Leeds Digital Festival: AI in the Clouds

We're Research Software Engineers in the Research Computing Group at the University of Leeds.

Our job is to work with our research colleagues to help them get the most out of our computational platforms (Cloud and High Performance Computing) and to help them develop new skills and techniques to help answer their research questions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a really important topic in research at the moment. Many people think that it's really difficult and you need to be a mathematical expert just to get started.

In our session, we going to show you that this doesn't need to be the case.

The public Cloud providers (such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure) provide some really straightforward tools that you can use to incorporate AI and particularly cognition into your projects.

In this 3 hour hands-on session, you'll learn how to access some of the cognitive services in the Microsoft Azure cloud and we'll build a tool that can recognise faces and emotions in a crowd.

Prerequisites: You don't need to know anything about AI or Deep Learning but you do need to be able to program at a basic to intermediate level in Python (if you know what a function is and you've heard of an API then you're good to go).

We'll supply the computers but if you want to bring your own laptop to work on then that's good too.

Everything we do will be in the Cloud so there's no need to install anything special.

Start time: 11.00am Finish time: 2.30pm

This event will take place on the University of Leeds campus.  We'll send full directions nearer the time.