Microsoft Data Amp Web Conference: Data is Your Most Strategic Asset

The Data Amp web conference was hosted in late April and showed developers how data can impact their apps and services.

Watch Scott Guthrie and Joseph Sirosh showcase how data is the nexus between application innovation and artificial intelligence in their keynotes. You can also access a variety of deep dive sessions on the big data and machine learning innovations.

We highlighted the future of machine learning, announced SQL Server 2017, released the Cognitive Services: Face API to developers and announced the general availability of Azure Analysis Services.

SQL Server 2017 is the next step for developers to harness machine learning capabilities. It includes Python support (including Python/R) and is geared toward taking on data intensive computing. The SQL Server 2017 Community Technology Preview (CTP) 2.0 release is ready to be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and Docker.

The newly released Azure Analysis Services transform complex data into actionable insights. The Cognitive Services Face API detects human faces and their emotions in images, compares similar faces and identifies previously tagged people. The Computer Vision API gives you the tools to understand the contents of any image from your code. It creates tags that identify objects, beings or actions and creates coherent sentences to describe the picture. You can now also detect landmarks and handwriting. Finally, the Content Moderator provides machine assisted moderation of text and images, augmented with human review tools. Video moderation is available in preview as part of Azure Media Services.

The release of Microsoft R Server 9.1 was also a topic at the Data Amp event: The pre-trained neural network models support Sparkly R, SparkETL, and Sparks SQL as well as CPU support for neutral networks.