Posts by David Smith
Author: David Smith
Azure AI and Machine Learning talk series
Feed: R-bloggers. Author: David Smith. At last week's Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, our team delivered a series of 6 talks about AI and machine learning applications with Azure. The videos from each talk are linked below, and you can watch every talk from the conference online (no registration necessary). Each of our talks also comes with a companion Github repository, where you can find all of the code and scripts behind the demonstrations, so you can deploy and run them yourself. If you'd like to see these talks live, they will also be presented in 31 cities around the ... Read More
New R Support in Azure Machine Learning
Feed: R-bloggers. Author: David Smith. [This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. Azure Machine Learning has added support for the R language, it was announced at the Ignite conference in Orlando this week. A new R package azuremlsdk (available to install from Github now, and from CRAN soon), provides the interface to the Azure Machine Learning service. With R functions, you can provision new computing ... Read More
AI, Machine Learning and Data Science Roundup: September/October 2019
Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. A roundup of news about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science. This is an eclectic collection of interesting blog posts, software announcements and data applications from Microsoft and elsewhere that I've noted recently. Open Source AI, ML & Data Science News Tensorflow 2.0.0 has been released. This major update makes many changes to improve simplicity and ease of use. Tensorflow 1.x models will need to be upgraded for Tensorflow 2.0. Keras 2.3.0 has been released, the first release of the high-level deep learning framework to support Tensorflow 2.0. spaCy v2.2 has been ... Read More
Handling dates and times in R: a free online course
Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. If you ever need to work with data involving dates, times or durations in R, then take a look at this free course on LinkedIn Learning presented by Mark Niemann-Ross: R Programming in Data Science: Dates and Times. Here's the course overview from the introductory video: When did Mount St Helens last erupt? How many birds migrated south this month? Which month last year was the coldest on average? These are questions related to time. And if you're going to perform calculations on this type of data, then you need date and time data structures. I I'll show you ... Read More
A DevOps Process for Deploying R to Production
Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. I've been at the EARL Conference in London this week, and as always it's been inspiring to see so many examples of R being used in production at companies like Sainsbury's, BMW, Austria Post, PartnerRe, Royal Free Hospital, the BBC, the Financial Times, and many others. My own talk, A DevOps Process for Deploying R to Production, presented one process for automating the process of building and deploying R-based applications using Azure Pipelines and Azure Machine Learning Service. The talk at EARL wasn't recorded, but you can see the slides here, and also ... Read More
AI, Machine Learning and Data Science Roundup: July/August 2019
Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. A mostly monthly roundup of news about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science. This is an eclectic collection of interesting blog posts, software announcements and data applications from Microsoft and elsewhere that I've noted over the past month or so. Open Source AI, ML & Data Science News StanfordNLP: a pure-Python package for grammatical analysis of sentences in over 50 languages. New projects added to the PyTorch ecosystem: Skorch (scikit-learn compatibility), botorch (Bayesian optimization), and many others. PyTorch-Transformers, a library of pretrained NLP models (BERT, GPT-2 and more) from HuggingFace. R 3.6.1 ... Read More
Data on demand: Azure SQL Database in serverless mode
Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. Azure SQL Database has a new “serverless” mode in preview that eliminates compute costs when not in use. In this post, I’ll show how you can set up a serverless database instance, and access data stored in it from R. I’m working on a demo that I’ll be giving at several upcoming conferences, and for which I’ll be needing data in a database. Normally, I’d use a database installed on my local machine or in a virtual machine in the cloud, but this time I decided to go a different route: serverless. I ... Read More
Microsoft ML Server 9.4 now available
Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. Microsoft Machine Learning Server, the enhanced deployment platform for R and Python applications, has been updated to version 9.4. This update includes the open source R 3.5.2 and Python 3.7.1 engines, and supports integration with Spark 2.4. Microsoft ML Server also includes specialized R packages and Python modules focused on application deployment, scalable machine learning, and integration with SQL Server. Microsoft Machine Learning Server is used by organizations that need to use R and/or Python code in production applications. For some examples of deployments, take a look at these open-source solution templates for credit risk estimation, ... Read More
Watch keynote presentations from the useR!2019 conference
Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. The keynote presentations from last week's useR!2019 conference in Toulouse are now available for everyone to view on YouTube. (The regular talks were also recorded and video should follow soon, and slides for most talks are available for download now at the conference website.) Here are links to the videos, indexed to the start of each presentation: All of the presentations are excellent, but if I had to choose one to watch first, it would be Julia Stewart Lowndes' presentation, which is an inspiring example of how R has enabled marine researchers to ... Read More
R 3.6.1 is now available
Feed: Planet big data. Author: David Smith. On July 5, the R Core Group released the source code for the latest update to R, R 3.6.1, and binaries are now available to download for Windows, Linux and Mac from your local CRAN mirror. R 3.6.1 is a minor update to R that fixes a few bugs. As usual with a minor release, this version is backwards-compatible with R 3.6.0 and remains compatible with your installed packages. Nonetheless, an upgrade is recommended to address issues including: A fix for "lock errors" when attempting to re-install packages on Windows Efficiency improvements and other ... Read More
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