A brief introduction to Scala

We are very excited to announce that Dr. Mark Lewis will be giving a talk on Scala. When people think about languages for data science, the ones that commonly come to mind are Python and R. However, when a project requires processing truly large amounts of data, things that really qualify as "big data", these languages are generally left behind as people move to other languages that can scale better. The first mainstream example of this was MapReduce and the Java-based implementation of it, Hadoop. These days, Hadoop is being replaced by other frameworks such as Spark, Kafka, and Flink. These big data frameworks are largely written in Scala. This talk will introduce you to the Scala language, focusing on the "scalable" aspects of Scala and how it can be used to do basic data processing.

Dr Lewis is a Professor at Trinity University. He teaches a number of different courses, spanning from first semester introductory courses to advanced seminars. His research interests included simulation and modeling, programming languages, and numerical modeling of rings around planets with nearby moons. He has written a few textbooks on the Scala programming language.