Steve Belcher and John Pelak from Microsoft

We're excited to have Steve Belcher and John Pelak from Microsoft give our June talk.

Steve Belcher Biography:

Steve has worked in IT, data mining and marketing automation software for over 27 years, with roles in Sales, Service, Marketing, Training, Programming and Product Management. He has helped a number of software providers to grow their business, including Unica, Infor (Epiphany), Portrait Software, Aprimo, KXEN, Revolution Analytics and Microsoft. He has taught at several colleges in both graduate and undergraduate programs, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the application of neural networks in financial forecasting. He has also been a featured speaker at a number of industry conferences.

John Pelak / Principal Program Manager / Azure ML Studio Team

John has over 25 years of industry experience developing applications for Windows, iOS, and the web. Before joining the Azure ML Studio team, John directed a team of engineers focused on building apps for phones, tablets, wearable devices, desktops, and wallboard displays, using native and hybrid technologies to reach multiple platforms with maximal code reuse. John holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and has recently completed a specialization in Data Science.

Abstract --

Advanced Analytics with R Server and Azure Machine LearningData is the currency of the modern business. From the cloud to on-premises and everything in-between, access to data anytime, anywhere from varied sources has become a requirement to be able to successfully operate and grow. With R, you can now go beyond reacting to data after the fact; you can begin gathering proactive insights and predicting results to help you plan ahead.

This is an exciting opportunity for Developers, Data Scientists and those new to analytics that need to deploy Big Data analytic solutions in production to learn about Microsoft R Server.

Azure Machine learning is a fully managed cloud platform for creating and publishing predictive analytics solutions. In this session, John will give an overview of the Azure ML platform and demonstrate various points of R integration including:

• Executing custom R Script

• Loading pre-trained R Models

• Working with data in the Jupyter notebook

• Calling published web services from R code