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February 3, 2020

Spark + AI Summit Reveals 2020 Keynote Speakers and Expanded Training

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Feb 3, 2020 — Databricks, the leader in unified data analytics, today announced keynote speakers alongside expanded technical content and training at Spark + AI Summit which is taking place June 22 – 25 in San Francisco. The keynote lineup spans data and machine learning innovators to data visionaries, including Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, Jennifer Chayes of UC Berkeley, and Adam Paszke of PyTorch. To support continuous innovation and expansion of the conference content, Spark + AI Summit welcomes Ben Lorica as the Program Chair.

Spark + AI Summit is the largest data and machine learning conference bringing together engineers, scientists, developers, analysts and leaders from around the world. “Over four days we’ll gather the greatest minds in our industry to shape the future of big data, analytics and AI and share knowledge through training, over 180 talks and networking events. Spark + AI Summit has become the destination for data teams to collaborate on solutions to solve the world’s toughest problems,” said Ali Ghodsi, cofounder and CEO at Databricks.

More than 7,000 attendees at Spark + AI Summit will attend four days of training sessions, presentations and networking events. This year’s Summit has tripled the number of technical training sessions covering key technologies and topics, including Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, MLflow, TensorFlow, deep learning, applying software engineering principles to data engineering and machine learning. The Summit kicks off with pre-conference training workshops, including both instruction and hands-on classes, which has now expanded to two days of full-day and half-day courses.

The growing list of keynotes include:

  • Nate Silver, Founder of FiveThirtyFive.com and Author of The Signal and the Noise
  • Kim Hazelwood, senior engineering manager leading the AI Infrastructure Foundation and AI Infrastructure Research efforts at Facebook
  • Adam Paszke, Author and Maintainer of PyTorch
  • Jennifer Chayes, Associate Provost of Data Science and Information, and Dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley
  • Francois Chollet, Author of Keras, Software Engineer at Google
  • Hany Farid, Professor, UC Berkeley and Author of “Photo Forensics”

Databricks executives and original creators of popular open source projects including Apache Spark, Delta Lake, MLflow, and Koalas will also hit the keynote stage:

  • Reynold Xin, Chief Architect and co-founder at Databricks
  • Matei Zaharia, Chief Technologist and co-founder at Databricks
  • Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder at Databricks

Ben Lorica Joins as Conference Chair

Ben Lorica is the former Chief Data Scientist at O’Reilly Media, and the former Program Chair of: the Strata Data Conference, the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, and TensorFlow World. The Summit will leverage Lorica’s industry expertise to continuously innovate and expand the Summit training, sessions and keynotes.

Find out more information about Spark + AI Summit 2020 and register to attend.

About Databricks

Databricks helps data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. As the leader in Unified Data Analytics, Databricks helps organizations make all their data ready for analytics, empower data-driven decisions across the organization, and rapidly adopt machine learning to outpace the competition. The company’s global customer base has thousands of organizations including Comcast, Shell, Expedia, and Regeneron. Databricks is venture-backed and founded by the original creators of popular open source projects, including Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow.


Source: Databricks 

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