Biographical note

Krishna Sankar is a chief data scientist at http://www.blackarrow.tv/, where he focuses on optimizing user experiences via inference, intelligence, and interfaces. His earlier roles include principal architect, data scientist at Tata America Intl, director of a data science and bioinformatics start-up, and a distinguished engineer at Cisco. He has spoken at various conferences, such as Strata-Sparkcamp, OSCON, Pycon, and Pydata about predicting NFL (http://goo.gl/movfds), Spark (http://goo.gl/E4kqMD), data science (http://goo.gl/9pyJMH), machine learning (http://goo.gl/SXF53n), and social media analysis (http://goo.gl/D9YpVQ). He was a guest lecturer at Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey. His blogs can be found at https://doubleclix.wordpress.com/. His other passion is Lego Robotics. You can find him at the St. Louis FLL World Competition as the robots design judge. Holden Karau is a software development engineer and is active in the open source sphere. She has worked on a variety of search, classification, and distributed systems problems at Databricks, Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a bachelor's of mathematics degree in computer science. Other than software, she enjoys playing with fire and hula hoops, and welding.