About the Reviewers

Sumit Pal has more than 22 years of experience in the software industry in various roles spanning companies from startups to enterprises. He is a big data, visualization, and data science consultant and a software architect and big data enthusiast and builds end-to-end data-driven analytic systems. He has worked for Microsoft (SQL server development team), Oracle (OLAP development team), and Verizon (big data analytics team) in a career spanning 22 years. Currently, he works for multiple clients, advising them on their data architectures and big data solutions and does hands on coding with Spark, Scala, Java, and Python. He has extensive experience in building scalable systems across the stack from middle tier, data tier to visualization for analytics applications, using big data and NoSQL databases.

Sumit has deep expertise in DataBase Internals, Data Warehouses, Dimensional Modeling, and Data Science with Java and Python and SQL. Sumit started his career being part of SQL Server development team at Microsoft in 1996-97 and then as a Core Server Engineer for Oracle at their OLAP development team in Burlington, MA. Sumit has also worked at Verizon as an Associate Director for big data architecture, where he strategized, managed, architected, and developed platforms and solutions for analytics and machine learning applications. He has also served as Chief Architect at ModelN/LeapfrogRX (2006-2013) where he architected the middle tier core Analytics Platform with open source OLAP engine (Mondrian) on J2EE and solved some complex Dimensional ETL, modeling, and performance optimization problems. Sumit has MS and BS in computer science.

Alexis Roos (@alexisroos) has over 20 years of software engineering experience with strong expertise in data science, big data, and application infrastructure. Currently an engineering manager at Salesforce, Alexis is managing a team of backend engineers building entry level Salesforce CRM (SalesforceIQ). Prior Alexis designed a comprehensive US business graph built from billion of records using Spark, GraphX, MLLib, and Scala at Radius Intelligence.

Alexis also worked for Couchbase, Concurrent Inc startups, and Sun Microsystems/Oracle for over 13 years and several large SIs over in Europe where he built and supported dozens of architectures of distributed applications across a range of verticals including telecommunications, healthcare, finance, and government. Alexis holds a master’s degree in computer science with a focus on cognitive science. He has spoken at dozens of conferences worldwide (including Spark summit, Scala by the Bay, Hadoop Summit, and Java One) as well as delivered university courses and participated in industry panels.