Deep Learning on Big Data Sets in the Cloud with Apache Spark and Google TensorFlow

Machine learning is the branch of artificial intelligence giving computers the ability to learn patterns from data without being explicitly programmed. Deep Learning is a set of cutting-edge machine learning algorithms that are inspired by how the human brain works. It allows to selflearn feature hierarchies from the data rather than modeling hand-crafted features. It has proven to significantly improve performance in challenging data analytics problems. In this tutorial, we will first provide an introduction to the theoretical foundations of neural networks and Deep Learning. Second, we will demonstrate how to use Deep Learning in a cloud using a distributed environment for Big Data analytics. This combines Apache Spark and TensorFlow, Google’s in-house Deep Learning platform made for Big Data machine learning applications. Practical demonstrations will include character recognition and time series forecasting in Big Data sets. Attendees will be provided with code snippets that they can easily amend in order to analyze their own data. A related, but shorter tutorial focusing on Deep Learning on a single computer was given at the Data Science Luxembourg Meetup in April 2016. It was attended by 70 people making it the most attended event of this Meetup series in Luxembourg ever since its beginning.