Thank you to Women in Big Data (WiBD) and DataBricks for organizing the Women in Big Data Spark Summit Panel and Lunch on June 7, 2017. The session was well attended by at least 150 women.

Soumya Guptha, Marketing Manager from Intel, kicked off the session off with an introduction to WiBD.  Next, Ziya Ma, VP & Director of Big Data from Intel discussed AI and Intel’s view of AI.

Then the panel discussion began, featuring:

Soumya Guptha, Intel, panel moderator

Ziya Ma, VP, Director of Big Data, Intel

Gayle Sheppard, Intel VP

Ritika Gunnar, IBM VP

Eva Tse, Director of Big Data, Netflix

Jennifer Shin, CEO, 8 Path

Soumya asked questions about a number of varied topics, including:

1. Big data infrastructure.
2. What are the market trends in AI/ML/DL, where is the industry headed, what are the usages?
3. Name use cases where the customer’s businesses and solutions have changed because of AI.
– Gayle responded with Market trends such as AI, use cases in healthcare, finding missing kids via facial recognition, fraud detection.
4. What are the pain points as businesses increasingly move towards using ML/DL?
5. How are the open source technologies transforming business models using AI and how are they being adopted?
– Ritika answsered that Open source is transforming AI.
6. What are the market trends in building big data services
 – How do you compare spark with other frameworks for applying ML on big data?
7. Why is data science valuable and how use it?
8. What are the programs in place to become a data scientist?
– Jennifer responded with programs atUC Berkeley, where she is on faculty.
9. How does one become a data scientist, skills, and classes? If you are already a professional today, how do become a data scientist and thrive?
10. Tell us about your personal journeys to become a data scientist ?
11. What are the differences between data engineering and software engineering?
12. How do women do the life balancing act between family and career?

Personal points of interest:
• Ritika said that 20% big data workloads are in production.
• Eva noted that Netflix uses AWS and its own infrastructure and Spark ecosystem.
• Gayle recommended a book by Eric Kendall, neuroscientist.
• Ritika mentioned thatOpen source languages such as Scala, Python, Spark and SQL for ETL and Cloud for infrastructure are fostering the growth of AI.

 

Click here to see the video of entire panel discussion.

Click here to visit the Spark Summit website for more details.

Click here for a PDF about this event.