Wow, the last two weeks were taken over by the flurry of announcements from Amazon. Even though Amazon is taking a break from announcements (probably focusing on Christmas shoppers), there are still some updates in the cloud data science world. Here they are.

News

• Google AutoML for Natural Language goes GA
  Extracting meaning from text is still a challenging and important task faced by many organizations. Google AutoML for NLP (Natural Language Processing) provides sentiment analysis, classification, and entity extraction from text. It now also supports PDF documents.
• Azure Data Factory Preserves Metadata during File Copy
  When performing a File copy between Amazon S3, Azure Blob, and Azure Data Lake Gen 2, the metadata will be copied as well. Not a huge update but still a nice feature.
• Azure Database for MySQL now supports MySQL 8.0
  This is the latest major version of MySQL
• Azure Functions 3.0 is Live
  The latest version of Azure Functions is backwards compatible and available now.

Videos

• Data Labeling in Azure ML Studio

• Visualizing Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) using Lucid
  Understand what is going on inside a CNN.

• Azure Cognitive Services at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  Azure Cognitive Services was used to categorize and classify pieces of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is pretty cool.

• Azure Tips and Tricks: Make your data Searchable
  A quick video to demonstrate Azure Search.

Courses and Learning

• New AWS course to prepare people for Machine Learning Certification
  Amazon just released a new Exam readiness course for the AWS Certified Machine Learning Certification.
• AWS launches Machine Learning Embark Program
  This is a program for upskilling the workforce of AWS customers. The program has an application process so it is not open to everyone.