Scala: Applied Machine Learning

Patrick R. Nicolas is the director of engineering at Agile SDE, California. He has more than 25 years of experience in software engineering and building applications in C++, Java, and more recently in Scala/Spark, and has held several managerial positions. His interests include real-time analytics, modeling, and the development of nonlinear models.

Alex Kozlov is a multidisciplinary big data scientist. He came to Silicon Valley in 1991, got his Ph.D. from Stanford University under the supervision of Prof. Daphne Koller and Prof. John Hennessy in 1998, and has been around a few computer and data management companies since. His latest stint was with Cloudera, the leader in Hadoop, where he was one of the early employees and ended up heading the solution architects group on the West Coast. Before that, he spent time with an online advertising company, Turn, Inc.; and before that, he had the privilege to work with HP Labs researchers at HP Inc., and on data mining software at SGI, Inc. Currently, Alexander is the chief solutions architect at an enterprise security startup, E8 Security, where he came to understand the intricacies of catching bad guys in the Internet universe. On the non-professional side, Alexander lives in Sunnyvale, CA, together with his beautiful wife, Oxana, and other important family members, including three daughters, Lana, Nika, and Anna, and a cat and dog. His family also included a hamster and a fish at one point. Alex is an active participant in Silicon Valley technology groups and meetups, and although he is not an official committer of any open source projects, he definitely contributed to many of them in the form of code or discussions. Alexander is an active coder and publishes his open source code at https://github.com/alexvk. Other information can be looked up on his LinkedIn page at https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexvk.

Pascal Bugnion is a data engineer at the ASI, a consultancy offering bespoke data science services. Previously, he was the head of data engineering at SCL Elections. He holds a PhD in computational physics from Cambridge University. Besides Scala, Pascal is a keen Python developer. He has contributed to NumPy, matplotlib and IPython. He also maintains scikit-monaco, an open source library for Monte Carlo integration. He currently lives in London, UK.