Keynote and Cognitive session at AI Bootcamp

Microsoft has organized the Artificial Intelligence boot camp to help folks jump start and get acquainted with their offerings on Microsoft technologies especially on cognitive services.  I was privileged to take the keynote session and then 2 hr long cognitive deep dive session  on Microsoft technologies.  In spite of heavy rainfall in gurgaon, we got a good 

audiences around 60+ to attend the event. Event start at around 10 AM with my keynote. It was very nice to see some of the common faces who came to attend the session from various places. Quiet a no. of college and engineering folks attended the session. I personally felt that it's so fortunate for these kids to get knowledge and understanding of Artificial intelligence during their college days. It would certainly boost up their future aspiration.  Certainly all most all companies would and are seeking people having AI and ML experience. I'm sure attending such session would definitely help them to jump start their career in field of Artificial Intelligence. Thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the event.

Digitilization of Agriculture Conference

Privileged to provide my thoughts on IOT and Artificial Intelligence in "Digitilization of Agriculture" at India Habitat center, New Delhi in front of eminent dignitaries of Agriculture. Keeping in mind the immense potential in digitalization of agriculture in India and the need to engage all stakeholders to discuss the opportunities and challenges, Conference invites ministers, policy makers, IT solution providers, agribusiness companies, academicians & researchers, entrepreneurs and progressive farmers to participate in the conference. Conference is to

·  Promote IT in Agriculture to enhance farmers’ income

·  Encourage technology enabled partnership among various stakeholders for benefiting farming communities

·  Project government policies and initiatives to popularize IT in agriculture

·  Showcase latest  Digital Technology Platform and Success Stories

This event provide a platform for companies to showcase their technologies, innovations and discuss over strengthening Information and Communication Technologies(ICTs) in agriculture and data ecosystems to support the development and delivery of timely, targeted (localized) information and services to make farming profitable and sustainable socially, economically and environmentally. The event highlights innovative solutions developed by start-ups and companies for development of agriculture and food sectors.

I had a great time speaking about usage of Internet of Things(IOT) and Artificial Intelligence. Agriculture has its deep roots from the inception of human to its present day. Since the early age of humanity till date, agriculture has become the oldest and most vibrant area focusing on food supply. Technologies exist right now to help farmers take informed decision. Need of an hour is to educate farmers and avail these technologies at low cost, scale up high so we can roll it out to larger masses. I have also written an article about Life in Agri business with emerging technologies. In coming post, I would be sharing it soon

Launch event for "Artificial Intelligence for .NET"

One of best thing post your all 10 months of dedicated effort, swamped weekends of research, sleepless nights to come up with book is it's launch. 

Over the years, I have been celebrating the launch of my book with my family and friends in a closed stuff. This time our launch is been in the presence of global leadership of Accenture. Paul Daugherty, CTO of Accenture, Marc Carrel-Billiard (Our labs global lead), Sanjay Podder (our India Labs head) and Adam (our Global Lead for Advanced Technology & Architecture) have been generous enough to provide their presence for the launch. Our Labs marketing team did a fantastic job in creating some great book samples for showcasing as shown in the attached pic. All in all, the celebrations in itself was grand enough. Paul, Sanjay, Adam and Marc really loved and appreciated the book. Each of them expected to read this book and as i promised them , I am working to send my signed copy of the book to each of them.  I certainly want to thank our Labs head Sanjay Podder for working with Marketing team to give such a pleasant suprise to me and Anurag on the eve of the launch.

Artificial Intelligence for .NET Book Launch

Over the last few months, I have been busy on authoring book. Unsurprisingly, it comes from one of my favorite topic "Artificial Intelligence". Book title is "Artificial Intelligence for .NET" and is now available on global online store like Amazon at here This book will introduce you to the world of artificial intelligence by providing genuine insights on AI concepts like Speech , Language and Search. The book also provides extensive examples to make it easier to put the new concepts into practice. Artificial Intelligence for .NET: Speech, Language, and Search will show you how to start building amazing capabilities into your applications today. Anurag Bhandari, who is been working with me since couple of years in Accenture has also worked as a contributing author in this book. I am sure you would love to read it. In next few coming blogs i would speak more about this book.

Drishti - Our Artificial-Intelligence-Powered-Solution-Improve-Visually

It was a great honor to see solution architected by my team getting released across the globe in almost all the newspaper. Drishti which means “Vision” in Sanskrit was developed as part of our Tech4Good initiative. I got the pleasure to architect, design and develop this Artificial intelligence system. Watch the video here to get more insights. You can get a chance to get a glimpse of me in the video as well at couple of places too. 

Drishti powered solution to help the visually impaired improve the way they experience the world around them and enhance their productivity in the workplace. Lot of people have reached out to us asking how it is better than other competitors in market.  Being in consulting company like Accenture gives you opportunity to collaborate with any of the companies rather than sticking with one. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we focused on exactly the missing pieces and uses some of the best in industry as well.

Drishti is been designed by taking some of the industry best breed of technologies combined together with Accenture IPs to produce very useful insight. If you haven’t get a chance to look on more detail, have a look on release like here and here. It was initially piloted with National Association of Blind. As you see in the release, we are currently focusing on releasing and testing it with various geographies within Accenture. We have been focusing on it and making it more user intuitive by adding various features. It was so soothing to use Artificial intelligence and other latest technologies to resolve social problem like blind. One of my best days in Accenture is still the day when we started pilot with NAB. It was so soothing to see all blind people in NAB pleased with using Drishti.  There is no doubt that technologies like AI is been disrupting the entire market with varied angles but one of those angles has been to improve the way people live and work. Drishti at some extent attempts to bring more equality and joy to the all people and certainly provides ability beyond disability with bringing How Visually Impaired People Live and Work

Disability Asia Conference - Met Two huge source of Inspiration

Last week , I went to Disability Asia conference to showcase our AI solutions. In this article, I am not going to talk about any AI technologies but talk about 2 huge source of inspirations that I met during the Disability Asia conference. Disability Asia conference is been conducted on 27-28th of July. This conference has been run by SpringBoard consulting in collaboration with Accenture. I was fortunate to showcase some of our AI based solution including Drishti to the audience. Audience loved our AI based solution. During showcase and meeting with various like-minded people, I came across two huge source of inspiration.

Deepa Malik

It was exciting to meet like-minded people in the conference. During the conference, I also heard the story of Nation icon Deepa malik. She is the first Indian woman to win a medal in Paralympic Games. She is Padma shri and Arjun Award winner. Huge source of inspiration. After meeting Deepa, All I can say is Adversity causes some to break, and some to break records.

Indian Blind Cricket Team

Got a chance to meet some of the players of Indian Blind cricket team. This team has won 2 T-20 World cups, 1 40 over world cup and Asia cup as well. This team unfortunately is not been funded by BCCI but by Cricket Association for the Blind in India (CABI).

This team has brought so much accolades but they are not been supported advertised by any of the companies. Team was very cheerful and passionate about cricket. Being Passionate of cricket since my childhood days, I got to chance to understand little more about blind cricket with them on various levels like B1, B2 and B3 which are various categories of blindness. 

Both Deepa and Indian blind cricket team are a huge source of inspiration. I salute their passion and commitment for excelling in life.

My Session at M-enabling Summit

I went ahead and provided my thoughts on m-enabling summit at here

Accenture AI accessibility solution

Over the years, I have been involved in architecting, designing and developing application related to AI and Machine Learning. Very recently, I got a chance to create an Accenture AI accessibility solution as part of our Tech4good initiative. This application has not getting popular but cause it's based on human centric design and is for social cause, application is very close to my heart. A video glimpse of what that solution is all about can be seen at  the link above. You can also see me in playing some of the roles in the video.

Hour of Code session

Computer science opens more doors for students than any other discipline in today’s world. Learning even the basics will help students in virtually any career—from architecture to zoology. All top IT Company’s are passionate about technology and committed to help students to learn and love coding.   Dec 5-11^th week is a week where Accenture offer our support for Hour of Code events. Hour of Code is a grassroots movement to empower every student in every school worldwide to learn to code. Through this volunteer-based program, students from around the world have learned an Hour of Code, a free, one-hour introductory course designed to demystify computer science and show that anybody can learn the basics. #hourofCode

Rather than taking computer session in Tier 1 and 2 cities, I went to my hometown, kotdwara.  Schools from Kotdwara very much appreciated it .. Net result was 15+ school participated with 400 Students for an hour of code. I was accompanied by my team member Anurag Bhandari as well. Couple of photos are below

 

 We have taught basics of web programming. At the end of the sessions, all the students were awarded hour of code certification. It was indeed a very soothing session. This news was also covered in some of the national newspapers.. Some of them are below

  

 

Top 15 AI companies

I have been working on lot of other areas professionally and personally and have not been able to blog it.. I was planning to start looking on giving more attention to the  blog but somehow i have missed. Today, after a gap of more than 4 years, I am starting it again..   

With so much enormous amount of data being generated every minute and having data storage cost being so less, AI is able to overcome his winter era.  I personally feel summer of AI have just started. World have just seen the glimpse of what disruption AI can bring..  I personally feel AI would be at his peak in and around 2020 where the usage of world "Guess" would be replace by actual facts and predictions coming from the Predictive Analytics. In this blog , I would try to make AI understanding simpler for the folks.  

Every companies have been speaking and discussing about disruption Artificial Intelligence(AI) is been making. More disruption feel is coming from Startups and now in last couple of years we see startups getting acquired by AI giants. Yesterday only i read about company API.AI being acquired by google.  Certainly this is an exciting era to be at..   I just came across list of top 15 companies who are really doing(rather than talking) about AI .. See here

Pro WCF 4 - My latest book published

What does this book contain


The release of .NET 4.0 brought a wide range of new functionality to WCF. Developers and Architects with experience using WCF 3.5 or earlier who want to be able to apply this new functionality to their application will benefit greatly from the discussions and code samples in this book. This book is also a great resource for application developers and architects new to SOA or just new to the core concepts of WCF.

For more info, you can visit on APress site with (http://apress.com/book/view/9781430233688) , or books selling sites like Amazon at (http://www.amazon.com/Pro-WCF-Practical-Microsoft-Implementation/dp/1430233680)

Silverlight 5 Announced

Last week, I blogged and mentioned about very nice article of Brad Becker talking about future of Silverlight. The article was talking about what Silverlight will be doing in future. The article can be downloaded by clicking Here. Today, Scott Guthrie announced Silverlight 5 in Silverlight firestarter event. All the information mentioned in Brad's article is been mentioned as a part of Silverlight 5. More information is mentioned in Scott's blog by clicking here. The features of Silverlight 5 are really impressive.

Contest for Sharepoint Journey

Sharepoint can be used for variety of reasons..  Be it for a workflow, collaboration,  DMS or now even for social media integration.  Microsoft team would like to know how you  or your organization got started with Sharepoint and how Sharepoint applications helps in driving business values.  In order to achieve this, Microsoft team has set up a contest to submit a video that talks about it. If you are intrested, click Here to know more about it.