Dean Wampler, Ph.D.

Industry expert in AI/ML engineering, streaming data, and Scala.
Author and industry public speaker.
Works for IBM Research. Photographer. Lives in Chicago.

Books & Reports

Programming Scala, 3rd Edition Fast Data Architectures for Streaming Applications What Is Ray? Hardware > Software > Process

Scala 3 highlights.

More information on my books and reports.

Some of My Talks

AI in the Open: Why It Matters. How to Achieve It.

AI Camp, Chicago, February 2024

To maximize availability and safety of AI, we should follow the path of open-source software, while recognizing what is new.

Open Source: Science vs. Software. What's Different? What's the Same?

Scale by the Bay, November 2023

What I learned at IBM Research about the differences and similarities of open-source software (OSS) and open-source science (OSSci).

Reinforcement Learning: ChatGPT, Games, and More

GOTO Chicago, May 2023, and IBM Research, October 2023

Things move fast; an update to January's RL talk that expands the coverage of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, a key element in training ChatGPT.

Open Source: Science vs. Software. What's Different? What's the Same?

Scale by the Bay, November 2023

What I learned at IBM Research about the differences and similarities of open source software (OSS) and open source science (OSSci).

Lessons Learned from 15 Years of Scala in the Wild

Several Conferences, 2021-2022

Since I joined the Scala community roughly 15 years ago, the Scala community has learned a lot to make the language more robust and easier to use effectively. I've also learned lots of lessons about effective "enterprise" programming using Scala. Finally, I see warning signs for FP's future growth.

Next Generation AI: Transitioning to the Continuous, Self-Learning Enterprise

Draft, February 2021

A talk I'm developing that looks at the state of AI/ML and what enterprises need to do to fully leverage it.

Modularity: A Retrospective

GOTO Chicago Nights, February 18, 2020 and Scala in the City, May 28, 2020

A look at what we've accomplished in making software modular and where we need to go.

Cluster-wide Scaling of ML with Ray

YOW! Data, July 1, 2020, and CodeMesh, Nov., 2020

Ray is a distributed computing system that offers a concise, intuitive API, with excellent performance for distributed workloads. It emerged out of the AI community at U.C. Berkeley.

Executive Briefing: What It Takes to Use ML in Fast Data Pipelines

Strata San Francisco, London, and NYC 2019

A briefing for managers and executives about the challenges of serving ML models in a streaming data context.

Executive Briefing: What You Need to Know about Fast Data

Strata London and NYC 2018

A briefing for managers and executives about the trends in Fast Data and how the impact on their organizations.

Download PDF Watch video (A similar webinar)

Streaming Microservices with Akka Streams and Kafka Streams

Strata San Jose and London 2018, Scala Days NYC 2018, Reactive Summit 2018, YOW! 2018

I discuss processing data in microservices using Akka Streams and Kafka Streams, vs. using tools like Spark and Flink.

Stream All the Things!!

Software Architecture Conference NYC 2017, Strata London and NYC 2017

I discuss the emerging architecture for large-scale stream data processing, that also integrates the best of microservice architectures.

All Talks