41 posts tagged with "azure"

Fun day at the Microsoft AI Tour @ Sydney! Lucky I made it back from Auckland ✈️ just in time to be one of the 6000+ participants!

I absolutely loved the keynotes, workshops, breakouts, and interactive sessions! Each one packed with valuable insights and inspiration. And let's not forget the Microsoft photo booths, such a fun and creative way to capture the day with friends like Saadullah! 📸

Especially thrilled to see PetAI being showcased in multiple occasions. Such a proud moment for our Insight team!

From cutting-edge Azure AI tools to real-world success stories, the event showcased the power of AI to drive transformation and innovation. Plus, the chance to connect with industry peers and experts was the cherry on top. 🍒

Innovation overload in Auckland! 🚀 Just rounded off another unforgettable AIAppinOneDay workshop in Microsoft office with Ahmed, and it was all about getting our hands dirty with Azure AI services.

Yep, we built a RAG chatbot from scratch 💬 - embedding generations, vector searches, LangChain orchestration. It was like taking OpenAI models to the next level, with a vibe that screamed: "Let's build cool stuff!"

The best bit?💡Realizing we can make AI apps for literally anything. Work? Sorted. Fun? Oh yeah. What about an app to predict the next lottery numbers (an idea from crowd) ! Are we coding or dreaming? Who cares - it's genius.

Shoutout to everyone in the room who brought the energy, ideas, and what if moments. 🤝

4am wakeup and 7am flight - totally worth it for an wonderful day at DDD Brisbane last Saturday! I'm so flattered and grateful that so many people joined me for my talk about LEGO AI and FLL.

Thank you for agreeing that I earned the cape in the end! 🦸‍♂️ Appreciate the interest and great chats afterward, Andrei and Gerald.

The only downside? Wishing I could clone myself to attend every talk! Huge shoutout to Joel (I did not tag you on social), Michelle (it is not luck but hard work from the girls!), Jason (C# & .Net will always be my favorite), Bryden & Luke (cool hats & photos!), Julian (I wrote RSA at uni as assignments) for your insightful talks - I walked away with new ideas and inspiration!

And of course, it was so lovely to catch up with new & old friends like Fabrizio, and Insight teammates. DDD events are as much about the community as they are about the content. To top it all off, look what I found at the airport on my way back to Sydney: a life-sized LEGO Captain! (last photo)

Thanks again, DDD Brisbane (especially Chris & Bronwen), for such a rewarding and enriching experience.

Will DDD Sydney come back one day? I will definitely sign up for volunteering!

🎉 I've been accepted into the Microsoft MVP Program (Azure AI Services)! Yes, I'm as surprised as you are! 😊

Here's what happened: when I joined Insight, Saadullah said to me, "You've got to keep an eye on Simon, he's doing amazing work in the community." So, I did! Like many MVPs, he's basically a walking RSS feed for user groups, conferences, and tech meetups. One day, on a whim, I submitted a talk and told him, "Hey, I did it, now that?" 🙃 He replied: "well, the chance to get in is pretty slim but don't give up, keep trying."

That small nudge set everything in motion.💥 After a few goes, I got my first public tech talk, things just started flowing – more events, more opportunities, and deeper involvement with tech and school community. The past six months have been incredibly intense. Just last week, I attended five events in ten days - early bird and red-eye flights to get there (a personal record for me 😅!). It's been a whirlwind of incredible experiences and unforgettable moments.

To anyone thinking about starting your community journey – take that first step. You never know where it might lead.

Incredible Microsoft AI AppinaDay Workshop in Wellington, my first time to the lovely city!

It's fantastic to see so much enthusiasm in the room as we dive into the capabilities of Azure AI services. The questions and engagement from everyone attending are truly impressive. Really great running the session with my Insight teammates Ross and Ajay!

An amazing session from AKS product team about the new features of Azure Kubernetes Service at Microsoft Reactor Sydney tonight! It's an insightful presentation and demo from Justin on running open source LLMs in AKS using the AI toolchain operator (KAITO) - a perfect blend of AI and Kubernetes in action!

Fantastic opportunity to hear directly from the team. Great to see Simon and Jorge and the visiting product managers Brian and Kaysie for such an engaging event. Read more about KAITO: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/ai-toolchain-operator

Great pizzas too! 🍕

Lucky! 🍀 My AzureAI and CosmosDB hackathon project was a winner (honorable mentions) and featured on the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB Dev Blogs ! A few weekends of hard work truly paid off! ✨

This AI hackathon had over 9,500 developers world-wide engaged with Azure Cosmos DB and Azure AI services, making it one of the most popular on Devpost, ranking in the top 0.2% of all Devpost hackathons. 🔥

📢 Checkout my "LEGO Robot AI" and other winner's projects in this blog: "Meet the Winners | Microsoft Developers Azure AI & Azure Cosmos DB Learning Hackathon".

We are back at Microsoft Brisbane office again for our second Azure AI App in a Day workshop.

Ready to build the next million-dollar app in just a day? 💡 We've just completed our second AzureAIAppInADay in Brisbane Microsoft office. Rakesh Lakshminarayana and I had so much fun leading the workshop, and we're glad to see more participants make it to the end - some of you without even a dev background! It's been amazing to keep the momentum going. A big thank you to Tricia Read and Ross Johnson.

In this workshop, we got hands-on with AI app development, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), prompt engineering and built a chatbot using CosmosDb for MongoDb. With the power of Azure and OpenAI, we're helping organizations bring their AI ideas to life!

Excited to see what incredible apps come next! Our Insight team is around to help.

I recently presented and co-hosted an Azure AI App in a Day workshop in Microsoft's Brisbane office, surrounded by 40+ developers who were just as excited as I am about learning AI and building innovative apps. It was an action-packed day, full of coding and collaboration, where we explored the possibilities of using AI in real-world applications. We dove deep into various Azure AI services, learning how to integrate machine learning models, natural language processing, and more into app innovations.

The workshop was not just about learning theory, we spent most of the time writing code together, which made it both engaging and practical. Everyone was there to push their limits and see how they could apply AI to solve real-world problems. There was a real sense of community and shared passion, which made the learning experience even more enjoyable.

During the session, I had the chance to share our own LEGO AI app with the group. This app, which we've built using several Azure AI services, helps students by providing them with AI-generated coding solutions for SPIKE Prime robots. It was great to show how AI can be used in education and robotics, two fields that are close to my passion. The feedback I received was incredibly positive. People were excited about how AI could be used in such practical, hands-on ways to empower the next generation of students and engineers.

Sharing the LEGO AI app also sparked some meaningful discussions. We talked about how AI can be integrated into everyday life, not just in high-tech or corporate environments, but in educational settings where students are learning to code, solve problems, and think critically. Developers were intrigued by the idea of using AI not only to build complex systems but also to inspire young minds. It was a reminder that AI has the potential to impact more than just technology - it can inspire creativity and learning in new ways.

One of the biggest takeaways from the workshop was the idea that the best AI app ideas often come from your passions. Whether it's education, robotics, or something completely different, finding an area you care about can lead to the most impactful and rewarding projects. When you're passionate about a subject, you naturally want to find better ways to improve or innovate, and that's where AI can really shine.

As I left the workshop, I was energized by all the new ideas floating around the room. It was a great reminder that AI is not just about data and algorithms. It's about creativity, innovation, and making life better in ways big and small. So, when you're looking for your next AI app idea, look to the passions in your life. You never know how AI might help turn your interests into something truly innovative.

In this FLL season, we decided to take our chatbot project to the next level. On top of helping us with coding for the LEGO SPIKE Prime, we wanted to explore if we could add all the season documents into the chatbot to help with research and navigating through the rules of the robot game. The idea was to make it easier for our team to access and understand the challenge, rules, and guidelines, all in one place, through a simple conversation with the bot.

To do this, we downloaded all the essential documents: PDFs, excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints from the FIRST LEGO League website. These documents contain all essential information about the Submerged season, including robot game rules, mission details, and field setup instructions. We then uploaded everything to our Azure storage account, which made it easy to connect the documents with our chatbot.

Using Azure, we linked the chatbot with the documents so it could answer questions related to the robot game rules and season guidelines. For example, if we needed to know what specific missions required or how points were awarded, we could ask the chatbot, and it would pull the information directly from the official documents.

The setup process on Azure turned out to be more straightforward than we anticipated using Azure AI Studio. Azure provides great tools for building, training, and deploying AI models, and we were able to get our chatbot running smoothly in a short amount of time. It was a valuable learning experience to see how cloud-based AI services like Azure work in real life. With this setup, our chatbot became a research assistant, helping us quickly reference complex rules and documents during our robot strategy sessions.

We are also keen on responsible AI during our learning. This season, we had sessions with students on AI bias and responsible AI use, which were critical in shaping how we approached this project. We taught the students that while AI can be incredibly powerful, it's also important to recognize its limitations. It's not just about getting the right answer; it's about understanding how the AI processes information and ensuring it's providing accurate and unbiased responses.

We talked about how bias can creep into AI models, especially when the data or documents they rely on are incomplete or misinterpreted. By being cautious and ensuring we used the chatbot as a support tool rather than the sole decision-maker, we are ready to explore AI's potential responsibly.

We're excited to continue using our chatbot for coding, research, and game strategy while keeping in mind the lessons we've learned about using AI. Our team is ready to dive into the Submerged season with confidence, knowing we have the tools and understanding to make the most of AI without losing sight of what's most important: learning, teamwork, and innovation.