Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to sincerely thank Vineet Tyagi, AVP and head of Innovation Labs at Impetus. Vineet has been instrumental and enabled me to take up book writing. He has been kind enough to give me three hours of official time over six to seven months—this has been crucial in helping me write the book. Any such scholarly activity needs consistent, dedicated time—it would have been doubly hard if I had to write the book in addition to my day job. Vineet just made it so that at least a portion of book writing is part of my job!

I would also like to express my gratitude to Pankaj Mittal, CTO and SVP, Impetus, for extending his whole-hearted support for research and development (R&D) and enabling folks like me to work on R&D full time. Kudos to him, that Impetus is able to have an R&D team without billability and revenue pressures. This has really freed me up and helped me to focus on R&D. Writing a book while working in the IT industry can be an arduous job. Thanks to Pankaj for enabling this and similar activities.

Praveen Kankariya, CEO of Impetus, has also been a source of inspiration and guidance. Thanks, Praveen, for the support!

I also wish to thank Dr. Nitin Agarwal, AVP and head, Data Sciences Practice group at Impetus. Nitin has helped to shape some of my thinking especially after our discussions on realization/implementation of machine learning algorithms. He has been a person I look up to and an inspiration to excel in life. Nitin, being a former professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Indore, exemplifies my high opinion of academicians in general!

This book would not have taken shape without Pranay Tonpay, Senior Architect at Impetus, who leads the real-time analytics stream in my R&D team. He has been instrumental in helping realize the ideas in this book including some of the machine learning algorithms over Spark and Storm. He has been my go-to man. Special thanks to Pranay.

Jayati Tiwari, Senior Software Engineer, Impetus, has also contributed some of the machine learning algorithms over Spark and Storm. She has a very good understanding of Storm—in fact, she is considered the Storm expert in the organization. She has also developed an inclination to understand machine learning and Spark. It has been a pleasure having her on the team. Thanks, Jayati!

Sai Sagar, Software Engineer at Impetus, has also been instrumental in implementing machine learning algorithms over GraphLab. Thanks, Sagar, nice to have you on the team!

Ankit Sharma, formerly data scientist at Impetus, now a Research Engineer at Snapdeal, wrote a small section on Logistic Regression (LR) which was the basis of the LR explained in Chapter 3 of this book. Thanks, Ankit, for that and some of our nice discussions on machine learning!

I would also like to thank editor Jeanne Levine, Lori Lyons and other staff of Pearson, who have been helpful in getting the book into its final shape from the crude form I gave them! Thanks also to Pearson, the publishing house who has brought out this book.

I would like to thank Gurvinder Arora, our technical writer, for having reviewed the various chapters of the book.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my doctoral guide Professor D. Janakiram of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, who has inspired me to take up a research career in my formative years. I owe a lot to him—he has shaped my technical thinking, moral values, and been a source of inspiration throughout my professional life. In fact, the very idea of writing a book was inspired by his recently released book Building Large Scale Software Systems with Tata McGraw-Hill publishers. Not only Prof. DJ, I also wish to thank all my teachers, starting from my high school teachers at Sankara, teachers at Sri Venkateshwara College of Engineering (SVCE), and all the professors at IIT Madras—they have molded me into what I am today.

I also wish to express my gratitude to Joydeb Mukherjee, formerly senior data scientist with Impetus and currently Senior Technical Specialist at MacAfee. Joydeb reviewed the Introduction chapter of the book and has also been a source of sound-boarding for my ideas when we were working together. This helped establish my beyond-Hadoop ideas firmly. He has also pointed out some of the good work in this field, including the work by Langford et al.

I would like to thank Dr. Edd Dumbill, formerly of O’Reilly and now VP at Silicon Valley Data Science—he is the editor of the Big Data journal, where my article was published. He has also been kind enough to review the book. He was also the organizer of the Strata conference in California in February 2013 when I gave a talk about some of the beyond-Hadoop concepts. That talk essentially set the stage for this book. I also take this opportunity to thank the Strata organizers for accepting some of my talk proposals.

I also wish to thank Dr. Paco Nathan for reviewing the book and writing up a foreword for it. His comments have been very inspiring, as has his career! He is one of the folks I look up to. Thanks, Paco!

My other team members have also been empathetic—Pranav Ganguly, the Senior Architect at Impetus, has taken quite a bit of load off me and taken care of the big data governance thread smoothly. It is a pleasure to have him and Nishant Garg on the team. I wish to thank all my team members.

Without a strong family backing, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to write the book. My wife Vidya played a major role in ensuring the home is peaceful and happy. She has sacrificed significant time that we could have otherwise spent together to enable me to focus on writing the book. My kids Prahaladh and Purvajaa have been mature enough to let me do this work, too. Thanks to all three of them for making a sweet home. I also wish to thank my parents for their upbringing and inculcating morality early in my life.

Finally, as is essential, I thank God for giving me everything. I am ever grateful to the almighty for taking care of me.