The Birth and Growth of Spark: An Open Source Success Story

Matei Zaharia is a Co-founder and Chief Technologist at Databricks as well as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He started the Apache Spark project during his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2009 and has worked broadly on other widely used data and AI software, including MLflow, Delta Lake, Dolly, and ColBERT. He works on a wide variety of projects in data management and machine learning at Databricks and Stanford. Matei’s research was recognized through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Vishnu Rachakonda is the operations lead for the MLOps Community and co-hosts the MLOps Coffee Sessions podcast. He is a machine learning engineer at Tesseract Health, a 4Catalyzer company focused on retinal imaging. In this role, he builds machine learning models for clinical workflow augmentation and diagnostics in on-device and cloud use cases. Since studying bioengineering at Penn, Vishnu has been actively working in the fields of computational biomedicine and MLOps. In his spare time, Vishnu enjoys suspending all logic to watch Indian action movies, playing chess, and writing.