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 h t t p : / / c a d e n t t e c h
. t v /, 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 [ h t t p : / / g o o . g l / E 4 k q M D], Data Science [ h t t p : / / g o o . g l / 9 p y J M H],
Machine Learning [ h t t p : / / g o o . g l / S X F 5 3 n], Social Media Analysis [ h t t p : / / g o o . g l / D 9 Y p V
Q] as well as has been a guest lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School. His occasional
blogs can be found at h t t p s : / / d o u b l e c l i x . w o r d p r e s s . c o m /. 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.
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