The integration of Azure Machine Learning and Azure IoT Edge enables organizations and developers to apply AI and ML to data that can't make it to the cloud due to data sovereignty, privacy, and/or bandwidth issues. All models created using Azure Machine Learning can now be deployed to IoT gateways and devices with the Azure IoT Edge runtime. Models are operationalized as containers and can run on many types of hardware, from very small devices all the way to powerful servers. We're releasing this toolkit to help get you started with AI and Azure IoT Edge. The toolkit will show you how to package deep learning models in Azure IoT Edge-compatible Docker containers and expose those models as REST APIs.

Many data and machine learning scientists have had the experience of working on a computer vision problem, e.g. While labeling data can be relaxing, our existence is impermanent. This is achieved by integrating the open-source web-based image annotation tool COCO-Annotator with a custom-built image segmentation or keypoint detection model that is trained and deployed on Azure. COCO-Annotator allows developers to easily review and correct inaccurate segmentation proposals for unlabeled data generated by the custom-built model. Corrected data can then be added to the training set for retraining the model.

We are happy to announce that Microsoft and Intel are partnering to bring optimized deep learning frameworks to Azure. These optimizations are available in a new offering on the Azure marketplace called the Intel Optimized Data Science VM for Linux (Ubuntu). Over the last few years, deep learning has become the state of the art for several machine learning and cognitive applications. Deep learning is a machine learning technique that leverages neural networks with multiple layers of non-linear transformations, so that the system can learn from data and build accurate models for a wide range of machine learning problems. Computer vision, language understanding, and speech recognition are all examples of deep learning at play today.

Today we are excited to strengthen our commitment to supporting PyTorch as a first-class framework on Azure, with exciting new capabilities in our Azure Machine Learning public preview refresh. In addition, our PyTorch support extends deeply across many of our AI Platform services and tooling, which we will highlight below. During the past two years since PyTorch's first release in October 2016, we've witnessed the rapid and organic adoption of the deep learning framework among academia, industry, and the AI community at large. While PyTorch's Python-first integration and imperative style have long made the framework a hit among researchers, the latest PyTorch 1.0 release brings the production-level readiness and scalability needed to make it a true end-to-end deep learning platform, from prototyping to production. Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) service is a cloud-based service that enables data scientists to carry out end-to-end machine learning workflows, from data preparation and training to model management and deployment.

The timing worked superbly, like the best Swiss clockwork: A few days before winter made a comeback in Switzerland, I sat in a plane to Los Angeles. Nevermind that California also had slightly cooler temperatures than usual – it was definitely preferable over the polar cold air masses that firmly occupied Switzerland. Even the place names felt evocative: Santa Cruz, Big Sur, and San Francisco. For two weeks I would cruise California, before making my way back to L.A. and then Palm Springs in order to attend the 2018 Esri Partner Conference and Developer Summit together with my colleague, Nicole Sulzberger. In what follows, we describe what we learned during the two Esri events: the latest news about developments at Esri.

Figure 9: The summary page allows you to review and agree to the contract. Step 7: Wait while the system deploys -- you'll see a convenient notification when your system is ready.

Integrating geography and location information with AI brings a powerful new dimension to understanding the world around us. This has a wide range of applications in a variety of segments, including commercial, governmental, academic or not-for-profit. Geospatial AI provides robust tools for gathering, managing, analyzing and predicting from geographic and location-based data, and powerful visualization that can enable unique insights into the significance of such data. Available today, Microsoft and Esri will be offering the GeoAI Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) as part of our Data Science Virtual Machine/Deep Learning Virtual Machine family of products on Azure. This is a result of a collaboration between the two companies and will bring AI, cloud technology and infrastructure, geospatial analytics and visualization together to help create more powerful and intelligent applications.

Distributed Support Vector Machines (DSVM) have been developed to solve large-scale classification problems in networked systems with a large number of sensors and control units. However, the systems become more vulnerable as detection and defense are increasingly difficult and expensive. This work aims to develop secure and resilient DSVM algorithms under adversarial environments in which an attacker can manipulate the training data to achieve his objective. We establish a game-theoretic framework to capture the conflicting interests between an adversary and a set of distributed data processing units. The Nash equilibrium of the game allows predicting the outcome of learning algorithms in adversarial environments, and enhancing the resilience of the machine learning through dynamic distributed learning algorithms. We prove that the convergence of the distributed algorithm is guaranteed without assumptions on the training data or network topologies. Numerical experiments are conducted to corroborate the results. We show that network topology plays an important role in the security of DSVM. Networks with fewer nodes and higher average degrees are more secure. Moreover, a balanced network is found to be less vulnerable to attacks.

This is the first in a multi-part series by guest blogger Adrian Rosebrock. Adrian writes at PyImageSearch.com about computer vision and deep learning using Python, and he recently finished authoring a new book on deep learning for computer vision and image recognition. I had two goals when I set out to write my new book, Deep Learning for Computer Vision with Python. The first was to create a book/self-study program that was accessible to both novices and experienced researchers and practitioners -- we start off with the fundamentals of neural networks and machine learning and by the end of the program you're training state-of-the-art networks on the ImageNet dataset from scratch. Along the way I quickly realized that a stumbling block for many readers is configuring their development environment -- especially true for those wanted to utilize their GPU(s) and train deep neural networks on massive image datasets (such as ImageNet).

Microsoft's Cognitive Toolkit (better known as CNTK) is a commercial-grade and open-source framework for deep learning tasks. At present CNTK does not have a native R interface but can be accessed through Keras, a high-level API which wraps various deep learning backends including CNTK, TensorFlow, and Theano, for the convenience of modularizing deep neural network construction. The latest version of CNTK (2.1) supports Keras. The RStudio team has developed an R interface for Keras making it possible to run different deep learning backends, including CNTK, from within an R session. This tutorial illustrates how to simply and quickly spin up a Ubuntu-based Azure Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) and to configure a Keras and CNTK environment.