<p><div><div><div><div data-show-faces="false" data-height="21" data-width="100" data-layout="button_count" data-send="true" data-href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/highlights-from-the-connect-conference/"></div></div><div></div></div><div></div></div>
<div>
(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/connect-highlights.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<div>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/connectevent" target="_blank">Connect();</a>, the annual Microsoft developer conference, is wrapping up now in New York. The conference was the venue for a number of <a rel="nofollow" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/connect-2017-gettopannouncementslist-cloud-data-ai/" target="_blank">major announcements</a> and talks. Here are some highlights related to data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>There have been several <a rel="nofollow" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/expanding-ai-tools-and-resources-for-developers-and-data-scientists-on-azure/" target="_blank">updates to Azure Machine Learning</a>, including the ability to deploy models to the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/machinelearning/2017/11/15/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-on-the-cutting-edge/" target="_blank">Azure IoT Edge</a> using Docker containers for intelligent Internet-of-Things applications. </p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Microsoft has joined the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://mariadb.org/microsoft-joins-mariadb-foundation/" target="_blank">MariaDB Foundation</a>, and now offers <a rel="nofollow" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/mariadb-postgresql-and-mysql-more-choices-on-microsoft-azure/" target="_blank">fully-managed MariaDB</a> databases in Azure. (MySQL and MariaDB creator Monty Widenius <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdkkC9ozDss" target="_blank">made the announcement from Finland</a>.) You can access MariaDB databases on Azure as you would any other instance, including via the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://mran.microsoft.com/package/RMariaDB" target="_blank">RMariaDB package for R</a>.</p>
</li>
<li><a rel="nofollow" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/a-technical-overview-of-azure-databricks/" target="_blank">Databricks Spark clusters are now available in Azure</a> as a fully-managed services. You can connect to these instances using standard Spark APIs, for example the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://mran.microsoft.com/package/sparklyr" target="_blank">sparklyr package for R</a>. </li>
<li>
<p>New capabilities for Azure Cosmos DB: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/dear-cassandra-developers-welcome-to-azure-cosmosdb/" target="_blank">Apache Cassandra API</a>; <a rel="nofollow" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/pre-announcing-the-general-availability-of-azure-cosmosdb-gremlin-graph-api/" target="_blank">Gremlin API support</a> for querying graph databases (preview), and enhanced <a rel="nofollow" href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cosmosdb-microsoft-connect-2017/" target="_blank">MongoDB and Spark connectivity</a>.</p>
</li>
<li><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/ai-tools-vs/" target="_blank">Visual Studio Tools for AI</a> is now available (in preview), making it easy to deploy models from deep learning frameworks (including CNTK, Tensorflow and Caffe) to Azure. This <a rel="nofollow" href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Connect/2017/T234" target="_blank">video</a> from Connect() demonstrates how it works.</li>
</ul>
<p>Lastly, I wanted to share this video presented at the conference from Stack Overflow. Keep an eye out for R community luminary David Robinson programming in R!</p>
<p><iframe width="450" allowfullscreen="" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dbF1EBMSajk" height="282"></iframe></p>
<p>You can find more from the Connect conference, including on-demand replays of the talks and keynotes, at the link below.</p>
<p>Microsoft: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/connectevent" target="_blank">Connect(); November 15-17, 2017</a></p>
</div>
	<p>
<div>
<div>To <strong>leave a comment</strong> for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/11/connect-highlights.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>.</div>
<hr>
<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers.com</a> offers <strong><a rel="nofollow" href="https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=RBloggers">daily e-mail updates</a></strong> about <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-project.org/" title="The R Project for Statistical Computing">R</a> news and <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/tutorial" title="R tutorials">tutorials</a> on topics such as: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/data%20science" title="Data science">Data science</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/Big%20Data" title="Big Data">Big Data, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-users.com/" title="R jobs">R jobs</a>, visualization (<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/ggplot2" title="ggplot and ggplot2 tutorials">ggplot2</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/boxplot" title="Boxplots using lattice and ggplot2 tutorials">Boxplots</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/map" title="Maps and gis">maps</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/animation" title="Animation in R">animation</a>), programming (<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/RStudio" title="RStudio IDE for R">RStudio</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/sweave" title="Sweave and literate programming">Sweave</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/LaTeX" title="LaTeX in R">LaTeX</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/SQL" title="SQL and databases">SQL</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/eclipse" title="Eclipse IDE for R">Eclipse</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/git" title="git and github, Version Control System">git</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/hadoop" title="Large data in R using Hadoop">hadoop</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/Web+Scraping" title="Web Scraping of google, facebook, yahoo, twitter and more using R">Web Scraping</a>) statistics (<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/regression" title="Regressions and ANOVA analysis tutorials">regression</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/PCA" title="principal component analysis tutorial">PCA</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/time+series" title="Time series">time series</a>, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/search/trading" title="finance trading">trading</a>) and more...
<img width="1" alt="" src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/RBloggers/~4/jlZ4QOU-4ss" height="1"></a></div>