machine learning. Like many in the audience, I was first attracted to Spark because it simultaneously allowed me to scale machine learning algorithms to large data sets while providing reasonable latency.

Here is a partial list of the items we discussed:

The current state of machine learning in Spark.

Given that a lot of innovation has taken place outside the Spark community (e.g., scikit-learn, TensorFlow, XGBoost), we discussed the role of Spark ML moving forward.

The plan to make it easier to integrate advanced analytics libraries that aren’t “textbook machine learning,” like NLP, time series analysis, and graph analysis into Spark and Spark ML pipelines.

Some upcoming projects from Berkeley and Stanford that target AI applications (including newer systems that provide lower latency, higher throughput).

Recent Berkeley and Stanford projects that address two key bottlenecks in machine learning—lack of training data, and deploying and monitoring models in production.

[Full disclosure: I am an advisor to Databricks.]

Related resources:

Spark: The Definitive Guide

Advanced Analytics with Spark

High-performance Spark

Learning Path: Get Started with Natural Language Processing Using Python, Spark, and Scala

Learning Path: Getting Up and Running with Apache Spark

“The current state of applied data science”