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2026 Talks

Wes McKinney
Wes McKinney
Principal Architect | Posit, PBC

Apache Arrow: A Cross-language Development Platform for In-memory Data

This talk discusses Apache Arrow project and its uses for high performance analytics and system interoperability. Data processing systems have historically been full-stack systems features memory management, IO, file format adapters, runtime memory format, in-memory query engine, and front-end user interfaces. Many of these components are fully "bespoke" or "custom", in part due to a lack of open standards for many of the pieces.

Apache Arrow was created by a diverse group of open source data system developers to define open standards and community-maintained libraries for high performance in-memory data processing. Since the beginning of 2016, we have been building a cross-language development platform for data processing to help create systems that are faster, more scalable, and more interoperable.

I discuss the current development initiative and future roadmap as it relates to the data science and data engineering worlds.

Wes McKinney

Principal Architect

Wes McKinney

Posit, PBC

Wes is an entrepreneur and open source developer focusing on analytical computing and new AI engineering systems. He is a Principal Architect at Posit and General Partner at Composed Ventures, an early stage angel fund. He created the Python pandas and Ibis projects, co-created Apache Arrow, and wrote Python for Data Analysis. He was a founder of Voltron Data, Ursa Labs, and DataPad. His current projects include: roborev (code review for AI agents), agentsview (search and analyze agent sessions), and msgvault (archive, search, and analyze email with AI).