A News Aggregator Built with Azure Machine Learning for a Federal Client

August 30, 2016

Machine learning An Azure Machine Learning News Aggregator Solution

Here is an overview of a personalized, machine-curated delivery of news and related significant data in the public domain powered by Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services, built by AIS.

A Little Background

Today’s 24-hour news cycle produces a vast amount of publicly available information about events occurring all over the globe. Imagine the data that is produced in a single hour, let alone in a single day. Now imagine having the responsibility of distilling that data into actionable information for a single team or individual. It would quickly become overwhelming! This was the reality for our client. They have offices and teams all over the world, and each team was seeking personalized views of data relevant to their region, mission and preferences. But by implementing machine learning technology, AIS developed a solution to help break through the noise. Read More…

Visualize Your Business’s Data with Cortana Intelligence Suite

August 23, 2016
Data Analytics, Cortana Intelligence Suite, Data Visualization The Cortana Intelligence Suite is a fully managed data analytics platform that offers a range of services aimed at helping businesses find meaning in all of the data they are collecting. This post will dive into the services that are offered by the platform. Prior to discussing these services in detail, let’s take a quick lap around data analytics specific to goals, what to expect when building and maturing a competency for your business, and challenges businesses experience while on this journey. After laying this groundwork, we’ll discuss the Cortana Intelligence Suite in a bit more detail and provide a list of the services offered by the platform. Additionally, we’ll cover how the Cortana Intelligence Suite can offer the tools needed to implement a robust strategy to address the key challenge areas we’ve described. Read More…

The Bot Framework

August 16, 2016
Innovations in devices, platforms and applications have advanced many user experiences – and user expectations. Voice activated digital assistants like Siri and Cortana have given users new ways to interact with services and information.

In light of this, interfaces like trusty web forms may seem a bit dated… perhaps it’s time to consider a more natural, conversational interaction with users.

A Pizza Bot
A sample Pizza Bot interaction (image courtesy of Microsoft from this article).

Read More…

Federal Tech Talk: Beyond the cloud, What’s next?

August 10, 2016
Cloud ComputingA few weeks ago, AIS’ Solutions Architect, Jason McNutt and Managing Director, Larry
Katzman spoke with Federal Tech Talk’s John Gilroy on Federal News Radio for a discussion around federal agencies moving to the cloud and to answer the question of “what happens once you get there?”

Listen to the interview.

John Gilroy states that “This is a critical question ask in the brave new world of the cloud. No human can conceivably be able to understand all the dependencies and updates that are needed for a complex cloud migration. This ability to manage the system is just as important once it is live. Jason McNutt talks about the capability of automation to be able to manage today’s complex systems.”

Federal Tech Talk looks at the world of high technology in the federal government. Host John Gilroy of The Oakmont Group speaks the language of federal CISOs, CIOs and CTOs, and gets into the specifics for government IT systems integrators. John covers the latest government initiatives and technology news for the federal IT manager and government contractor. Follow John on Twitter @raygilrar and hear more from Federal Talk Talk on federalnewsradio.com

Listen to the interview.

Improving Productivity with Office 365 Add-ins

August 9, 2016
Office 365

In earlier posts we went over the Office 365 development platform and proposed an example application to demonstrate how we can leverage its resources and Azure Active Directory using the Graph API.

In the previous post we looked under the hood at securing our web application and API with Azure Active Directory, and using the Graph API to find users, check calendars and send email notifications.

In the final installment of this series, we’ll take a closer look at the Outlook Add-in for this application.

Office 365 Add-ins

As we’ve seen, the Graph API makes it easy to integrate Office 365 resources and functionality into your own applications. Add-ins allow you to pull external resources and services directly into Office applications like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

Office 365 Add-ins are implemented as independently hosted web applications that are hosted within Office applications (both the web-based versions or native applications). This means: Read More…

AIS Models FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Data

August 9, 2016
FBI UCR

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program is a nationwide, cooperative statistical effort of more than 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies voluntarily reporting data on crimes brought to their attention. The program’s primary objective is to generate reliable information for use in law enforcement administration, operation, and management. Over the years, however, this data has become one of the country’s leading social indicators. The FBI is required by law to store national UCR data in a platform that will allow the public to search/view results and download for off-line analysis.

The current UCR data reporting tool was built in Cold Fusion and has not received an update since 2010. The FBI released an RFI solicitation with the intent to gather information about possible ways to replace the current UCR tool. Criteria for the new tool is that it should be web based with the ability to filter on any UCR attribute and then export the results in a .csv format.

Using 2 gigabytes of sample data provided by the FBI, AIS set out to determine if, in just a few weeks, a minimally viable product (MVP) solution could be built leveraging public cloud services that were currently (or soon to be) available in the Azure Government Cloud. The resulting MVP was designed to fully support the capability for citizens to be able query, filter, correlate and display public FBI National Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) information. Take a look at the solution we built!

Technologies:

  • ASP.NET MVC 4.5 (with jQuery, bootstrap, ADO.NET)
  • Power BI embedded
  • SQL Azure Data Warehouse
  • Blob storage with SaaS for file download