The Artificial Intelligence track at Future Decoded 2016

If you have been to or watched any event this year from Microsoft such as Build, Ignite or TechDays Online, you'll know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is core to Microsoft's overall vision for how we'll help every person and organisation on the planet achieve more.

Microsoft's vision include is about three bold ambitions:

• Reinventing Productivity
• More Personal Computing
• Intelligent Cloud

AI is central all of these ambitions and technologies like Azure Machine Learning, Cortana Analytics, Cognitive Services and the Microsoft Bot Framework here today and ready for you to start building AI into your applications.

The AI track at Future Decoded

Future Decoded is Microsoft's annual UK event which brings together business and technical people from across the UK to learn about the latest in Microsoft technology and the partner ecosystem that surrounds it.

The two days will be split into a business focus on the first day and a technical focus on the second day. The afternoon of Technical Day will be split into several tracks focusing on specific technologies, one of those tracks is the Artifical Intelligence track.

The theme of artificial intelligence is inescapable at Future decoded this year; you'll hear about AI throughout the keynotes and exhibition at Future Decoded and if you're excited to learn what you can do today, the 'Microsoft AI track' is where you can learn exactly that. We'll have three talks from Microsoft evangelists on the three core pillars of Microsoft's current AI platform.

Talk 1: Can Machine Learning predict whether you’ll come to my talk?

12:45 > 13:45

Amy Nicholson - Microsoft Evangelist

Amy will talk about data and Machine Learning and how you can use it to create your own machine learning experiments with your own data sets.

During this talk, Amy will use the data from previous Future Decoded events to try and predict how many people will turn up to this session compared to others? As well as maybe the types of people that could turn up? This is a great Machine Learning challenge and we will not know the outcome until the session happens live on 2nd November!

This journey and challenge will take us around the Azure Machine Learning service showing how you can go from raw data to a deployed web service using a data science process; utilising tools in between such as R/Python scripts and Jupyter Notebooks. Physicist Niels Bohr said, "making predictions is very difficult, especially about the future", let's see if Azure can help us out.

Talk 2: Cognitive Services in Action

14:00 > 15:00

Martin Kearn - Microsoft Evangelist

Martin will cover the world of Cognitive Computing, specifically Microsoft Cognitive Services.

Machine Learning is all well and good, but even with Azure helping you out, it is still fairly complex; you'll need some level of data science expertise to really make the most of it. This is where Cognitive Services comes in; these services from Microsoft, IBM and Google allow regular developers to harness the power of Machine Learning via a simple REST API call which can be included in any application.

In this talk, we'll explore some of the Cognitive Service APIs provided by Microsoft. We'll also create a simple application to see how happy the audience is and how Cognitive Services are used in the real world.

Talk 3: Introducing the Microsoft Bot Framework

15:15 > 16:15

Simon Michael - Microsoft Evangelist

Jamie Dalton - Microsoft Evangelist

Simon and Jamie will conclude the track with a talk about the Microsoft Bot Framework and the Conversation-as-a-Platform landscape as a whole. Microsoft Bot Framework is a comprehensive offering to build and deploy high quality bots for your users to interact with using their favorite messaging applications.  Developers writing bots all face the same problems: bots require basic I/O; they must have language and dialog skills; they must be performant, responsive and scalable; and they must connect to users, ideally in any language the user chooses.  Multiply this by each conversational channel you want to target and you have a real challenge! The Bot Framework provides just what you need to build, connect, manage and publish intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking. In this session you will learn how to build a bot using the Microsoft Bot Framework and give your bot smart skills such as natural language processing and other cognitive APIs.

In Summary

If you want to learn about AI and how it can be applied in your software right now, this is the track for you.