On the closing day of Spark + AI Summit, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi recognized three exceptional data teams for how they came together to solve a tough problem-- delivering impact, innovation, and helping to make the world a better place.
These are the inaugural Databricks Data Team Awards, and we were blown away by the submissions and the finalists, representing a wide variety of data science use cases spanning multiple industries. Across the board, they showcased how a unified analytics platform like Databricks can help bring together the diverse talents of data engineers, data scientists and data analysts to focus their ideas, skills and energy toward accomplishing amazing things.
Here are, the 2020 Databricks Data Team Awards winners:
Data Team for Good Award: Aetion
Aetion's data team is working on a high-impact use case related to the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, Aetion has partnered with HeathVerity to use Databricks to ingest and process data from multiple inputs into real-time data sets to be used to analyze COVID-19 interventions and to study the pandemic's impact on health care utilization. Their integrated solution includes a Real-Time Evidence Platform that enables biopharma, regulators, and public health officials to generate evidence on the usage, safety, and effectiveness of prospective treatments for COVID-19 and to continuously update and expand this evidence over time. This new, high-priority use case for Aetion has already produced a social impact—it will be employed in the company's new research collaboration with the U.S. FDA, which will support the agency's understanding of and response to the pandemic.
Accepting the award on behalf of the team at Aetion was John Turek, CTO.
Runners-up: Alignment Healthcare, Medical University of South Carolina
Data Team Impact Award: Disney+
Disney+ surpassed 50 million paid subscribers in just five months and is available in more than a dozen countries around the world. Data is essential to understanding customer growth and to improve the overall customer experience for any streaming business. Disney+ uses Databricks as a core component of its data lake, and using the Databricks Delta Lake, it has been able to build streaming and batch data pipelines supporting petabytes of data. The platform is enabling teams to collaborate on ideas, explore data, and apply machine learning across the entire customer journey, to foster growth in its subscriber base.
Accepting the award on behalf of his team at Disney+ was Tom LeRoux, VP of Engineering.
Runners-up: Unilever, YipitData
Data Team Innovation Award: Goldman Sachs
To better support its clients, the Marcus by Goldman Sachs data team continues to innovate its offerings and, in this instance, leveraged Databricks to build a next generation big data analytics platform that addresses diverse use cases, spanning from credit risk assessment, to fraud detection to marketing analytics and compliance. The unified data team not only built a robust and reliable infrastructure but also activated and empowered hundreds of analysts and developers in a short number of months.
Accepting the award for the Marcus by Goldman Sachs team was Executive Director Karthik Ravindra.
Runners-up: Comcast, Zalando
Data Teams Unite!
Congratulations to the Data Team Award winners for their exceptional achievements!
We look forward to seeing data teams worldwide leverage the power of Databricks to unite. And we will continue to celebrate them for using data and artificial intelligence to help to solve the world's toughest problems.