The tagline for this year’s event was ‘Putting AI into the hands of developers’ and it’s clear that Microsoft is working hard to be a leader in this emerging space.
“We’re delivering more open source data technologies, making AI easier to consume, and helping organizations streamline their journey to the cloud,” wrote Rohan Kumar, General Manager of the Database Systems Group at Microsoft, in a blog post.
Starting with Visual Studio, a new package aptly called ‘Visual Studio Tools for AI’ will allow developers to get started with a new project using a machine learning engine of their choice. Microsoft’s own CNTK framework is naturally supported, but also third-party alternatives such as TensorFlow (which received a big update this month.)
Once the machine learning model is prepared, the package will enable developers to ship their code to Azure Batch AI — a new cloud service providing an environment for machine learning models to be trained.
Within this environment, developers can train AI models on sample data. This will help to ensure their accuracy before deploying into real-world scenarios.
