Thursday, October 28, 2021

Nov '21 Technical Events

Virtual User Group Meetings

 

Virtual Conferences

 

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Closing Announcements for “Global AI Back Together” Event

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

 

Saturday, September 25, 2021

AI Articles Weekly Series

Thursday, September 23, 2021

Oct '21 Technical Events

Virtual User Group Meetings

 

Virtual Conferences

 

Friday, September 17, 2021

Azure Custom Vision Object Detection

Computer Vision and Custom Vision are 2 subsets of services provided by Azure Cognitive Services.

 

Computer Vision: Analyze content in images.

  1. OCR: Optical Character Recognition
  2. Image Analysis: extracts visual features from images (objects, faces)
  3. Spatial Analysis: Analyzes the presence and movement of people on a video feed and produces events that other systems can respond to.

 

Custom Vision: Customize image recognition to fit your business needs.

  1. Image Classification: applies label(s) to an image
  2. Object Detection: returns coordinates in image where applied label(s) can be found.

 

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

 

  1. Be sure to use the same login for https://customvision.ai as the one used for the Azure portal.

 

  1. Use same "Directory" in CustomVision.ai and Azure portal.  This setting can be found in the top right corner for both Azure portal and CustomVision.ai

 

  1. When training the model, you must use a minimum of 15 images for every tag.  More images with different lighting, angles, and backgrounds will produce better results.

 

  1. The images types used for training must be .JPG, .PNG, or .BMP, and less than 4MB.

 

 

 

Thursday, September 16, 2021

.Net Release Schedule

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.

 

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

A day of data and AI

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

 

Thursday, August 26, 2021

Sep '21 Technical Events

Virtual User Group Meetings

 

Virtual Conferences

 

Monday, August 2, 2021

AI Articles

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

 

ML{.NET} Introduction

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.

 

AI in real-life: A Q&A with Gavin Day

From AllAnalytics

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...

 

Detecting Financial Fraud with Machine Learning

From BlueGranite Blog

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...

 

Rise of the Cyborgs: Using AI/ML to Enhance Human Intelligence (Part 1)

From Dataversity

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...

 

An overview of Azure Cognitive Services

From SQLShack

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...

 

Sean Gallagher and an AI expert talk about our crazy machine-learning adventure

From Ars Technica

Join our headline experiment post-mortem today, July 28, at 1 pm Eastern time!

 

 

Saturday, July 31, 2021

Custom Lingual Adaptation (Preview)

“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:

  1. German (Germany)
  2. English (Australia)
  3. English (Canada)
  4. English (Canada)
  5. Spanish (Spain)
  6. Spanish (Mexico)
  7. French (Canada)
  8. French (France)
  9. Italian (Italy)
  10. Japanese (Japan)
  11. Korean (Korea)
  12. Portuguese (Brazil)
  13. Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified)

 

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.

 

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Aug '21 Technical Events

Virtual User Group Meetings

 

Virtual Conferences

 

Thursday, May 27, 2021