AMPLab End Of Project Event at UC Berkeley, CA
After five very productive years for UC Berkeley’s AMPLab project (2011-2016), it is now coming to an end. The project that has brought us Apache Spark among many other things. The picture above summarizes some of the key statistics about the project. Its achievements are impressive regardless the key statistic you pick (see picture above). Congrats to the four UC Berkeley professors for such great success!
The event started the evening before with a post session and a reception (see pictures below).
Friday 18 November 2016
Next morning, the real event started at UC Berkeley’s International House.
Next, Dr. Ion Stoica gave a talk on the evolution of the BDAS open-source software stack. It resulted in the founding of three startups: Databricks, Mesosphere and Alluxio.
Next, Mike Olson (see picture below) - a Cal graduate and founder of Cloudera - highlighted the importance to be ambitions in projects such as AMPLab played out. In the same way, he inspired UC Berkeley Faculty to reach for the stars again with the RiseLab: “Choose those problems for RiseLab that are hard, and those that others (such as companies) are not willing to work on.”
Then, Dr. Mattei Zaharia (now at Stanford University, see picture below) talked about his new Weld project. He presented some very encouraging initial results. We look forward to more exciting results to follow...
Next, it was time to listen to the CEOs of three startups that grew out of the AMPLab project. The first to speak was Ali Ghodsi (co-founder and CEO at Databricks, see picture below) took the stage.
Next, Dr. Chaitan Baru (NSF, see picture below) took the stage to share the National Science Foundation perspective to “Harnessing the Data Revolution.”
Next, Haoyuan (HY) Li (co-founder and CEO at Alluxio, see picture below) talked about the advantages of channeling data through Alluxio (formerly known as Tachyon).
The final startup company to join the event remotely was Benjamin Hindman (CEO of Mesosphere) who joined from China.
In sum, another great event to finalize a great project. Congrats to all the participants! It was a privilege to attend. Copyright to all pictures in this blog post is held by Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel.
Next, Dr. Charles Chiu gave a fascinating talk titled “Genomic and Computational Approaches for Infectious Disease Diagnosis in the Clinical Setting.”
Finally, a panel discussion was held during which final questions could be asked.
The event wrapped up with a final reception at the Berkeley City Club.
First, Dr. Michael Franklin started by providing an overview of the AMPLab project.
