Azure AI and Machine Learning talk series

At last week's Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, our team delivered a series of 6 talks about AI and machine learning applications with Azure. The videos from each talk are linked below, and you can watch every talk from the conference online (no registration necessary). Each of our talks also comes with a companion Github repository, where you can find all of the code and scripts behind the demonstrations, so you can deploy and run them yourself.

If you'd like to see these talks live, they will also be presented in 31 cities around the world over the next six months, starting with Paris this week. Check the website for Microsoft Ignite the Tour for event dates and further information.

AIML10 Making sense of your unstructured data with AI

Tailwind Traders has a lot of legacy data that they’d like their developers to leverage in their apps – from various sources, both structured and unstructured, and including images, forms, and several others. In this session, learn how the team used Azure Cognitive Search to make sense of this data in a short amount of time and with amazing success. We discuss tons of AI concepts, like the ingest-enrich-explore pattern, search skillsets, cognitive skills, natural language processing, computer vision, and beyond.

Github repository here. Video here.

AIML20 Using pre-built AI to solve business challenges

As a data-driven company, Tailwind Traders understands the importance of using artificial intelligence to improve business processes and delight customers. Before investing in an AI team, their existing developers were able to demonstrate some quick wins using pre-built AI technologies.

In this session, we show how you can use Azure Cognitive Services to extract insights from retail data and go into the neural networks behind computer vision. Learn how it works and how to augment the pre-built AI with your own images for custom image recognition applications.

Github repository here. Video here.

AIML21 Developers guide to AI: A data story

In this theater session, we show the data science process and how to apply it. From exploration of datasets to deployment of services – all applied to an interesting data story. We also take you on a very brief tour of the Azure AI platform.

Github repository here. Video here.

AIML30: Start building machine learning models faster than you think

Tailwind Traders uses custom machine learning models to fix their inventory issues – without changing their software development life cycle! How? Azure Machine Learning Visual Interface.

In this session, learn the data science process that Tailwind Traders’ uses and get an introduction to Azure Machine Learning Visual Interface. See how to find, import, and prepare data, select a machine learning algorithm, train and test the model, and deploy a complete model to an API. Get the tips, best practices, and resources you and your development team need to continue your machine learning journey, build your first model, and more.

Github repository here. Video here.

AIML40 Taking models to the next level with Azure Machine Learning best practices

Tailwind Traders’ data science team uses natural language processing (NLP), and recently discovered how to fine tune and build a baseline models with Automated ML.

In this session, learn what Automated ML is and why it’s so powerful, then dive into how to improve upon baseline models using examples from the NLP best practices repository. We highlight Azure Machine Learning key features and how you can apply them to your organization, including: low priority compute instances, distributed training with auto scale, hyperparameter optimization, collaboration, logging, and deployment.

Github repository here. Video here.

AIML50 Machine learning operations: Applying DevOps to data science

Many companies have adopted DevOps practices to improve their software delivery, but these same techniques are rarely applied to machine learning projects. Collaboration between developers and data scientists can be limited and deploying models to production in a consistent, trustworthy way is often a pipe dream.

In this session, learn how Tailwind Traders applied DevOps practices to their machine learning projects using Azure DevOps and Azure Machine Learning Service. We show automated training, scoring, and storage of versioned models, wrap the models in Docker containers, and deploy them to Azure Container Instances or Azure Kubernetes Service. We even collect continuous feedback on model behavior so we know when to retrain.

Github repository here. Video here.