The July issue of the Communications of the ACM contains an article by Gregory Goth entited “Bringing Big Data to the Big Tent” which talks about the outsize role of Open Source software in the emerging Big Data ecosystem.   The article contains a nice description of the AMPLab and quotes from not just 1 or 2, but 3 AMPLab personalities:

1) Mike Franklin (yours truly) on the need to bridge the gap between model creation and production operation and to make analytics easier to use. (hint: BDAS is aimed in these directions)

2) Ion Stoica on the growth of the Spark Ecosystem (summary: it’s huge)

3) Shivaram Venkataraman on the wonders of SparkR and Pipelines (nutshell: they are very powerful).

This issue also contains the formal announcements of the ACM Dissertation Awards given to Matei Zaharia and John Duchi as described on the AMPLab Home Page