About the Authors
Md. Rezaul Karim is a research scientist at Fraunhofer FIT, Germany. He is also a PhD
candidate at RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany. He holds a BSc and an MSc in
computer science. Before joining Fraunhofer FIT, he had been working as a researcher at the
Insight Centre for data analytics, Ireland. Previously, he worked as a lead engineer with
Samsung Electronics' distributed R&D centers in Korea, India, Vietnam, Turkey, and
Bangladesh. Earlier, he worked as a research assistant in the Database Lab at Kyung Hee
University, Korea, and as an R&D engineer with BMTech21 Worldwide, Korea. Even before
that, he worked as a software engineer with i2SoftTechnology, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
He has more than 8 years of experience in the area of research and development, with a
solid knowledge of algorithms and data structures in C/C++, Java, Scala, R, and Python-
focused big data technologies: Spark, Kafka, DC/OS, Docker, Mesos, Zeppelin, Hadoop, and
MapReduce, and deep learning technologies: TensorFlow, DeepLearning4j, and H2O-
Sparking Water. His research interests include machine learning, deep learning, semantic
web, linked data, big data, and bioinformatics. He is the author of the following book titles
with Packt:
Large-Scale Machine Learning with Spark
Deep Learning with TensorFlow
I am very grateful to my parents, who have always encouraged me to pursue knowledge. I
also want to thank my wife Saroar, son Shadman, elder brother Mamtaz, elder sister Josna,
and friends, who have endured my long monologues about the subjects in this book, and
have always been encouraging and listening to me. Writing this book was made easier by
the amazing efforts of the open source community and the great documentation of many
projects out there related to Apache Spark and Scala. Further more, I would like to thank
the acquisition, content development, and technical editors of Packt (and others who were
involved in this book title) for their sincere cooperation and coordination. Additionally,
without the work of numerous researchers and data analytics practitioners who shared
their expertise in publications, lectures, and source code, this book might not exist at all!
