Michael Berk

Ever wonder how The Virtue Foundation connects medical resources with underserved regions? As the first collaboration under Databricks for Good, the foundation partnered with us to build an AI-powered platform improving medical outcomes across 73 countries. This talk breaks down the production Lakehouse architecture behind the system that continuously curates healthcare data to match volunteers with communities in need. What we’ll cover: - LLM extraction at scale: Processing 5M+ web pages with OpenAI models via bespoke multimodal pipelines running natively on Spark, reducing cost while improving precision. - Data engineering on Spark: Running skewed, multi-terabyte workloads using Spark for parallelism, Photon for performance at scale, and production-grade orchestration. - Making data trustworthy: Unifying millions of healthcare facilities through entity resolution. A candid, systems-level look at what it takes to move LLM-powered data extraction from proof of concept to global impact.

Nonprofits are tackling some of society’s most urgent challenges, but many are constrained by limited budgets, fragmented data, and limited technical capacity. In this session, we will share how Databricks for Good helps mission-driven organizations overcome these barriers through nonprofit pricing, technical enablement, and hands-on support from Databricks experts. Attendees will learn how nonprofits can use the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify data, strengthen analytics foundations, explore responsible AI, and turn information into insights that support better decisions and greater mission impact. The session will feature stories from Crisis Text Line and GO Project, highlighting their missions, data journeys, implementation lessons, and the opportunities they see to use data and AI more effectively. Attendees will leave with a practical playbook for how nonprofits can get started with Databricks and accelerate meaningful, measurable social impact.