Developers Conference 2017 - Introduction to Data Science

The third edition of the developers conference of Mauritius was held between the 30th of March and 1st of April 2017. The conference ran on 3 days with 3 tracks in parallel and had about 330+ attendees and 50+ speakers.

Data Science is definitely one of my favorite topics these days. I’ts amazing how data can be crafted and transformed to help us make better decisions by using predictive analytics. This year, I really wanted to deliver a level 300/400 session about Machine Learning. But, to do so, I needed to make a good introduction to the subject first. Therefore, with the help of Arwin, my friend from the MSP community, we worked together for 2 weeks to prepare a session about the introduction to Data Science.

Arwin was a bit tensed since it was his first time to the summit. However, after some coffee and preparation, he managed to complete his part of the session brilliantly!

Arwin getting ready for his session while being criticized by some crazy attendee

Arwin started the presentation by describing the Data Science process before explaining to the major types of algorithms that can be used for Machine Learning. I then took over the session to explain the basics of Azure Machine Learning and made a demo of how to create and deploy a basic Azure Machine Learning Model.

There were about 40+ attendees and we were more than happy to answer the questions that came up during the session which made it very interactive. The questions were mostly related to the algorithms available in the Azure ML Studio and the overall cost of creating and deploying an experiment.

To answer the questions I opened the Azure Machine Learning Cheat Sheet which shows all the algorithms, in what scenarios to use each of the and what the the pros/cons of each algorithm.