chrisdury's blurblog

Solutions Specialist at @EmpiredLtd | Architect for Business Productivity using @Microsoft Tech (Office365, SQL, .NET) Love my family, tech, food and movies.

#MSBuild 2017 Revisited: AI/ML by Greg Duncan
Wednesday June 14^th, 2017 at 3:53 AM

Channel 9

For the next couple months we're going to revisit Build 2017, each post focusing on different aspects and technologies presented. Not every session will be listed, just a select set, hopefully enough to wet your appetite. All the on-demand sessions can be found and the Channel 9 Build event site.

Cortana, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence was a major theme of Build. Of the 46'ish sessions here a select 26 sessions.

Build Revisited Table Of Contents

: Microsoft Security Risk Detection – Artificial Intelligence Powered Risk Detection for…; Microsoft Security Risk Detection, formerly “Project Springfield,” packages pioneering artificial intelligence into a scalable cloud service that helps you find issues in code you build, code you buy, or code you are moving to the cloud. You will see how Security Risk Detection fits into these scenarios. You will learn about the issues Security Risk Detection can help you find and actions you can take. Finally, watch to the end for a new frontier in Microsoft’s journey to help developers everywhere be more secure.
: Using Visual Studio for Machine Learning; Whether it is building a model for online product recommendation, or developing a project using Microsoft SQL Server 2016 with R, where you need to develop both the models, and the stored procedure, Visual Studio enables both developers and data scientists to work together to build your next generation intelligent apps and services. All the tooling you need to analyze, build models, and create smart apps, including: Python Tools for Visual Studio and R Tools for Visual Studio. Join us in this this session, as we show you how Visual Studio can be used to do data science, and help you create the next intelligent application!
: Distill information into conversational, easy to navigate answers with Microsoft Cognitive…; Microsoft Cognitive Services QnA Maker is an easy-to-use API that trains AI to respond to users’ questions in a more natural, conversational way. QnA Maker is a question and answer service with a graphical user interface—meaning you don’t need to be a developer to train, manage, and use it for a wide range of solutions.
: Contextual decisions for you; Do you want to recommend a news story? Have your interface optimize for its user? Maybe you just wish that when you used machine learning it actually worked in deployment? In all of these cases, you want to make decisions amongst a set of actions based on a context to optimize an outcome. Doing this consistently and effectively requires a system that combines exploration and learning together to adaptively discover performant policies. We have created that system and deployed it several ways with great results. That system can now be used by you, most easily for simple content personalization, but more generally in any system where you have many repeated events where context matters in making a decision and the quality of that decision can be evaluated.
: How to do predictive modeling using R and SQL Server Machine Learning Services; Learn how to use R scripts from T-SQL to perform training and scoring and leverage parallelism and streaming capabilities to get better performance.
: Built-in machine learning in Microsoft SQL Server 2017 with Python; Machine learning services in SQL Server 2017 provides Python support for in-database machine learning, now. In this session we show the basics of how to run Python code in SQL Server. We then discuss how any app that can talk to SQL Server can get intelligence from machine learning models running in SQL Server. We showcase an app that uses a Python-based deep learning model built and deployed in SQL Server. The model leverages an open source deep learning framework running with SQL Server and utilizes GPU for boosting model training performance.
: Leveraging Cortana user knowledge to personalize your Cortana skill; As a personal assistant, Cortana learns about each user and develops a deep understanding of their preferences, habits, and context. This session shows you step-by-step how to use the Cortana Skills Kit to leverage Cortana user knowledge to create highly personalized skills that drive deep user engagement.
: Image processing at scale using U-SQL in Azure Data Lake; Making use of cognitive capabilities such as Image OCR or Sentiment Analysis of text is straightforward with small datasets of a few terabytes. But, at the scale of hundreds of terabytes or even a petabyte, you need a different approach to that can massively scale out *AND* be simple to build. Azure Data Lake offers a straightforward way of programming using .NET code against these massive Petabyte-scale datasets without the need to become a deep expert in distributed computing, big data technologies, or machine learning.
: Use the power of Video AI in your apps with Video Indexer; Got video? We can help you turn your video into insights and transform your business. Join us as we show you are latest video intelligence capabilities.
: Custom Vision from Cognitive Services: easily build a custom image classifier; Custom Vision is a tool for easily building an image classifier to recognize content you care about. In a few minutes, you can train a classifier and deploy it to an API endpoint. Using suggestions from the software, it is easy to improve the quality of your classifier.
: Using Microsoft Cognitive Services to bring the power of speech recognition to your apps; Learn about Microsoft Cognitive Services Speech APIs - Bing Speech, Customer Speech Service and Speaker Recognition - and how they recognize audio, speech and individual speakers to bring the power of speech to your apps.
: Build intelligence into your business apps with ease using Bing APIs in Microsoft…; The Bing API's in Cognitive Services let you bring the intelligence and knowledge of the planet to your app in just a few lines of code. Join us to learn about the Bing Search APIs, get a sneak peek at the next version of “Search” APIs, and learn how you can leverage these services in conjunction with the Microsoft Bot Framework to build an intelligent assistant. See useful demos, experience the simplicity of calling this code, and get ideas for adding this functionality to your own applications.
: How Microsoft Cognitive Services can help your apps communicate with people; Microsoft Cognitive Services Language APIs - Bing Spell Check, Language Understanding, Linguistic Analysis, Text Analytics, Translator and Web LM - can enable your apps to understand language and communicate with people.
: How to serve AI with data: The future of the Microsoft Data Platform; The cloud is truly becoming the “brain” for our connected planet. You’re not just running algorithms in the cloud, rather you’re connecting that with data from sensors from around the world. By bringing data into the cloud, you can integrate all of the information, apply machine learning and AI on top of that, and deliver apps that are continuously learning and evolving in the cloud. Consequently, the devices and applications connected to cloud are learning and becoming increasingly intelligent. Please join us on a journey through the core new patterns that are emerging as we bring advanced intelligence, the cloud, IoT, and big data together.
: Navigating the AI Revolution; Learn about the new software landscape, how Microsoft makes it easy to add AI to your applications, and how to thrive as a developer in a world of machine learning, neural networks, and data science.
: Machine Learning for developers, how to build even more intelligent apps and services; In this session we explain some of the different machine learning offerings such as Azure Machine Learning, SQL Server R Services, Data Science Virtual Machine, Cognitive Services and Cognitive Toolkit, and Azure Data Lake Analytics from Microsoft through a few comprehensive end-to-end examples that encompass as applicable: problem detection, algorithm selection, machine learning model creation and deployment and consumption of the machine learning model. The session is delivered by an engineer, and it's intended for engineers, so he does not delve into a deep understanding of complex mathematical models behind machine learning, but instead focuses on the concepts of machine learning and resources available to demystify machine learning using Microsoft Azure.
: How to run AI at Petabyte Scale with cognitive functions in the Azure Data Lake; In this session, learn how you can use Azure Data Lake (ADL) for doing Big Cognition on raw customer support data. Learn how you can use ADL to perform key phrase extraction, sentiment analysis, and how you can use R/Python scripts for support volume forecasting. In addition, learn how you can use federated queries in ADL with Azure SQL Database. Discover how you can pull all these insights into an Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and using Azure Analysis Services to enable interactive analysis of the processed data. Join us for this exciting session as we show how you can develop intelligent applications by using the insights derived from processing massive Petabyte-scale datasets.
: Deep learning with Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit; Explore the toolkit we use to build AI tools and train your own deep learning algorithms to learn like the human brain.
: Create Cortana skills for your customers, partners, and work force; The Cortana Skills Kit opens up new opportunities for businesses to reduce costs, improve customer service, and drive revenue. This session shows how you can combine the Cortana Skills Kit together with Microsoft AI services in B2C, B2B, and line-of-business scenarios.
: Cortana advanced language and voice skill design; The Cortana Skills Kit opens the world of voice-driven experiences to every developer, but developing skills your users will love requires a deeper understanding of this voice-first paradigm. This session covers design principles for voice-first and voice-only experiences, how to design and implement robust language understanding, and shows you how to implement these using the Cortana Skills Kit.
: Computer vision made easy: From pre-trained models to Custom Vision, Microsoft Cognitive…; Learn about Computer Vision APIs and tools from Microsoft, and how you can embed them in your software solutions. There will be a deep dive into the new Custom Vision service from Microsoft Cognitive Services, a tool for easily building, deploying, and improving an image classifier. We will also disambiguate how to find the right tool for the job across our APIs, services, Cognitive Toolkit. There will be announcements and demos across image classification, face and emotion recognition, OCR, and video services. See powerful demos, experience the simplicity of calling this code, and get ideas for adding this functionality to your own applications.
: How to build in-app analytics with Azure Data Services, an Xbox case study; What are some of the largest games and apps doing to understand user behavior and deliver up to the minute insights for product and business planning? How are some applications using advanced analytics and machine learning to deliver ground-breaking experiences? Learn how games companies like Xbox Studios are using Azure services including SQL Data Warehouse, Analysis Services, and Microsoft Power BI to drive great in-game experiences and determine where to take their products. See how you can use these patterns to drive deeper engagement in your app and gain insights into user behavior.
: A lap around R Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio 2017; R Tools for Visual Studio is a new, open source and free tool for R users built on top of the powerful Visual Studio IDE. In this talk, we take you on a tour of its features and show how they can help you be a more productive R user. We look at: integrated debugging support; variable/data frame visualization; plotting and help integration; using the Editor and REPL in concert with each other; RMarkdown and Shiny integration using Microsoft Excel and SQL Server; Extensions and source control. We also demo our R remoting feature that allows developers to execute R code on SQL Server.
: Bot Human Handoff; Bots can’t replace our human agents, but they can augment the customer service experience. This session explores how we can use a bot to initiate a conversation with a customer, and then hand off context to a human agent.
: Authentication in Cortana Skills; Cortana Skills can make calls to other services that require authentication, such as the Microsoft Graph. The easiest way to implement this for a service that requires OAuth 2.0 authentication is to configure a Connected Service for your skill and let Cortana manage the authentication token which is passed to your skill on invocation. Alternatively, you can manage the authentication entirely within your skills service which requires more work but gives greater flexibility. In this session, we’ll walk through how to configure a Connected Service and how to access the authentication tokens within your skill service to make authenticated calls, and we’ll cover how to implement skill-managed authentication.
: How your applications can benefit from AI using Bing APIs on Microsoft Cognitive Services; Bing APIs on Cognitive Services provides a wealth of AI capabilities for you to use in your enterprise or mobile applications. Learn how easy it is to incorporate knowledge and intelligence into your applications and take your business to the next level.

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chrisdury

2515 days ago

26 sweet AI/ML vids from Build 2017.

Adelaide, South Australia

Announcing general availability of Azure Functions by Yochay Kiriaty
Sunday November 27^th, 2016 at 12:45 AM

Microsoft Azure Blog

Today organizations are turning to the cloud not only to accelerate – but to transform – their business. Platform as a Service (PaaS) enables businesses to innovate at a scale that fuels their business transformation – with a focus on application innovation rather than infrastructure management and maintenance. Microsoft Azure has led the way with PaaS in alignment with our decades long commitment to enable developers with world class tools and services. Part of the Azure PaaS portfolio, Azure Functions, offers a serverless compute experience for rapid application development and operational agility. Released in preview in March 2016, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Azure Functions today.

Functions supports the development of event driven solutions on a serverless architecture, enabling on demand scaling and you pay only for the resources you consume. Today, Functions support for both C# and JavaScript is generally available and F#, PowerShell, PHP, Python and Bash are in preview. Functions uniquely offers integrated tooling support, out of the box Azure and third-party service bindings and continuous deployment to improve developer productivity.

Building with the community

Azure Functions is built in the open with the community on GitHub. The Functions team has actively engaged in customer discussions as feedback has been shared. In the preview period, over 900 GitHub issues were raised and addressed helping us deliver a high quality, production-ready service. We want to continue this dialogue with our customers and we maintain a backlog of features in UserVoice where you can provide suggestions.

Integrated tooling support

We now have support for creating, running, and debugging Functions locally on Windows, with the beta Azure Functions CLI. For JavaScript Functions on NodeJS, the CLI integrates with Visual Studio Code and sets up debug targets automatically. While the CLI currently only works on Windows, we’re working on support on Mac and Linux.

Our top UserVoice suggestion is for Visual Studio 2015 tooling support, which will be available as a preview shortly. (We’ll update this post with a download link when it’s ready). This preview tooling will enable developers to create and develop new Function Apps, debug them locally or remotely, and publish them to Azure.

Bind to services

Unlike other comparable services in the market, Azure Functions enables developers to configure bindings to services with just a few clicks. Bindings can be set for services to trigger a function and the object is passed into the function at runtime. There is support for Azure services such as Blob Storage, Event Hub, Service Bus, Storage Tables and external services like OneDrive and DropBox. For example, a binding configured to Azure Storage could trigger a function when a new file is uploaded. This results in less code for developers to maintain as the binding implementations are managed by the service. Developers who use their own tool chain can also edit the functions.json file directly to configure bindings.

The SendGrid, Twillio, Box, DropBox and Google Drive preview bindings were built in-house based on a binding extensibility framework that we will launch in preview early next year. This framework will allow developers to create their own service bindings and allow ISVs to contribute to the extension ecosystem.

Pay only for what you use

With Azure Functions, there is no need to reserve resources and you will only be charged for the time your function runs and memory consumed. Azure Functions pricing includes a permanent free grant of 400,000 Gigabyte Seconds (GB-s) execution time and one million total executions each month. For usage exceeding the monthly free grant, customers are billed based on GB-s and executions consumed. Azure Functions charges execution per msec, with a 100 msec minimum. For existing Azure App Service Basic/Standard/Premium customers, Functions consumption is incorporated into the cost of the plan. Azure Functions is currently available in 12 Azure Regions with more on the way and the full price billing will start January 1, 2017. For more information check out the pricing page.

Increased operational efficiency

Azure Functions can scale up and down on demand so you don’t need to build infrastructure for the largest scale scenario and pay for resources you don’t use. You can also set a maximum daily spending cap to prevent runaway functions. There is also no more worrying about patching and maintaining frameworks, the operating system or infrastructure. Functions takes care of the underlying infrastructure for you.

Our customers

The true power of Azure Functions is realized through the application innovations of our early adopter customers like Accuweather and Plexure. Both customers are using Azure Functions in their production applications.

Accuweather: “Azure Functions has allowed us to move CRON workloads to the Cloud in an easy and efficient way. They provide powerful functionality without complicated setup, and allow us to quickly and easily implement event driven processes and workflows that are critical to our business.” Chris Patti, CTO at Accuweather.
Plexure: “As a software vendor it can be hard to completely solve a client problem where the software only meets ninety percent of their needs. Functions lets the team rapidly release small auto scaling units of logic that fill these gaps and unlocking significant value in our product to our customers. By building this into our software architecture it allows the teams to rapidly evolve the software to fill gaps unique to a customer but still keeping product standardization.” David Inggs, CTO at Plexure

What next?

So, what are you waiting for? Try Azure Functions for FREE for one hour without the need for a credit card today. Please visit UserVoice to give us your thoughts on Azure Functions.

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chrisdury

2715 days ago

Adelaide, South Australia

Announcing auto-shutdown for VMs using Azure Resource Manager by Xiaoying Guo
Sunday November 27^th, 2016 at 12:45 AM

Microsoft Azure Blog

We are excited to announce you can set any ARM-based Virtual Machines to auto-shutdown with a few simple clicks!

This was a feature originally available only to VMs in Azure DevTest Labs: your self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create Dev/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs. In case you haven't heard it before, the goal for this service is to solve the problems that IT and development teams have been facing: delays in getting a working environment, time-consuming environment configuration, production fidelity issues, and high maintenance cost. It has been helping our customers to quickly get “ready to test” with a worry-free self-service environment.

The reusable templates in the DevTest Labs can be used everywhere once created. The public APIs, PowerShell cmdlets and VSTS extensions make it super easy to integrate you Dev/Test environments from labs to your release pipeline. In addition to the Dev/Test scenario, Azure DevTest Labs can also be used in other scenarios like training and hackathon. For more information about its value propositions, please check out our GA announcement blog post. If you are interested in how DevTest Labs can help for training, check out this article to use Azure DevTest Labs for training.

In the past months, we’ve been very happy to see that auto-shutdown is the #1 policy used by DevTest Labs customers. On the other hand, we also learned from quite a few customers that they have their centrally managed Dev/Test workloads already running in Azure and simply want to set auto-shutdown for those VMs. Since those workloads have already been provisioned and managed centrally, self-service is not really needed. It’s a little bit overkill for them to create a DevTest lab in this case just for the auto-shutdown settings. That’s why we make this popular feature, VM auto-shutdown, available to all the ARM-based Azure VMs.

With this feature, setting auto-shutdown can’t be easier:

Go to your VM blade in Azure portal.
Click Auto-shutdown in the resource menu on the left-side.
You will see an auto-shutdown settings page expanded, where you can specify the auto-shutdown time and time zone. You can also configure to send notification to your webhook URL 15 minutes before auto-shutdown. This post illustrates how you can set up an Azure logic app to send auto-shutdown notification.

To learn more about this feature or see what's more Azure DevTest Labs can do for you, please check out our announcement on the Azure DevTest Labs team blog.

To get latest information on the service releases or our thoughts on the DevTest Labs, please subscribe to the team blog’s RSS feed and our Service Updates.

There are still a lot of things in our roadmap that we can’t wait to build and ship to our customers. Your opinions are valuable for us to deliver the right solutions for your problems. We welcome ideas and suggestions on what DevTest Labs should support, so please do not hesitate to create an idea at the DevTest Labs feedback forum, or vote on others’ ideas.

If you run into any problems when using the DevTest Labs or have any questions, we are ready at the MSDN forum to help you.

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chrisdury

2715 days ago

Adelaide, South Australia

1 public comment

jshoq

2718 days ago

This is huge for teams using Azure IaaS. The ability to auto-shutdown VMs is crucial to keeping costs down in the cloud-enabled world.

Seattle, WA

What autonomous driving is — and isn’t — in 2016 by Kristen Hall-Geisler
Friday November 11^th, 2016 at 11:30 PM

TechCrunch

When Honda announced that its latest Civic sedan would have a full suite of state-of-the-art driver assist features for $20,000, The Wall Street Journal called it a self-driving vehicle. While the Civic can do a lot, it cannot drive itself. Yet. So what are we even talking about when we talk about autonomous or self-driving vehicles? Lucky for us, engineers are on top of this. In January… Read More

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chrisdury

2730 days ago

Adelaide, South Australia

Scientists look at how A.I. will change our lives by 2030 by Sharon Gaudin
Saturday September 3^rd, 2016 at 3:31 AM

CIO

By the year 2030, artificial intelligence (A.I.) will have changed the way we travel to work and to parties, how we take care of our health and how our kids are educated.

That’s the consensus from a panel of academic and technology experts taking part in Stanford University’s One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence.

Focused on trying to foresee the advances coming to A.I., as well as the ethical challenges they’ll bring, the panel yesterday released its first study.

The 28,000-word report, “Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030,” looks at eight categories -- from employment to healthcare, security, entertainment, education, service robots, transportation and poor communities -- and tries to predict how smart technologies will affect urban life.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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chrisdury

2800 days ago

How AI will change our lives by 2030 - a not that long but pretty informative read.

Adelaide, South Australia

Office 365 news roundup by Office 365 Team
Tuesday August 9^th, 2016 at 11:31 PM

Microsoft 365 Blog

Security and productivity are top priorities for every person, business and organization that uses Office 365. Yet, finding the right balance between the two—one that provides maximum security without compromising productivity and vice versa—can be a challenge. At Microsoft, we are committed to helping you achieve and maintain that balance.

We recently announced that we are extending Azure Rights Management to the Word, Excel and PowerPoint mobile apps for Android, providing full Office Mobile support for information rights management (IRM). As a result, you can now open, read and review rights-protected emails and Office documents on any device—whether it runs Windows, Mac, iOS or Android. We are also working on new features and enhancements to make IRM even better for Office 365 subscribers in the future.

For enterprises, the Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E5 plan provides Advanced Threat Protection and Advanced Security Management to help organizations defend against malware, viruses and other attacks. In addition, we recently shared two new resources to help our enterprise customers take a systematic approach to security and information protection.

To continue increasing productivity for our subscribers, we’ve made several new improvements to Office 365. We added intelligent services to our Office apps, such as Researcher and Editor in Word. Researcher is a new service that helps you find and incorporate reliable sources and content in fewer steps, and Editor is a digital writing assistant that provides advanced proofing and editing. To help you work smarter on any device, we also extended two email efficiency features—Focused Inbox and @mentions—to our Outlook apps on every platform. Finally, we announced the rollout of modern SharePoint lists to SharePoint Online, along with one-click integration of PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, which gives you powerful new collaboration capabilities.

Office 365 provides outstanding productivity and exceptional security—all in one easy-to-use service.

Below is a roundup of some key news items from the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Microsoft’s current cloud business is bigger than most people realize—Learn how Office 365 is helping Microsoft take the lead in revenue among cloud services providers.

Kelly Services—putting nearly one million people to work every year, one great hire at a time—Find out how this leading temp agency is using Office 365 to increase productivity and engage customers in new ways.

Skype for Business voice conferencing comes to Australia—Discover how Office 365 users in Australia can join Skype for Business meetings from any device starting September 1, 2016.

Microsoft is introducing new features that will make its Office 365 apps smarter—Learn how Microsoft is adding intelligence to many Office 365 applications.

5 ways to boost your professionalism over email—Find out how small businesses can make every email a professional calling card.

The post Office 365 news roundup appeared first on Office Blogs.

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chrisdury

2824 days ago

Office365 roundup - New capabilities for E5, Flow+Apps in SharePoint and more

Adelaide, South Australia

Next Page of Stories

#MSBuild 2017 Revisited: AI/ML by Greg Duncan Wednesday June 14th, 2017 at 3:53 AM

Build Revisited Table Of Contents

Announcing general availability of Azure Functions by Yochay Kiriaty Sunday November 27th, 2016 at 12:45 AM

Building with the community

Integrated tooling support

Bind to services

Pay only for what you use

Increased operational efficiency

Our customers

What next?

Announcing auto-shutdown for VMs using Azure Resource Manager by Xiaoying Guo Sunday November 27th, 2016 at 12:45 AM

What autonomous driving is — and isn’t — in 2016 by Kristen Hall-Geisler Friday November 11th, 2016 at 11:30 PM

Scientists look at how A.I. will change our lives by 2030 by Sharon Gaudin Saturday September 3rd, 2016 at 3:31 AM

Office 365 news roundup by Office 365 Team Tuesday August 9th, 2016 at 11:31 PM

#MSBuild 2017 Revisited: AI/ML by Greg Duncan
Wednesday June 14^th, 2017 at 3:53 AM

Announcing general availability of Azure Functions by Yochay Kiriaty
Sunday November 27^th, 2016 at 12:45 AM

Announcing auto-shutdown for VMs using Azure Resource Manager by Xiaoying Guo
Sunday November 27^th, 2016 at 12:45 AM

What autonomous driving is — and isn’t — in 2016 by Kristen Hall-Geisler
Friday November 11^th, 2016 at 11:30 PM

Scientists look at how A.I. will change our lives by 2030 by Sharon Gaudin
Saturday September 3^rd, 2016 at 3:31 AM

Office 365 news roundup by Office 365 Team
Tuesday August 9^th, 2016 at 11:31 PM