Microsoft Puts Machine Learning in the Cloud
Machine learning is ascending to the cloud. The Register asks, “Do Data Centers Dream of Electric Sheep? Microsoft Announces Machine Learning Cloud.” As competition in the world of SaaS and remote hosting continues to escalate, this move may set Microsoft ahead of Amazon and Google (for now). Our question—will this progress rub off on Bing? One can hope.
Writer Jack Clark tells us:
“The company’s new ‘Azure ML’ service was announced on Monday and means developers can access machine learning systems hosted in the Azure cloud and even link their applications directly to them. The tech gives developers a directory of machine learning and associated technologies, including deep learning systems, that they can apply to their applications…
“Azure ML also has ‘a number of tools to help clean data,’ explained Microsoft exec Joseph Sirosh in a chat with El Reg, and has compatibility with popular mathematical software R. The service also gives users a way to drag-and-drop various machine learning technologies together so that they can build an application in a visually striking and understandable way.”
It is interesting to note that Sirosh spent nearly ten years working with (among other things) Amazon’s internal machine learning systems during his stint at that company. Though machine learning itself is nothing new, Microsoft hopes Azure ML will make it more accessible, and tempting, to developers. Likening this advance to the birth of the cloud itself, Sirosh enthuses, “Machine learning is an incredibly underutilized capability—every app around us could be becoming intelligent. I would love to have the excitement around machine learning be unleashed.”
Cynthia Murrell, July 25, 2014
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