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On September 13, we hosted our first XPLR.Lowlands meetup. This was a full virtual event, streamed from our community studio. We hosted the following sessions: Sessions Navigating the world of AI infrastructure as a data scientist: Gabrielle Davelaar & Ekaterina Sirazitdinova Traditionally hardware has always been a job for a High Performance Specialist. With the arrival of State-of-the-Art models such as GPT-3, Turing and Megatron-Turing more compute has been proven to be necessary. This talk is about how to navigate through the world of GPU’s, bandwidth, parallelization from a data science perspective. ...

Governments and organizations are focusing on digital transformation to fundamentally transform the way they operate and deliver services to their customers. Cloud adoption has increased tremendously in the last couple of years, also due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as they move to the cloud, organizations want to maintain the same level of control over their IT resources as they have in their datacenters. Concerns about cloud sovereignty, which includes data, operational, and technical issues, are not new and have been increasing because of rising geopolitical tensions; changing data and privacy laws in different countries; the dominant role of cloud players concentrated in a few regions; and the lessons learned through the pandemic. As a result, governments and organizations are re-evaluating their external exposure and looking for ways to maintain physical and digital control over strategic assets. ...

This Global XR Talks, Alexander Meijers presented the following session: Introduction to Microsoft Remote Assist and Guides Microsoft offers a broad range of solutions modernizing field services with Mixed Reality for technicians. It empowers them by offering modern tools like Mixed Reality devices, Video calls, Annotations and File Sharing capabilities. These tools allow field service workers to solve complex problems even faster, collaborate together with experts and gives them easy access to work orders. Another one of them is creating customized training modules for new workers on the factory floor. Using Dynamics 365 and Microsoft HoloLens 2 we are able to create augmented training which allows new workers to be more quickly in learning their daily job, support workers in complex tasks and even guide audits. This session will give you an introduction to both first-party apps of Microsoft. ...

We are reaching the end of the Global AI Bootcamp 2022, and we’d like to introduce you to organizers from all over the world to learn more about their events: who are they and what content (did) they provide? In 6 different episodes (and timezones) we’ll focus on specific regions, and like the bootcamp, we’ll go around the world to connect to everyone. The Global AI Bootcamp is a series of free one-day events organized across the world by local communities that are passionate about artificial intelligence on Microsoft Azure. Check out the official Global AI Bootcamp website, for more information and an overview of all the events. ...

Sarah Lean: When superpowers combine; Azure & Octopus Deploy Microsoft Azure is a great option for organisations looking to host their IT infrastructure in the cloud or as a hybrid partner. While Octopus Deploy is a tool that can help you automate the deployment of your infrastructure and software releases all in one place. In this talk, we’ll cover off the possibilities of using Octopus Deploy to help your developers, release managers, and operations folk deploy and manage their Azure resources. ...

InFebruary we kicked off 2022 with the following great session: A brand new way to develop AR/VR apps for Oculus using WebXR PWA In this session we will learn about XR Development on AR/VR using Javascript to distribute our Apps or Games into Oculus Platform as a Playable Application. Speaker: R Surahutomo Aziz Pradana Watch the recording You can watch the recording of the session below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SicCAs2kag

Esther Barthel: Transitioning Ops to the Cloud, adding Dev skills to the mix This session offers tips and tricks to add core Developer skills to your skillset, so you can transition from (on-premises) Operations to a Cloud DevOps role. This session will zoom in on some basic knowledge and terminology that will make it easier to understand the shift in work and competencies for DevOps engineers. Keep in mind that this session is not a technical deep dive that helps you pick the right tool for the job at hand, but it focuses on some basic knowledge of DevOps processes that will help you to plan the next steps in your career and pick those DevOps competencies that will put the fun back into your work. ...

Frank Buters: Getting rid of silo’s, Embracing MLOps, Democratize data all sounds catchy but how? Having come across of many examples, especially within the financial sector (Banks, Insurance, Pensions), where data, modelling and IT activities take place in different teams across departments, we know about some of the pains of our customers. So how can technology, and in particular Azure technology, help here? During this Azure Thursday event we will discuss and experience how Azure Synapse Analytics together with Azure Machine Learning can help relieve some of these pains. We will show you how a model can be deployed as a stand-alone API, and how easy it is to use the same model to score records in a traditional data warehouse. In this way, we hope to give a flavor of how state-of-the art techniques can go hand-in-hand with more traditional ways of processing and storing data. ...

This evening we had two amazing speakers again! Gianni Castaldi & Jeroen Niesen: How to run an Azure SOC like Ninja’s Most companies use Microsoft Azure as their cloud. With the use of Azure, companies are bringing sensitive data to Azure. Just as on-premises you want to make sure that your data is well protected and is compliant with the law and regulations of your company’s industry. Azure has all components available to create a next-gen SOC. In this session, ...

On December 15 we wanted to zoom in on accessibility opportunities in (web) tech at the Tech A11y Summit. Disability never hold anyone back. Disability is not something that people need to overcome. The barriers that exist are created by society and it’s up to every single one of us to work together to remove those barriers. During the event interpretation into International Sign was provided. Below, you see an overview of the sessions: ...

Nowadays, nearly every developer is a developer of distributed applications or systems. Modern software development involves building distributed applications: almost every application leverages a distributed architecture, and most are backed by services in the public cloud. Microservices are a successful approach for building distributed services. And by using containers to build these microservices, you will introduce scalability, faster deployments, and the ability to run applications everywhere. Microsoft recently released a new container service in Azure: Azure Container Apps, which is a serverless container service for running modern apps at scale. Azure Container Apps is released during Ignite, in September 2021, and currently still in preview. The IT industry is embracing containerization heavily the last couple of years, but struggles managing the infrastructure. Kubernetes, the facto standard at many organizations, is challenging to learn and to manage for many IT professionals. Azure Container Apps offers a solution for this: this service is specifically aimed to deploy containerized applications without the need to manage complex infrastructure. It manages the details of Kubernetes and container orchestrations for you. ...

On December 1-3, we organized the largest global community event about Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality and WebXR! All sessions were streamed to our YouTube channel and can be watched there! See below, an overview of all the YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHulrhe_CI0gtt6sPqgiTNKBDCOAlqXZh

This is the second article in a series about the different solutions that Microsoft Azure has to offer for specific industries. In my first post, I covered how these industry specific solutions help organizations to accelerate their digital transformation, and why this is so important nowadays. In this second part, we will look at the manufacturing, financials services and government industries. Azure for manufacturing In the upcoming years, instead of selling unconnected products, manufacturers will start focusing more on selling products that come with connectivity services. They will also move from selling a discrete product to selling products as a service. ...

Sustainability and humanity’s response to climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime. And luckily, this is becoming more important for most companies, across all different industries. At Capgemini we set a bold ambition: We will achieve carbon neutrality no later than 2025 and become a net zero business by 2030. This means accelerating our approach to carbon reduction across our key impact areas. And together with reducing our own environmental impacts for a net zero future, we also want to help our clients to transform to a low carbon future. ...

The way we work and live has changed. As a result of the recent global health crisis, many organizations are accelerating their digital transformation efforts to meet the challenges that they were exposed to. Employees around the world shifted to remote work, stores needed to shift to a buy online, pick up in-store model. In manufacturing, remote capabilities became key. Digital transformation has now become a requirement for business continuity, and digital technology has universally become key to business resilience and transformation. This enormous pressure on digital transformation, since the pandemic struck, has affected all industries. ...

Sjoukje Zaal is haar cariere begonnen in de gezondheidszorg maar is nu werkzaam als CTO voor Microsoft bij Capgemini, is Microsoft Most Valuable Professional en Microsoft Regional Director. Hoe ben je in de IT terecht gekomen? Op jonge leeftijd kreeg ik van mijn broer zijn oude Commodore 64. Daar speelde ik games op en ik programeerde ook spelletjes. Heel erg leuk om te doen! Gamen ben ik altijd heel actief blijven doen maar ik heb het programmeren losgelaten en ben me op andere hobbies gaan richten zoals het maken van muziek. ...

The October event was a collaboration with our sponsor Capgemini. This was a fully virtual event recorded in our studio and streamed to our YouTube channel. This time we had three speakers: Arjan Nieuwenhuis: Keeping track on all your apps Managing your apps during the whole software development lifecycle and beyond is hard as apps come in all shapes and sizes and can target multiple platforms. Keeping track on your apps from early stage development to production can be a handful, especially as target platforms are whole ecosystems. ...

The September event was the first event after summer break and our first in-person event since March 2020! Of course, we streamed the event to our YouTube channel as well. This time we have two amazing speaker again: Stacey Cashmore: Building your personal online brand using Static Blazor Apps, one step at a time We’re told that by using services such as Medium, dev.to etc that we are diluting our personal brand. That we should be posting to our own site and building ourselves up. But making that move can seem huge! Rather than eating the elephant - which can seem impossible - how about slowly moving to your own space? Build your brand whilst still using those great features that attracted you to your chosen platform in the first place. With the joint power of client-side Blazor and static web apps in Azure you no longer need to run web servers or App Services in order to host your site online. You can get set up in minutes! In this session we’ll set up a new Blazor Wasm Application and Azure Function, deploy to Azure and then fetch blog posts from dev.to to link to them in our page. We’ll also talk about next steps - and how to eat the elephant one bite at a time - to create your personal brand! ...

On September 23 after our summer break, we organized another Global XR Talks! This time we had the following awesome session: Zaid Zaim: Mixed Reality for Cultural Heritage Zaid is going to share his journey and experience on how he came to Mixed Reality and working with HoloLens. Then He will take the audience on a journey to the ancient city of Palmyra (UNSECO Cultural Heritage site in Syria) and will demonstrate within his talk a live demo with HoloLens 2 bringing Palmyras monuments back to life. ...

Cloud computing is redefining how modern services and applications are designed. Instead of building traditional monoliths, applications are broken down into smaller, decentralized microservices. And instead of running on a traditional server, they are using serverless services where you don’t have to worry about infrastructure at all and only pay for the services you actually use. Microservices typically communicate with other microservices by through APIs and asynchronous messaging. This allows applications to scale more efficiently, be more cost effective and easier to replace and deploy. Cloud platforms and microservices ask for a different type of architecture. ...