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Architecture Forum 2016 - Agenda

October 25, 2016

Currently finalising the Agenda for our 9th Architecture Forum, and will update the content here as it is confirmed. Actual running order may vary.

Build your intelligent apps using Microsoft Cognitive Services with Galiya Warrier (@galiyawarrier)

In future applications would be able to see and talk to their users, understand what they're feeling, and may even be able to use foreign languages to communicate. Hold on, that's not the future, it is already here today. Add some lines of code and see how artificial intelligence can be used to make your apps smarter, more interesting and fun.

Galiya Warrier is a Cloud Solution Architect for Microsoft.

Could Your Next Employee be a Bot? with Gary Short (@garyshort)

Bots are fast becoming the acceptable face of Artificial Intelligence. As such, it is very likely that by the end of the decade your enterprise will be deploying bots in a range of roles. In this session I’ll demonstrate the use of a bot in an HR scenario and then we’ll explore the architecture that made this magic happen.

Gary Short is a Data Solution Architect for Microsoft. He specialises in machine learning and “big data” on the Azure Platform, but has an interest in data science, in all forms, especially computational linguistics and social network analysis.

Go Jump in a Lake with Andrew Fryer (@deepfat)

Azure Data Lake is Microsoft approach to big data analytics at petabyte scale. Data Lake has been in use for some time inside Microsoft as the engine behind Bing and MSN, but has only recently been put into preview for public use. The best way to understand what it does is to see how it works in action and so that is what we’ll do rather than use too many slides. So if you’re interested in doing big data rather than spending time spinning up clusters, and managing them you might find this interesting.

**Andrew Fryer **works in the Developer Experience and Evangelism Group in Microsoft UK as a technical specialist focusing on data management, manageability and security.

Managing Innovation in Communications – Lessons from the Industrial Revolution, with Martin Woodward (@martinwoodward)

A VC funded start-up are set about to revolutionise communication between the financial centres of the world, but at the same time they have to pioneer new science, broker peace between two nations recently engaged in a bitter war, harness the power of the largest machine ever built. And do all this in a lean, agile way. Oh yeah – and this happened 150 years ago. Find out what lessons we can learn today from the beginning of the first communications revolution of the industrial age.

Martin Woodward (@martinwoodward) is the Executive Director of the .NET Foundation and a Principal Program Manager on the .NET team. Before that Martin looked after the Linux and Mac tooling for Visual Studio Team Services and helped introduce Git into Microsoft.

Reimagining code quality with Visual Studio with Giles Davies (@VisualStudioUK)

The Visual Studio IDE has introduced or updated several capabilities to help you improve the quality of your code. This session will introduce Visual Studio 2017 and look at a mixture of existing and new features including:

• Generating unit tests with IntelliTest
• Live unit test
• Live code analysis
• Improved architectural validation


Giles Davies (@VisualStudioUK) works in the Developer Experience and Evangelism Group in Microsoft UK. His key interest is in the full Application Lifecycle Management and DevOps tooling using Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server. Giles started his development career with Microsoft technologies in the days of client/server applications before becoming an early adopter for Java, working with CORBA and subsequently J2EE. Having worked in the Java space for a number of organisations Giles joined Microsoft in 2008. Giles has had various roles including that of developer, technical lead, software architect, consultant and project manager. He has used a range of development processes including formal methods, Rational Unified Process and Scrum and is a regular speaker at both Microsoft and independent events.

Don’t forget we have changed the venue - now at the Crowne Plaza in Leeds!