Spark Trends and Spark Analytics

You may want to attend this meetup in Glendale. Please see above for place and time. Additional information can be found at: http://www.meetup.com/LA-Open-Data/events/223365549/

Join us to discuss recent Spark development trends, and go over some use cases of using Spark for analytics and machine learning.On June 15–17, I attended the 2015 Spark Summit and was excited to observe some new developments. The Spark Summit in last year had only about 500 attendees, for this year, the summit had more than 2000 attendees with many good use cases presented. More info about this summit is available at https://spark-summit.org/2015/ .

The Chief Information Officer from the Central Intelligence Agency, Doug Wolfe, also spoke at the Spark summit, about open data and about adopting big data technologies in government. It seems Spark could be very useful to process all the open data available, and I was told some venture capital funds have been created specially for the open data and public sector analytics, with the $100 Million SineWave Venture Fund as one example.

And as announced at the Spark summit, IBM made a huge commitment to Spark, with a Spark Technology Center to be established in San Francisco that IBM will put thousands of data scientists and researchers into Spark development and has already made the IBM machine learning package, SystemML, open source to be integrated into Spark. For more, you may visit http://www.ibm.com/analytics/us/en/technology/spark/ .

So, let us meet on July 8th evening to discuss:

1) Spark development trends

2) Spark analytics use cases

3) Spark and open data

4) Spark and machine learning tools

As before, Starbucks coffee and cookies will be provided. The meeting will start at 7pm sharp, and we will have Q&A sessions and networking time following the talk / presentation.

Parking along the Brand Blvd costs about $1 per hour, and you may find free parking in nearby small streets.