This week Microsoft Announced that is has released version 0.16 of its new deep learning data science tool for Spark, Microsoft Machine Learning for Apache Spark, (MMLSpark) on Github. MMLSpark requires Scala, Spark and Python, and works with Microsoft Cognitive Services and Azure Databricks. It was originally released two years ago, with the most recent version before this -- .015 New features and improvements in version 0.16 include support for Spark deep learning pipelines, a new "ranking train validation splitter," better integration with Azure Search, support for name entry recognition cognitive service on Spark (for analytical text extraction), improved boosting capabilities with the gradient boosting tool for tree-based algorithms LightGBM, as well as many other changes. More information on MMLSpark can be found on the Microsoft product page here.