Matei Zaharia is a Romanian-Canadian

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, educator and the creator of

Apache Spark Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of Californi ...

. As of April 2022,

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

ranked him and

Ion Stoica Ion Stoica is a Romanian-American computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing and computer networking. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and co-director of AMPLab. He co-fo ...

as the 3rd- richest people in Romania with a net worth of $1.6 billion.

Biography

Zaharia graduated from secondary school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute before moving to become an undergraduate at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

. Zaharia was a gold medalist at the

International Collegiate Programming Contest The ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest, known as the ICPC, is an annual multi-tiered competitive programming competition among the universities of the world. Directed by ICPC Executive Director and Baylor Professor Dr. William B. ...

, where his team University of Waterloo placed fourth in the world and first in North America in 2005. During his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo, he also greatly contributed to water rendering physics in the now open-source game called 0 A.D. While at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

AMPLab AMPLAB was a University of California, Berkeley lab focused on big data analytics located in Soda Hall. The name stands for the Algorithms, Machines and People Lab. It has been publishing papers since 2008 and was officially launched in 2011. The ...

in 2009, he created Apache Spark as a faster alternative to

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filtering ...

. He received the 2014

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to the authors of the best doctoral dissertations in computer science and computer engineering. The award is accompanied by a prize of US $20,000 a ...

for his PhD research on large-scale computing. In 2013 Zaharia was one of the co-founders of

Databricks Databricks is an American enterprise software company founded by the creators of Apache Spark. Databricks develops a web-based platform for working with Spark, that provides automated cluster management and IPython-style notebooks. History Data ...

where he serves as chief technology officer. He joined the faculty of

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

in 2015, and then became an

assistant professor Assistant Professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States and Canada. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doctoral degree and general ...

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 2016. In 2019, Zaharia received the

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The White ...

. In 2019 he was spearheading MLflow at Databricks, while still teaching.

References

External links

Website
at Stanford
Chinese translation of his PhD Dissertation
by CSDN community, January 2015 * Canadian computer scientists Romanian computer scientists Living people Romanian emigrants to Canada Canadian people of Romanian descent Stanford University faculty UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni University of Waterloo alumni Chief technology officers Open source advocates Year of birth missing (living people) {{compu-scientist-stub

Biography

See also

References

External links