Scale By The Bay 2020: Shadaj Laddad, Data Science in Scala with ScalaPy

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Python is the dominant language for data science today with a plethora of machine learning and scientific computing libraries. Scala, on the other hand, is the dominant language for big data processing. What if we could bring these two worlds together? ScalaPy enables Scala applications to use Python libraries with a seamless interop layer. With support for core Python features including native bindings, ScalaPy can be used anywhere from training neural networks on GPUs with TensorFlow to making astronomical calculations with Astropy. In addition, ScalaPy supports creating type definitions to enable type-safe interactions with Python libraries. In this talk, we’ll explore how ScalaPy works and how it can be used in different applications. We’ll also look at support in environments like Jupyter notebooks and ways to optimize interop performance. Shadaj Laddad UC Berkeley Student Websitehttps://twitter.com/ShadajL Shadaj loves exploring the boundaries of programming, usually with Scala for its combination of functional and object-oriented concepts. He is currently a student at UC Berkeley studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has interned at Google Brain, Facebook, Apollo GraphQL, Khan Academy, Coursera, and Paya Labs to develop open-source libraries, machine learning infrastructure, and educational platforms. At Berkeley, he works on research enabling high-level programming languages and abstractions to produce efficient and safer code. Shadaj hosts many open-source libraries and projects on GitH…