Page 10 - MSDN Magazine, December 15, 2017

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Getting Started
with Microsoft AI
Joseph Sirosh and Wee Hyong Tok
Software developers are quickly adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, such as natural language understand- ing, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, image understanding and machine learning (ML). Across a broad range of industries and sectors, AI-infused software applications and cloud services drive innovative customer experiences, augment human capabilities and transform how we live, work and play. New tools, cloud-hosted APIs and platforms make it even easier to build such applications.
Modern AI applications live at the intersection of cloud com- puting, data platforms and AI tools. The cloud provides a powerful foundation for elastic compute and storage, while supporting spe- cial-purpose hardware such as graphics processing units (GPUs) that accelerate demanding calculations. It also enables connec- tivity, identity, application monitoring and the Internet of Things
(IoT). Data platforms in the cloud can ingest and integrate massive volumes of data, use databases and data lakes to transform and analyze the data, and build real-time data-driven applications. Layered upon these capabilities are AI tools and algorithms that help developers build models from the data for targeted intelligent scenarios, and deploy them in a hosted AI application.
What are some examples of such applications? Here are a few examples:
• Health Care: Doctors in the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE) leverage AI to improve patient outcomes for eye surgeries by identifying optimal surgical parameters to personalize treatment and maximize the probability of success.
At the Cochrane Transform Project, AI is used to improve and streamline the nonprofit organization’s comprehensive reviews of health care interventions, with the goal of iden- tifying the best treatments and interventions for patients. AI is used to analyze thousands of research studies, sharply reducing the time spent on manual reviews and freeing staff to focus on more urgent tasks.
• Manufacturing: Jabil, one of the world’s leading design and manufacturing companies, uses AI to optically inspect printed circuit boards and detect manufacturing defects. AI is also used in the manufacturing environment to monitor equipment to predict declining efficiency and impending failure of machines.
This article discusses:
• Getting started with Microsoft AI
• Overview of what’s new in Azure Machine Learning
• Building an intelligent application using Cognitive Services • Building an intelligent bot using Bot Framework Technologies discussed:
Microsoft AI, Azure Machine Learning, Bot Framework, Cognitive Services
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