The Microsoft Machine Learning & Data Sciences Conference was the place to discover how machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies are helping build an intelligent world.

Let me take you readers to the atmosphere that we had at #IndiaMLMeet. Coming to a little background, Microsoft announced the conference and opened registration. We came to know about this from our CEO Amit. As we know that machine learning is gonna be a cardinal part of future, we were too eager to register. After couple of days, selected candidates got awesome welcome letter. And yeah, Rest was waiting till 08th of August 2016, for the event to kick off.

Day 1 Keynote and Kicking off Hackathon

We left to the ITC Gardenia- one of the finest hotel in bangalore - early morning. Booked an UBER Taxi.Waited for half an hour, often its hard to get UBER in morning. We gave up and took an auto-rikshaw.

Upon reaching ITC, we passed the main gate, and stepped forward. The reception was excellent, and registration was well organized. There were several registration desk. We were suppose to get in touch with the one which has starting alphabet of your company. We were from Techjini thus we went to registration desk T - Z .

Upon registration Microsoft provided basic booklet, pen, food coupon, etc… just saying, the quality of everything was impressive. And we headed towards the top floor, called Botania. Breakfast was served there.

Keynote

Keynote began exactly at 9:00 AM IST by addressing, why we need Machine Learning. India is a country of farmers. The recent changes in climate is affecting the yield of crops. Our farmers and ancestors know the time of farming, based on the season. And now with sharp curves on climatic characteristics the optimum environment required for good yield isn’t the time based on season. Thus an algorithm written to solve a situation like this, can predict what is the right time for seeding. What is the best time for harvesting. And with IoT integration to this, it can even predict at what ratio water and fertilizers should be provided to the crop. The interesting thing is it’s already started in Andra Pradesh(India).

Keynote

We got another delegate from Rolls-Royce. He was demonstrating how RR uses machine learning to predict the aircraft engine failure based on number of parameters read from the engine across time to time. Coming to the medical field, machine learning can be used to predict the chances of health risk by going through history of medical examination data of the patient.

Thus Machine Learning can impact our future. We may be able to do farming which may give maximum yield irrespective of climatic changes. We may have new treatment methods for immunodeficiency and cancer. And self driving vehicles, intelligent traffic management system, Smart natural calamity warning systems ,etc…

I think that is me

Hackathon

Around noon we started with our Hackathon. We were a team of 5, trying to built a platform that could detect, if a teenager needs attention. I know it seems crazy when hearing it for first time. To brief, we were trying to build a platform which will process photos of a person across a week[arbitrary time] and says, is there is any possibility that this guy need attention/help to overcome from emotional Challenges. We are living in a time where parents and teachers couldn’t pay enough attention to there kids/students. These minor neglecting may create irreversible changes in our life, that could be avoided with a very little time of our life. This was our attempt to address this issue with the aid of machine learning.

Our team was so confident about the project. Each of us got going with each corner of the project. We were trying to make use of Microsoft emotion API’s, which will gives us details of emotions of a face. And that data will be fed to our algorithm. The algorithm will predict an attention Index, If the attention index is above 50, that person needs attention, and if it is above 80 then there is definitely something serious going around. The algorithm will learn from each verified results.

24 Hours went like a blizz. Coffee and code, code and coffee. Finally our prototype was ready. We presented it, but we couldn’t get into top ten. Nevertheless the media person from Microsoft called our team for an interview. Even though we couldn’t make it to the top, we learned so much things from Hackathon, that we may never learn inside the boundaries of our cubicle

Day 2 Networking and Closing

Was honored to be a part of such ab event. We got chance to meet Machine Learning exerts from different domains. At the end of the day not only we got Machine Learning exposure, but also a good network of friends. Thank you Microsoft and Techjini

Bye Bye