Southampton Data Platform and Cloud Meeting - 1st May 2019

Welcome to Southampton Data Platform and Cloud Group, this event is hosted at the Axis Conference Centre at 2 Venture Road, Southampton Science Park near Chilworth. When entering the Science Park, turn off the A27 onto University Parkway. Not Manor Road.

Please be aware that in order to attend we need you to register in advance as there is limited space and we need to know how many people to order pizza for, thanks :-)

Agenda

18:15 - Doors Open

18:30 - Introductions

18:45 - Christina Leo - Introducing Microsoft Cognitive Services

The drive to build systems that can increasingly hear, see, speak, understand, and even begin to reason is real, and with Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs, adding this functionality is easier than ever. In this session, we’ll look at the different options within the cognitive services suite, we’ll show you how to connect to the APIs using Python code, and we’ll build and train a custom speech to text translation model.

19:45 - Break and Pizza

20:15 - Paul Andrew - ETL in Azure made easy with Data Factory Data Flow

What happens when you combine a cloud orchestration service with a Spark cluster?! The answer is a feature rich, graphical, scalable data flow environment to rival any ETL tech we’ve previously had available in Azure. In this session we’ll look at Azure Data Factory v2 and how it integrates with Azure Data Bricks to produce a powerful abstraction over the Apache Spark analytics ecosystem. Now we can transform data in Azure using Data Bricks but without the need to write a single line of Scala or Python! If you haven’t used either service yet, don’t worry, you’ll get a quick introduction to both before we go deeper into the new ADF Data Flow feature.

21:15 - Prize Draw & Close

Sponsors

A massive thanks to our Spectrum IT. Without them we would not be able to host this event for free. SpectrumIT kindly provide funding for the room, pizza and a £20 Amazon Voucher.

Speakers

Paul is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP with 10+ years’ experience working with the complete on premises SQL Server stack in a variety of roles and industries. Now as Data Analytics Consultant has turned his keyboard to big data solutions on the Microsoft cloud platform. Specialising in Data Factory, Data Bricks, Data Lake and Stream Analytics. Paul is also a STEM Ambassador for the networking education in schools’ programme, PASS chapter leader, a member of the SQL Relay committee, SQL Bits, SQL Saturday, SQL Day, SQLGLA, PASS Summit speaker and helper. Currently the Stack Overflow top user for Azure Data Factory. As well as very active member of the technical community.

Christina is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft specialising in the Data and AI Platform. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2016, she worked as an independent consultant focusing on T-SQL and BI development, as well as database performance tuning in the finance and investment banking sector. When she isn't sharing her 18 years of technical experience with the data community, you can find her racing around the Solent on a 40' sailboat or often in the Thames on a little Laser