Microsoft’s news at Ignite: A lot About AI..

That said I haven’t been at Ignite, but I am overwhelmed by the vast amount of announcements made there and around these dates… and the vast amount of content, 119 talks on AI, 313 sessions on Machine Learning, whoa, it’s getting crazy and the feeling is that all the technologies on Microsoft around AI/Machine Learning/Data Science are accelerating – Fast!

So, let’s catch up!

• Microsoft ML Server 9.2 released – Microsoft’s Platform offer on Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics for enterprises. As big improvements, now it supports full data science lifecycle support for ETL (Extract Transform and Load operations), supporting R & Python. And yes, this is what was known earlier as Microsoft’s R server, whose name was not fully correct after ‘adopting’ Python 😉 Oh, and now it’s fully integrated with SQL Server 2017… you can read more at the official source. Or watch a quick 2′ introductory video here. I think it is pretty damn important on the full operationalization offer that Microsoft proposes…
• Azure SQL Database supports now real-time scoring for R and Python
• Yay! The pretty much expected next gen SQL Database Server from Microsoft has been released: SQL Server 2017, with full support for R & Python and including the before mentioned ML Server.
• Azure Machine Learning has been greatly updated… this service now brings to us the AML workbench, a client application for AI powered data wrangling and “ML fun”, which I have reserved some time this weekend to download and “have some time together”.. also the AML Experimentation service has been launched to help Data Scientist to experiment faster and better, as well as the AML Model Management  Service. Here you can find an overview as “short” as it can be..
• Microsoft R Client 3.4.1 release – supporting the obvious version of R, providing desktop capabilities for R development with the ability to deploy models and computations to a ML Server. Original source here. Note that to properly use this, it is vital to use the Visual Studio IDE and to install the R Tools for Visual Studio, which is free.
• Talking about Visual Studio, we have now the Visual Studio Code Tools For AI which provide extensions to build, test and deploy Deep Learning / AI solutions, being fully integrated with Azure Machine Learning. Github is here.
• Visual Studio Code for AI has been launched as well, meant for developing for Tensorflow, CNTK, AML and more.
• The “Quantum Revolution” happened 😉 – the initial movement from Microsoft to embrace the next “shiny light” in computing: Quantum computing. But this is not released, but announced… there will be a Quantum programming language inheriting from C#, Python and F#, a quantum computer simulator and everything integrated with our favorite developer IDE. Short introduction (2′) here. To follow it and suscribe to news on this, go here and on the bottom there is a “signup” button which I’ve already pressed – so, what are you waiting for? 😉

Hope it was interesting!

Let me know if you liked it..  And.. Would you like a hands-on overview on the AML “Workbench”? 😉