About the Author

Krishna Sankar is a Senior Specialist—AI Data Scientist with Volvo Cars focusing on Autonomous Vehicles. His earlier stints include Chief Data Scientist at http://cadenttech.tv/, Principal Architect/Data Scientist at Tata America Intl. Corp., Director of Data Science at a bioinformatics startup, and as a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco. He has been speaking at various conferences including ML tutorials at Strata SJC and London 2016, Spark Summit [goo.gl/ab30lD], Strata-Spark Camp, OSCON, PyCon, and PyData, writes about Robots Rules of Order [goo.gl/5yyRv6], Big Data Analytics—Best of the Worst [goo.gl/ImWCaz], predicting NFL, Spark [http://goo.gl/E4kqMD], Data Science [http://goo.gl/9pyJMH], Machine Learning [http://goo.gl/SXF53n], Social Media Analysis [http://goo.gl/D9YpVQ] as well as has been a guest lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School. His occasional blogs can be found at https://doubleclix.wordpress.com/. His other passion is flying drones (working towards Drone Pilot License (FAA UAS Pilot) and Lego Robotics—you will find him at the St.Louis FLL World Competition as Robots Design Judge.

My first thanks goes to you, the reader, who is taking time to understand the technologies that Apache Spark brings to computation and to the developers of the Spark platform. The book reviewers Sumit and Alexis did a wonderful and thorough job morphing my rough materials into correct readable prose. This book is the result of dedicated work by many at Packt, notably Nikhil Borkar, the Content Development Editor, who deserves all the credit. Madhunikita, as always, has been the guiding force behind the hard work to bring the materials together, in more than one way. On a personal note, my bosses at Volvo viz. Petter Horling, Vedad Cajic, Andreas Wallin, and Mats Gustafsson are a constant source of guidance and insights. And of course, my spouse Usha and son Kaushik always have an encouraging word; special thanks to Usha’s father Mr.Natarajan, whose wisdom we all rely upon, and my late mom for her kindness.