Facebook was having some pretty interesting AI developments with their FAIR team this week. As it turns out, we have our own little headline in the AI field here in Mauritius, albeit not as big as one potentially turning to the dark side. This month, one of our very own Microsoft Azure MVPs – Chervine Bhiwoo – took up the task to plan the monthly meetup. We had a nice audience of around 50 people which is always a very welcome crowd.

In our past events, AI and Data Science were common discussion topics. While networking in-between sessions, one would often talk about the possibilities and innovations in the field. The hype was there, but we never really had a proper event dedicated to the subject – till last Saturday. It’s just a small step for Mauritian developers, but it was about time. We’re looking forward to follow-ups.

Meetup Breakdown

1. Introduction to Cognitive Services
2. Cognitive Services with Xamarin
3. Building your First Intelligent Bot
4. Azure Bot Service

Introduction to Cognitive Services

Presented by Vidush H. Namah.

What if your computer was your friend?

This was, as the name implies, an introductory session with no coding. The idea was to show off Microsoft’s Cognitive APIs and their capabilities. More importantly, the session was focused on outlining the new horizons now open to developers in the Cognitive Intelligence field, regardless of their level of knowledge in Data Science. With APIs like Microsoft Cognitive Services out there, the power of Machine Learning and Intelligence is just within our reach. The only limit is our imagination!

Cognitive Services with Xamarin

Presented by Arwin Neil Baichoo

Your face is your authentication.

Neil’s session showcased the application of the Face API - one of the Cognitive Services. The session dove into Uber’s success story using the Face API to authenticate drivers and how it provides a competitive advantage and an innovative touch to the service. The best moment of this session was the demo where Neil showed off a Xamarin application that cross matches a user’s Twitter profile picture with a selfie taken on the spot. The application determines whether it’s a match or not. Shout out to our audience volunteer - Akasha.

Building your first Inteligent Bot

Presented by Chervine Bhiwoo

You won’t even realize it’s a Bot!

This session steered in a different direction – the world of messaging. Chervine dove into the growing impact of chat applications compared to social media, and how AI fits into the picture in the form of intelligent Bots. As it turns out, developing a bot can be relatively easy, but creating one that understands languages and can provide context-based responses can be a challenge – unless one is using Microsoft’s Language Understanding Intelligent Service, or LUIS. The presentation was followed by an in-depth demo covering the basics of configuring a bot from scratch to integrating LUIS and the Bing API (also from Microsoft’s Cognitive Services) to achieve some form of intelligence.

Microsoft Azure Bot Service

Presented by Adrien Rose

Adrien’s presentation built on the foundations laid by Chervine’s demo of the Bot Framework. The session explored one of the industry’s first Chatbot-as-a-Service platforms - Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service. With a more hands-on approach, the demo consisted of creating and deploying a Weather Bot – capable of providing weather reports for specific locations on request. As for the codes, they were deployed from GitHub directly via Continuous Integration. Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service is indeed impressive, but there is much room for improvement before it can truly become an asset to the industry. To be fair, it is still in PREVIEW - implying development is still ongoing.

Wrapping Up

With that, the sessions ended officially and the crowd broke into groups for the usual chitchat – everyone sharing their views and thoughts (and deciding on the best place for lunch). After this meetup, we all look forward to the next iteration on AI and Analytics developer events in Mauritius. We hope to hear about some user stories from the audience, relating how they achieved intelligence in their projects.

Well, that’s it for my report of the day 😉