Data Toboggan Alpine Coaster 2023 Agenda

Announcing the Data Toboggan - Alpine Coaster Agenda for APAC, EMEA and AMER

Sign up for Data Toboggan Alpine Coaster

Event: Friday 24th November

Register: https://bit.ly/DTAC23-Register

Agenda: https://www.datatoboggan.co.uk/alpine-coaster-2023-agenda/

The Asilomar AI Principles

The Asilomar AI Principles are a set of 23 guidelines for responsible AI development that aim to ensure safety, security, and rights of individuals and society. They cover various aspects of AI such as research ethics, transparency, and accountability, and are crucial for building trust in AI technology. Here is a summary of the main points:

• Research Goal: The goal of AI research should be to create not undirected intelligence, but beneficial intelligence.
• Research Funding: Investments in AI should be accompanied by funding for research on ensuring its beneficial use, including thorny questions in computer science, economics, law, ethics, and social studies.
• Science-Policy Link: There should be constructive and healthy exchange between AI researchers and policy-makers.
• Research Culture: A culture of cooperation, trust, and transparency should be fostered among researchers and developers of AI.
• Race Avoidance: Teams developing AI systems should actively cooperate to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards.
• Safety: AI systems should be safe and secure throughout their operational lifetime, and verifiably so where applicable and feasible.
• Failure Transparency: If an AI system causes harm, it should be possible to ascertain why.
• Judicial Transparency: Any involvement by an autonomous system in judicial decision-making should provide a satisfactory explanation auditable by a competent human authority.
• Responsibility: Designers and builders of advanced AI systems are stakeholders in the moral implications of their use, misuse, and actions, with a responsibility and opportunity to shape those implications.
• Value Alignment: Highly autonomous AI systems should be designed so that their goals and behaviors can be assured to align with human values throughout their operation.
• Human Values: AI systems should be designed and operated so as to be compatible with ideals of human dignity, rights, freedoms, and cultural diversity.
• Personal Privacy: People should have the right to access, manage and control the data they generate, given AI systems’ power to analyze and utilize that data.
• Liberty and Privacy: The application of AI to personal data must not unreasonably curtail people’s real or perceived liberty.
• Shared Benefit: AI technologies should benefit and empower as many people as possible.
• Shared Prosperity: The economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly, to benefit all of humanity.
• Flourishing: AI systems should be used to enhance the wellbeing of all sentient entities, respecting their intrinsic value and autonomy.
• Diversity: AI systems should respect and promote the diversity of life forms, opinions, cultures, and values.
• Common Good: AI systems should be designed and operated for the common good of humanity and the environment, mindful of the potential impact on present and future generations.
• Cooperation: AI systems should be designed and operated to cooperate with other AI systems and with human beings, based on mutual respect and trust.
• Human Control: Humans should choose how and whether to delegate decisions to AI systems, to accomplish human-chosen objectives.
• Non-subversion: AI systems should not be designed or operated to subvert the values or interests of human beings or groups, or to deceive, manipulate, or coerce them.
• Human Feedback: AI systems should solicit and incorporate feedback from human users and other stakeholders, to improve their performance and alignment with human values.
• Meta-Ethics: AI systems should be designed and operated in accordance with the ethical principles that humans use to evaluate the morality of their actions and decisions.

For more information, you can visit the Future of Life Institute website or read the WIRED article about the Asilomar AI Principles.  Some more reading here .  Chat used to create the summary. 

Microsoft Ignite November 2023

Microsoft Ignite is next week. There are lots of exciting sessions.

Online: November 15–16, 2023 PT | In Seattle: November 14–17, 2023 PT

The headline Experience AI transformation in action, online from anywhere. The session catalog is packed full of exciting content and the agenda states whether the session will be recorded or not , so helpful when planning your schedule. A few key sessions to watch.

Keynote: Microsoft Ignite opening

Wednesday, November 15 5:00 PM - 5:45 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Satya Nadella will share how Microsoft is creating new opportunity across our platforms in this new era of AI.

Keynote: Becoming an AI-Powered Organization with Microsoft Copilot

Wednesday, November 15 5:45 PM - 6:35 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Join Rajesh Jha, along with Jared Spataro and other leaders to see how Microsoft Copilot will unlock productivity and transform business process for everyone across functions and industries.

Keynote: AI transformation for your organization with the Microsoft Cloud

Thursday, November 16 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Scott Guthrie and other leaders will share how the Microsoft Cloud is uniquely positioned to help our customers transform by building AI solutions and unlocking data insights using the same platform and services that power all of Microsoft’s comprehensive solutions.

Keynote: The Future of Security with AI

Thursday, November 16 6:15 PM - 7:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time

While the new era of AI presents unprecedented opportunities to elevate human potential, it also ushers in a new set of unknowns and risks. In this session, Charlie Bell and Vasu Jakkal will share how Microsoft is delivering AI for security with Security Copilot, and how we are enabling organizations to secure and govern AI with new capabilities.

Keynote: Inside Microsoft AI innovations with Mark Russinovich

Friday, November 17 8:30 PM - 9:30 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Join Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO and Technical Fellow, for an in-depth exploration of Microsoft's AI architecture. Discover the technology behind our massive supercomputers used for foundational model training, efficient infrastructure for serving models, sustainable datacenter design, AI-aware resource management and scheduling, GPU usage optimization techniques, and advancements in confidential computing to safeguard data during processing.

Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks

Wednesday, November 15 7:45 PM - 8:30 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Bring your data into the era of AI with Microsoft Fabric, a powerful all in one AI powered analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, real time analytics and business intelligence. Learn how Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric seamlessly work together to offer customers a modern, price performant analytics solution that helps teams turn data into a competitive advantage.

Upgrading your data estate to Microsoft Fabric and getting started Q&A

Thursday, November 16

9:30 PM - 10:15 PM Greenwich Mean Time

Looking to get started with Microsoft Fabric, but don't know where to start? Join our product experts to discuss everything from basic set up steps to migrating to Fabric from Synapse to starting a POC with departments where you want to gain traction quickly.

PASS Data Community Summit 2023

PASS Data Community Summit have revealed that they will be livestreaming 16 key sessions for free. LIVE from #PASSDataSummit 2023 in Seattle November 14-17.  From #AzureSQL, #SQLServer to #DevOps and #ChatGPT, we've got it all covered.  More details can be found in their blog post  on how to join the livestream. 

All timings are in Pacific time, and the sessions are:

Wednesday November 15

8.15-9.30am – KEYNOTE: Limitless growth, limitless opportunities: Data and innovation in an AI world

9.30-10.15am – break

10.15-11.30am – COMMUNITY: What’s New in Azure SQL and SQL Server, Data Exposed Live

11.30am-12pm – break

12-1pm – LUNCHEON: Database DevOps Luncheon: All you Ever Wanted to Know but were too Afraid to Ask

1-1.30pm – break

1.30-2.45pm – MICROSOFT: Data Warehousing Simplified in Microsoft Fabric

2.45-3.15pm – break

3.15-4.30pm – COMMUNITY: Automating Database Deployments using Azure DevOps

4.30-4.45pm – break

4.45-6pm – AWS: 3-Step Guide to Modernize SQL Server to PostgreSQL

Thursday November 16

8.15-9.30am – KEYNOTE: The New Database Landscape – Revealing Shifts and Charting the Next Horizon

9.30-10.15am – break

10.15-11.30am – REDGATE: Redgate Product Launch: Transform your software delivery with Test Data Management

11.30am-12pm – break

12-1pm – LUNCHEON: Women in Technology: Got your Back: Finding Allies at Work

1-1.30pm – break

1.30-2.45pm – INTEL: How Microsoft & Intel Power Your SQL Server environments

2.45-3.15pm – break

3.15-4.30pm – COMMUNITY: Easy Enterprise Integration with Azure PaaS Services

4.30-4.45pm – break

4.45-6pm – COMMUNITY: Accelerated Database Recovery – A Deep Dive Behind the Magic

Friday November 17

8.15-9.30am – KEYNOTE: AIOps and ChatGPT: Prepare to Ride the Next Wave

9.30-10.15am – break

10.15-11.30am – REDGATE: Cloud Migration: The Good, the Bad, and How to Plan for Success

11.30am-1.30pm – break

1.30-2.45pm – MICROSOFT: What You Should Know About Always On Availability Groups

2.45-3.15pm – break

3:15-4:30pm – MICROSOFT: Everything You Need to Know About Data Virtualization in SQL

Lots of amazing sessions to watch.

Data Weekender 6.5

I am very excited to share that I have been selected to speak at Data Weekender 6.5 on Saturday 4 November 2023. 

The session I will be presenting is the Business Benefits of Good Governance at 9.15. See the schedule here. 

Data Weekender is a Pop-up and Online Microsoft Data Conference.  #DataWeekender is organised by a group of European-based Microsoft data platform professionals.  The organisers are all regular contributors to the Microsoft Data Community either via speaking, blogging, hosting conferences, and running local meetup groups. Set up during the Covid-19 pandemic this was created to provide a simple way for people to continue presenting and hopefully for people to attend and learn. Since then the conference has grown from strength to strength. 

Learnings from Microsoft Build AI Day 2023

I had an amazing day at #MSBuildAIDay and the opportunity speak with many people about AI.  A keynote opened the event and demonstrated a number of different uses of AI. 

At the event I created some artwork using Azure OpenAI DALL-E lab #InventwithAI . There were a few questions to answer via voice input that resulted in your own artwork being created. The questions were: what is you favourite colour; favourite landscape; where do you live; artwork style; favourite technological innovation. The image created is below. 

I had the opportunity to be a connection hub expert and proctor in the 2 Prompt Engineering workshops run by Amy Kate Boyd and Henk Boelman on Learn how to use OpenAI models (e.g. ChatGPT) using Azure OpenAI.

It is strange to be talking about traditional AI, of a few years ago, as historic as we move to Generative AI. Responsible AI was described as, about reducing the amount of time people spend doing certain tasks, and not replacing them as people are always required to validate the output.

A few points learned in the workshop 

• Generative AI models can generate humanlike text, images, and code
• Generative AI models are stateless: they do not learn, and are constrained by their training data which is frozen at a fixed point in time
• Azure OpenAI Service is a managed service that provides access to state-of-the-art natural language generative AI models, including ChatGPT and GPT-4 from OpenAI with the security and enterprise promise of Azure.
• Azure OpenAI Service provides a simple REST API for accessing these models
• Prompt engineering is a technique for "grounding" generative AI models, and can be used to influence the style of their output, provide factual information, and constrain their behaviour.

With Generative AI systems beginning to disrupt the world, it comes with challenges. Guidelines are put in place in prompts to govern the context of asking questions and receiving relevant results. The term 'Jailbreaking' has sprung up to break the guidelines or restrictions set down in the AI program.  Thus there is the need to consider how to make these AI models safe and secure for use.

In the workshops AzureOpenAIService-Workshop Understanding-LLMs the sizes of the models were shown to see the rapid changes over such a short period of time. 

The prompt engineering lab was great to be able to get started with immediately.

It is important to think about the business use cases that need to be solved and have a high level understanding of what Generative AI can do to help.  A business should look at  the benefits of using AI, the ethics of using AI and how that impacts employees and customers.

Terms explained

Generative AI  is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, imagery, audio and synthetic data.

A large language model (LLM) is a deep learning algorithm that can perform a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing inputs for generative AI tools that will produce optimal outputs.

Microsoft Tools

A couple of tools that are worth looking at:

Responsible AI Toolbox

Responsible AI is an approach to assessing, developing, and deploying AI systems in a safe, trustworthy and ethical manner. Learn how Microsoft thinks about Responsible AI here.

Hands-on tools for building effective human-AI experiences

The HAX Toolkit is for teams building user-facing AI products. It helps you conceptualize what the AI system will do and how it will behave. 

Following the event Microsoft Published

AI Innovations Shine at Microsoft Build: AI Day London

The Microsoft Fabric roadmap

The Microsoft Fabric roadmap is a place where you can check out what's new and planned for in the  unified SaaS platform.  https://aka.ms/FabricRoadmap

There is a good summary of items coming 

Microsoft Fabric roadmap October 11, 2023 by James Serra

I am particularly interested in the administration and governance side.  I am looking forward to these items.

Purview hub for administrators and data owners – Public preview

Estimated release timeline: Q4 2023

Fabric admins (Q3 2023) and data owners (Q4 2023) can gain valuable insights about sensitive data, certified and promoted items. They contain insights about sensitive data, certified and promoted items, and a gateway to advanced capabilities in Microsoft Purview portals.

Purview data loss prevention policies for schematized data in OneLake

Estimated release timeline: Q1 2024

Compliance admins can use Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to detect the upload of sensitive data (such as social security number) to OneLake. If such an upload is detected, the policies will trigger automatic policy tip that is visible to data owners and it can also trigger an alert for compliance admins. DLP policies can automate the compliance processes to meet enterprise-scale compliance and regulatory requirements in an effective way.

New to Fabric announcements can be tracked here.