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Thanks to all who attended the "Global AI Back Together" Event on October 19, 2021.
Keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pJ771eAPvA
Check-In (Swag & Azure Passes): https://checkin.globalai.community/
Workshops
The Azure Function that can see: https://workshops.globalai.community/the-azure-function-that-can-see/introduction
Train and deploy a PyTorch model using the Azure Machine Learning platform: https://workshops.globalai.community/azure-machine-learning/introduction
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU4ffaIzhsvMr_cCt9kjQMw
All presentations from the event will be posted. Please subscribe to the channel to get notifications when new videos are posted.
Evaluation: https://forms.office.com/r/ctYxEL4fDE
This week’s series of AI articles is from Dinesh Asanka, an 8x Microsoft MVP in SQL Server. He has been working with SQL Server for more than 15 years, written articles and co-authored books. Dinesh is a presenter at various user groups and universities.
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Computer Vision and Custom Vision are 2 subsets of services provided by Azure Cognitive Services.
Computer Vision: Analyze content in images.
Custom Vision: Customize image recognition to fit your business needs.
When using the Object Detection Prediction API, the response returned from azure will be a JSON dataset using the following format.
public class PredictionResponse
{
public string id { get; set; }
public string project { get; set; }
public string iteration { get; set; }
public string created { get; set; }
public Prediction[] predictions { get; set; }
}
public class Prediction
{
public string tagId { get; set; }
public string tagName { get; set; }
public string probability { get; set; }
public BoundingBox boundingBox { get; set; }
}
public class BoundingBox
{
public string left { get; set; }
public string top { get; set; }
public string width { get; set; }
public string height { get; set; }
}
Each BoundingBox object in the response is represented graphically by the red boxes, as shown in the sample image below
In addition, listed below are some Gotcha’s to watch out for when working with Object Detection
There has been some confusion created with the release of .Net and .Net Core releases and how their support will be impacted in the near future. Listed below is a summary from the Microsoft Support Policy:
.NET and .NET Core refer to several technologies including the runtime, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, and more.
.NET Core and future versions of .NET provide Long Term Support (LTS) releases that get three years of patches and free support.
Patches to releases are compatible, which eliminates risk adversely affecting applications.
For details, see the .NET and .NET Core support policy.
| Version | Original Release Date | Latest Patch Version | Patch Release Date | Support Level | End of Support |
| .NET 5 | November 10, 2020 | 5.0.10 | September 14, 2021 | Current | 6 months after .NET 6 release (around May 2022) |
| .NET Core 3.1 | December 3, 2019 | 3.1.19 | September 14, 2021 | LTS | December 3, 2022 |
For better visualization of the .Net roadmap, see the timeline below for release dates of past, present, and future releases.
O’Reilly Radar presents a day of data and AI that will showcase what’s new, what’s important, and what’s coming in the field. It’s free and open to the public.
The event is happening October 14 and again on October 21. It's free, but registration is required.
RSVP here for October 14, 7:00am–10:30am PT / 10:00am–1:30pm ET
RSVP here for October 21, 8:30am–12:00pm IST / 2:00pm–5:30pm AET
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SQLServerCentral.com is a well known web site for knowledge sharing on all things SQL Server related, as well as other DB technologies. It’s a community driven web site that publishes a daily newsletter with articles from their contributors, as well as contributors on other web sites. Since data is the basis for machine learning and AI, the newsletter also started to cover various AI related topics. Listed below are a few articles from July 31st newsletter.
| AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services |
| Machine Learning (ML) has come from a buzzword that is nice to have in your application to a must-have feature that works and adds value. Data scientists develop ML models in various ML Frameworks like TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, PyTorch, Azure ML, etc. Before ML.NET became available to all developers, adding the ML functionality to .NET applications required knowledge in some ML frameworks to build and train ML models. |
In this Q&A with MIT/SMR Connections, Gavin Day, Senior Vice President of Technology at SAS, shares real-life examples of artificial intelligence (AI) at work, discusses picking the right problems... |
According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers reported losing more than $3.3 billion to fraud in 2020, an increase of $1.5 billion since 2019. Contributing to this uptick in... |
Click to learn more about author Assaf Egozi. Modern organizations house a growing number of “citizen data analysts.” These individuals hold a wide range of positions in the enterprise, from... |
Microsoft Azure has been a leading cloud service provider over the past few years. In this article, we are going to look into an overview of various cognitive services... |
Join our headline experiment post-mortem today, July 28, at 1 pm Eastern time! |
“Custom Neural Voices” is a part of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services suite of technologies. It allows users to develop highly realistic, humanlike voices by using Microsoft's groundbreaking neural text-to-speech technology. A user will simply record audio samples and then upload training data. Once the voice is created, it can be used in applications for Text-to-Speech or Voice Assistant.
In addition, once the voice is created, it can be used to speak fluently in 13 other languages:
This will provide developers the ability to give their application a voice and persona that can be applied to 13 different languages/dialects. Global companies such as BBC, Swisscom, AT&T and Duolingo have built realistic voices that resonate with their brands.
To learn more about custom voices, as well as getting started tutorials, visit https://speech.microsoft.com/customvoice.
Virtual User Group Meetings
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Virtual User Group Meetings
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Virtual User Group Meetings
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