June 4, 2016 is a cloudy day 2.0. Artificial intelligence in the cloud

In early April, we had a virtual cloud day , consisting of reports and labs that helped participants to get acquainted with the Microsoft Azure cloud in one day. Since the event has been very successful, we continue the good tradition and spend Cloudy Day 2.0 , dedicated to the topic of artificial intelligence in the cloud.



Why did we choose the topic of artificial intelligence? Now Microsoft is rapidly developing the direction of “more personal computing”, within which the Microsoft Bot Framework and Cognitive Services (formerly Project Oxford) are announced. All this allows you to add more intelligence to your applications, interact in a new way with the user - and all this with the help of a very simple code using ready-made cloud services. We specifically developed the content of the cloudy day so that the material was understandable even to elementary students and schoolchildren who can program.
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The first 800 people who register for a cloudy day will receive a promotional code for the month of using Microsoft Azure cloud resources worth $ 100. If someone is not enough - then 80% of the exercises can be done using the free cloud offer for students .

Within the framework of a cloudy day several large topics will be presented:

• A brief introduction to artificial intelligence , in which we will tell in general about the various directions of AI, about its role in the modern world and about the direction of more personal computing. As I teach the course “Artificial Intelligence” at the Faculty of Applied Mathematics of the Moscow Aviation Institute , in this lecture I will share a small part of what I tell students in the first lecture.
• Create chat bots using the Microsoft Bot Framework . We have already dealt with this topic in an article on Habré , but now we will tell in more detail how the various elements of the framework are used: dialogues, conversation chains, FormFlow technology, and natural language recognition using the cognitive service LUIS.
• The use of cognitive services , in particular, the service of recognition of faces, gender, age and emotions. We will conduct an interesting computational experiment to determine the happiest person on the Internet from his image, and you can (using the available cloud resources) continue this experiment at home (for example, find the happiest of your friends on VKontakte).
• Machine Learning : Using Azure Machine Learning and a Microsoft R server to extract knowledge from data. Our best machine learning expert, Alexander Belotserkovsky, will show some fascinating examples. We have already touched on this topic a bit in our past cloudy day - now you will have an exciting continuation!

Like last time, you are waiting for video lectures, which you can view at a comfortable pace, and a series of simple laboratory work. During a cloudy day, our experts will be ready to answer your questions in real time. To effectively complete the training, we recommend doing the tasks, and for this you will need:

• Visual Studio 2015 , Update 2, with Microsoft Azure SDK installed.
• Access to Microsoft Azure cloud . After registering, a few days before the event, you will receive a promotional code for using the cloud, which must be activated in advance so as not to waste time on it at the event. Instructions on how to activate the code can be found in the first lecture of a cloudy day 1.0 .

We are waiting for you on a cloudy day 2.0! Hope this is a good start to summer!