Data Camp 2017 The Singapore SQL Server User Group Team is happy to announce “Data Camp 2017”, a one day free event on SQL Server and Microsoft Data Platform technologies to be held on 11th March 2017. The event will feature top quality technical content delivered by Data platform experts in this region. A total of 15 topics to be deliver by speakers in this one full day event which include Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, Microsoft Professionals and overseas speakers! ...
The Microsoft Bot Framework provides a unified platform where a developer can deploy code once but reach multiple platforms such as Skype, Facebook Messenger or Telegram at the click of a button. The following example is built using the Microsoft Bot Framework, Language Understanding Intelligent Service, Microsoft Translator API and myTransport.SG API. This is an open source project & step-by-step installation guide to deploy a simple Bus Timing Bot. It is coded in Node.js but you can also use C# to build a bot. Please feel free to fork it for your own purposes. ...
Gain valuable cloud skills at the Microsoft Tech Summit and take your career to the next level Every day the Microsoft Cloud helps developers and IT professionals like you stay competitive in today’s digital transformation landscape. To help build your cloud and infrastructure skills, we’re hitting the road with our top engineers visiting cities around the world to deliver two days of free technical training. This year, there will be a Microsoft Tech Summit near you in Singapore on March 13-14, 2017 at the Marina Bay Sands. To keep up with the evolution of technologies, tools, and techniques that make up the Microsoft Cloud, the event offers a great opportunity to: ...
Dear Institutions, A sincere thank you to all who have submitted their proposals for the Imagine Cup 2017. You have successfully completed your first milestone! The submissions were incredible, and narrowing the field was next to impossible for our judges. But after much discussion and deliberation, we’ve now selected the 16 Semifinalists who’ll advance to the next round. Without further ado, here are the 16 Semifinalists! (in no particular order) Congratulations to those moving on and thanks again to everyone who threw their hat in the ring. You knocked our socks off! Next steps for Semifinalists. An email with the details will be sent to you on the Semifinals. Do keep a look out for it in your mailbox. Do follow us on Spiffy.sg | Spiffy Facebook, or check the Imagine Cup 2017 website news page for updates. Thanks Lilian Quek together with team – Chun Siong Tan | Kyzer Wong
Once a year, Microsoft’s top engineers hit the road to share their ideas about the latest cloud trends and technologies. On March 13-14, they’re coming to Singapore. We invite you to join us at this free, two-day technical summit. This Microsoft Tech Summit is geared towards IT professionals and developers. It features more than 50 technical sessions on a range of topics—from productivity and security to containers, big data, and more. ...
Azurenaut Weekend @ NUS Hackathon Day 1: Date & Time: Friday, January 13, 2017 (18:00 – 22:00) Venue: The Hangar, 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore 119613 Day 2: Date & Time: Saturday, January 14, 2017 (08:00 – 19:00) Venue: Microsoft Singapore, Level 21, Auditorium, One Marina Boulevard, Singapore 018989 Register Now! Registration & Swags are on a first come first serve basis Be one of the first few Azurenauts from NUS & Join us for a fun-filled 2-day hackathon on Microsoft Azure. Form a team of up to two other friends for this hackathon. There will be workshops to help you get started with Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Microsoft Bot Framework as well as Microsoft Blockchain as a Service (BaaS). Also, there will be AWESOME FOOD, SWAGS (worth over $100) and of course, PRIZES (worth over $1700) to be won! Eligibility Criteria: Student at a tertiary institution as at 13th January 2017 Recommended age of 18 and above Proof of identity (Institution Matriculation Card) will be checked on the 14th of January *Terms & conditions apply! ...
Pitch your tech to the world’s #1 consumer goods company to disrupt a $4 Billion USD business! Fabric Care P&G pitch contest This is an open innovation competition to develop and pitch your tech to P&G wherein participants have a wonderful opportunity to secure SGD20,000 funds from P&G, partnership opportunity and other prizes. Entire global tech community including external community like developers, innovators and creators are invited to develop technology based solutions transforming laundry experience solving key consumer issues enabling consumers and their fabrics with focus on China and Japan markets. Visit http://pngchallenge.thehub.sg/ for more details and to register/participate
23 September 2016 Last Friday, the second session of ACE Microsoft Tech Talks took place at ACE Ideation Centre, Block 79. In this session, I discussed about the latest trending technology in the IT industry, which is Chat Bots. I gave the audience an overview of Chat Bot technologies from Microsoft by using Bot Framework and LUIS. The Bot Framework allows for developers to build a single web service and connect it to the various communication channel such like Skype, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and more. The engine behind which understands natural language is LUIS which allows for developers to build a language model of their own allowing it to understand intents and entities of a user by analyzing the text message sent by the user. Towards the end of the talk, a few chatbots demo were shown and one of them is a Changi Airport Chatbot that i have built. This is closely related to the customer service industry as chatbots could replace mundane tasks of a customer service officer and employers could assign them a much more important or critical task. A link to my Changi Airport chatbot code could be found below. If you would like to read up more on Bot Framework and LUIS. Here are a few useful links**:** For Bot Framework- dev.botframework.com For LUIS- luis.ai For Sample code on the integration of Bot Framework with LUIS- github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder/ For LUIS Documentation- https://www.luis.ai/Help For BotFramework Documentation-https://docs.botframework.com/en-us/csharp/builder/sdkreference/ For Changi Airport Code Repository- https://github.com/izzkhair/SampleChangiAirportBot Here are a few photos taken during the talk: [caption id=“attachment_22318” align=“alignnone” width=“3840”] Explaining the industrial use cases of Chatbots.[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_22322” align=“alignnone” width=“3840”] Giving a demo on the various Chatbots that I have built.[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_22320” align=“alignnone” width=“3840”] The audience that attended my talk[/caption]
5 reasons why everyone should learn to code 12 September is not just the 256th day of the year – it is also International Programmer’s Day, a time for us to celebrate the architects behind our increasingly digital world. In case you’re wondering- the number 256 symbolizes the number of distinct values that can be represented with an eight-bit byte. Today, we take for granted how simple it is to stay in touch with our loved ones, shop online, or even read this article on our mobile devices. We rarely pause to consider that all these conveniences and benefits of technology are actually only possible through the work of coders and programmers. Coding is something that everyone should try – here’s why: 1. Digital capabilities and economic growth go together: According to a recent study by Accenture, more than a fifth (22%) of global GDP today can be attributed to some form of digital skills, capital, goods or services. Digital tech could power $2 trillion of the global economic output by 2020 clearly demonstrating its role in igniting overall economic growth. For this reason, there are plans to formally introduce computing and computer science education into national curricula in several Asian countries like Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. ...
[caption id=“attachment_22162” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] MenuSnap Team - Ong Zhi Yong (left) & Abel Lim (right)[/caption] Hello! Can you guys tell us more about yourself? We are friends and both studying Computer Science in NUS School of Computing. We developed this Android application for the NUS Orbital Summer Project. One common thing about us is that we both wanted to develop a useful application with real world use and that is why we formed a team together. Which 3 words would describe the team best? Synergistic, curious, efficient How did you come up with the idea? And what problem is your application trying to solve? It started as we were brainstorming for an idea for our summer project. At that time, we had many different ideas and we thought of using computer vision APIs for interesting applications. One idea we thought of was using OCR to understand food menus. We realised that whenever we travel overseas or when we try to order food from a foreign restaurant in Singapore, it was always difficult to figure out what exactly we were ordering, especially when there is no picture of it on the menu. We figured that using OCR would be an interesting idea because it is fast and accurate for food menus that are usually well-printed. It would make it much more convenient for looking up our food menu items and encourage people to find out more about what they are ordering. On top of that, we decided to add in translation and image search features which gave us the initial concept of MenuSnap. MenuSnap would provide users with relevant images, information and translations of the particular menu item allowing them to make a more informed decision when ordering their food. How long did your application take to finish development? (Before the application was released) Roughly the entire duration of our summer break! Around 3 months or so. What are your preferred platforms/tools? Android Studio, Firebase and Github are some of the tools we used for developing this project. Our preferred platforms as of now are mobile platforms like Android and iOS. Have you gotten any interesting feedback from users of the application? Yes, we have gotten a few. One of our user who’s a UX designer and researcher from Alibaba Iran sent us a very detailed feedback on our current UX design and it was really helpful, as he gave us professional guidelines to follow. Another user also gave feedback that he used the application for a very different use case from how we imagined initially. Instead of scanning food menus to find out more about them, he was a food menu collector and wanted to scan all the menus into a digital format. How do you keep yourself motivated, especially during the low times? We had a clear goal of what we wanted to produce at the end of the summer. By knowing that, we became very motivated to finish the project as soon as possible with all the features we had planned. What’s next for you guys? Other than crushing a few more bugs on MenuSnap, we are each looking to take on new projects and to develop more interesting applications. MenuSnap is just a starting point for our software development journey. What’s one advice you would give to other upcoming application developers? For Android developers, you would need a wide range of Android devices to test your app because what works on one phone might not work on another. The compatibility issue is very real for android developers. Therefore, expand your social circle to include more Android users. For app developers in general, never be afraid to try new technologies/APIs, it can develop into interesting applications with many possibilities. You may download their application “MenuSnap - Food Search” on Google Play.