Highlights from the Connect(); conference

Connect();, the annual Microsoft developer conference, is wrapping up now in New York. The conference was the venue for a number of major announcements and talks. Here are some highlights related to data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence:

• There have been several updates to Azure Machine Learning, including the ability to deploy models to the Azure IoT Edge using Docker containers for intelligent Internet-of-Things applications. 

• Microsoft has joined the MariaDB Foundation, and now offers fully-managed MariaDB databases in Azure. (MySQL and MariaDB creator Monty Widenius made the announcement from Finland.) You can access MariaDB databases on Azure as you would any other instance, including via the RMariaDB package for R.

• Databricks Spark clusters are now available in Azure as a fully-managed services. You can connect to these instances using standard Spark APIs, for example the sparklyr package for R. 

• New capabilities for Azure Cosmos DB: Apache Cassandra API; Gremlin API support for querying graph databases (preview), and enhanced MongoDB and Spark connectivity.

• Visual Studio Tools for AI is now available (in preview), making it easy to deploy models from deep learning frameworks (including CNTK, Tensorflow and Caffe) to Azure. This video from Connect() demonstrates how it works.

Lastly, I wanted to share this video presented at the conference from Stack Overflow. Keep an eye out for R community luminary David Robinson programming in R!

You can find more from the Connect conference, including on-demand replays of the talks and keynotes, at the link below.

Microsoft: Connect(); November 15-17, 2017