Functional Programming & Scala: The Killer Combo for Machine Learning • Marek Kolodziej • YOW! 2015

This presentation was recorded at YOW! 2015. #GOTOcon #YOW https://yowcon.com Marek Kolodziej - Principal Research Engineer at Nitro, Inc. @mkolod RESOURCES https://x.com/marekinfo https://github.com/mkolod https://www.linkedin.com/in/marek-kolodziej ABSTRACT While FP and Scala have already become the mainstays of middleware, web development and big data stacks (#Akka, Play, Kafka, Spark), they tend not to have a big presence in the machine learning and NLP communities. For instance, the emerging deep learning toolkits are mostly Python‐based (#Pylearn2, Theano, etc.). The same goes for general-purpose machine learning (Python's scikit-learn, countless R libraries). Performance seekers dissatisfied with slow scripting languages write typed Cython code, contorted C++ libraries bound to scripting language wrappers, or resort to random exotic solutions such as Lua. Some even dispense with all abstraction and write incomprehensible CUDA kernels. There has to be a better way. As a machine learning engineer, I want to write strongly typed functional code. Math has no place for side effects, and I don't want to waste time running a simulation for hours, only to find that I made a typo in my "stringly-typed" script. Unbeknownst to most, Scala's machine learning and NLP ecosystem is growing rapidly, from numeric processing (Spire, Breeze) to big data machine learning (MLLib, Mahout) to GPU‐based text parsing (Puck), to general‐purpose probabilistic programming (FACTORIE). In this talk, I'll do a quick overview of Scala's machine learning ecosystem, and show how easy it is to re-use existing components to build a new, scalable algorithm implementation. If you'd like to see how you can write vectorized linear regression running native BLAS code, based on an SGD/Adagrad implementation written from scratch. capable of running at scale on petabytes of data using Spark, this talk is for you. RECOMMENDED BOOKS Martin Odersky • Programming in Scala 5th Edition • https://amzn.to/44rXiaM Joshua D. Suereth • Scala in Depth • https://amzn.to/3QVADk6 https://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.instagram.com/goto_con https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #FunctionalProgramming #ApacheSpark #ApacheFlink #MachineLearning #ScalaLang #SoftwareEngineering #Programming #MarekKolodziej #YOWcon CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at https://gotopia.tech Sign up for updates and specials at https://gotopia.tech/newsletter SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1