Michelle Casbon gave a presentation on how Idibon uses Apache Spark for natural language processing tasks in a distributed cloud-based infrastructure. Idibon builds machine learning models that can analyze text in any language. They use Spark for feature extraction, training models like logistic regression and SVM, and making predictions on unseen data. Spark allows them to do these NLP tasks at scale. Idibon also developed a persistence layer that allows them to operationalize many models and integrate Spark functionality into their existing systems.