Andreas Erben
CTO for Applied AI and Metaverse at daenet
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, United States
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Andreas spent most of his professional life and a career of over 25 years integrating "backend" applications. First inside or between Enterprises and Startups directly, then - "in the cloud".
Before that, Andreas dabbled with Virtual Reality in the 90s. In 2013, he started to work with Kinect for Windows V2 and something wonderful happened - Andreas had new fun with new toys and he was all set to work on new paradigms to interact with computers.
Then Microsoft HoloLens was announced and he expanded his focus on Mixed Reality applications and concepts.
He cannot stop talking about technology, which apparently some people like so Microsoft gave him the MVP award. Because he has shown leadership can advise C-levels and business, he also got accepted into the ranks of the Microsoft Regional Directors .
Andreas helps customers as a trusted advisor, external CTO and innovation consultant, he also produces exciting applications and solutions with a great team of skilled individuals.
He acts as CTO Applied AI for daenet.
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Let's do Personal Generative AI - What you can do on your own devices
In this demo heavy session you will get exposed to Generative AI capabilities that you can run on your own devices.
Of course this starts with running Large Language Models that you can run on powerful computer and servers servers, but it continues with Small Language Models that can run your phone.
But why stop there?
We will look at how you can leverage capabilities such as Image Generation, Transcribing and Translating human speech, and working with multimodal input.
All without ever needing to send your data to the cloud.
Let's focus on Embeddings
Embeddings are a semantic representation of content. You hear about them all the time in the context of vector databases for example.
In this session we will focus on embeddings, look deeper why they are important, and what you can do with them.
Through examples we will also explore challenges when working with embeddings and look at strategies to overcome those challenges.
Let's focus on useful AI Agent Interactions
When you are building AI Agentic applications, often you will have more than one agent, and those are supposed to collaborate in some way.
In this session we want to focus on that collaboration, how agents can be set up to work together as a team to get things done.
Part of this conversation includes:
How do you define what an agent should do or shouldn't do?
How can agents relate to human counterparts?
How do you organize or re-organize a team of agents?
How do agents share information?
How do you orchestrate complex agent interactions?
In our approach we will stay hands-on with specific examples and provide some concrete implementations.
Join me to look at defining multi-agent systems.
Microsoft's PyRIT Tool to Red Team Generative AI applications
Recognizing that Generative AI applications have their own types of vulnerabilities, Microsoft created the Python Risk Identification Tool for generative AI (PyRIT).
When you incorporate Generative AI capabilities, you want to minimize your risks, and thus having tools available that can effectively red team your applications is very important.
In this session we are giving a quick overview about what PyRIT can do for you, how you can use it, and see PyRIT in action.
RAG - Retrieval Augmented Generation - a closer look
In this talk we will look closer at RAG - Retrieval Augmented Generation. You hear this term everywhere, so it is time to focus on how to use it.
We will cover topics such as:
Why do I need RAG?
How do I implement RAG?
How do I use Azure AI Search?
What are current challenges how to do RAG well?
What future trends and methods can lead to better RAG?
Join us to focus at RAG.
The one person (or less) AI company?
As a thought experiment in this geek out we will ask, could you plan, build, and run a company with AI?
We will talk about different aspects of creating and running a company and match them up with the AI powered building blocks that could reduce human workload dramatically there.
The One Person Company - Disruptive AI Models
In the wake of Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, Microsoft fully bets on integrating AI everywhere. But what does it all mean to regular businesses?
This session we will look at the capabilities of large AI models and their integration in our software and business landscape.
We will conduct a thought experiment: Could you replace a whole organization with just one person?
This thought experiment will be underpinned by showing hands-on how many aspects of setting up and running a business can leverage capabilities of large AI models.
Please join us for a demo-heavy glimpse of how large AI models can transform all aspects of running a business.
Things they don't tell you about AI vulnerabilities
So you are ready to develop AI applications in .NET?
You absolutely are, but take pause to consider things you may not have thought about.
In the brave new world of Generative AI people talk about "prompt injection" and other Generative AI related vulnerabilities.
This is the session you want to attend to understand some of the current Generative AI risks through different attack vectors and get information about the current mitigation attempts and strategies.
We will cover both immediate attacks as well as strategies where attackers may be playing "the long game".
You will see actionable examples and understand what people can learn about systems through "attack-like" behavior.
Windows Copilot Runtime and friends - Local models the Microsoft way
Besides of running those large models in the cloud, a modern computer can do amazing things in the world of AI given it's hardware is capable enough.
In this session we will look at what Microsoft is cooking up to enable you to develop applications that run on Windows based devices. This includes the Microsoft Copilot Runtime as part of the larger Copilot stack.
Join me to explore running AI locally - the Microsoft way.
You have not started with Azure Machine Learning yet?
Azure Machine Learning is the center-stage service Microsoft offers to handle Machine Learning workloads.
This session aims to give attendees the long-overdue chance to learn about how to get started using Azure Machine Learning.
In this demo-centric presentation, various capabilities of Azure Machine Learning for the Azure Machine Learning lifecycle workflow, all the way from training AI model training to deploying and running models will be shown.
Developers, architects, and decision makers will get a better understanding about what Azure Machine Learning can do and how to get started using it.
Your Prompt Engineering needs Engineering
One of the hyped terms in Generative AI is "prompt engineering" and how people can become great prompt engineers and make Generative AI do bountiful things, and then here is a list of the "100 BEST PROMPTS".
At closer look, there is often a lot of hyperbole, but not much substance regarding methods and engineering when it comes to how to approach this topic.
If you think you are a good prompt engineer, just because you so far have been able to get stuff done, you may be betting too much on things that could change rapidly.
In this session we will discuss how you could approach Prompt Engineering with an engineering mindset, how to use a mix of intuition, the power of Generative AI itself, and then using tools, testing, and automation to improve your craft.
So, join me to put some "engineering" into "prompt engineering".
Beyond ChatGPT - Imagine your mind blown
Almost everybody has heard about ChatGPT, but the story does not stop there.
Imagine you asking your computer how it would look like to have your mind blown in abstract art and it generates a selection of images that each blows your human mind?
This is a very hands-on session demonstrating advanced concepts of today's AI including ChatGPT/GPT-4, DALL-E, Midjourney, and similar models.
In this session you will also receive actionable information about how to run some of those models and understand the business value of using those models.
Applied Artificial intelligence combined with vast computing resources and enormous trained models can accomplish amazing feats when it comes to working with data including semantics, context, subtext, and all sorts of relationships that you could imagine.
We will look at some of those services, solutions, and products, many of them in the cloud, that enable scenarios that many of us would have thought impossible only a few years ago.
Expect to start working on textual data with simple scenarios like classifying information such as company types, we will journey on to summarize or rewrite text, or to come up with a representative title. We then explore further creating creative text or completing a story.
This includes the capability to work with source code such as written in .NET favorite's C# or Python through GitHub Co-Pilot or OpenAI's Codex.
This is actionable information to anybody who has to deal with text today.
Then we go towards incorporating other modalities, specifically generating images and visual art with services such as DALL-E 2.
We discuss the upcoming world of "multi-modal" models and how they are already appearing in products and services.
We will finish asking - are computers dreaming yet? Am I imagining your mind blown?
Unity3D with IL2CPP - what is it and how does it work?
Unity3D is a popular multi-platform gaming engine increasingly often used to develop enterprise applications and Microsoft's first choice to develop applications for Mixed Reality.
Unity3D's default scripting language is C#, typically edited, debugged, and deployed in Visual Studio.
But Unity3D was built on Mono to support multiple platforms and that mapped to .NET when running on Windows. Today Unity uses IL2CPP (Intermediate Language To C++) for many target platforms, which then compiles to native code for the target device. In this session, the developer user experience, from project creation, code editing, to deployment and debugging will be demonstrated and discussed.
Mixed Reality Workshop - Building AR/VR Applications
In this 1 day workshop, attendees will learn about the various concepts and technologies that comprise Mixed Reality applications.
The typical tool chain to develop applications will be demonstrated and explained. This is a technical workshop and active participation of attendees using their own notebook computers is strongly suggested.
The Metaverse - Beyond the buzzword
The last few months in 2023 saw partial divesting of various large companies, including Microsoft, in the Metaverse field. Hence it is even more important than ever to look beyond the "buzz" and look at what the foundations of Metaverse applications can be.
The buzz started 2021 when Microsoft, then Nvidia and finally Facebook even rebranding itself to "Meta" started using the term "Metaverse", all types of businesses and products suddenly had to do something to do with it.
In this session we will look at common capabilities that are generally understood as contributing to the "Metaverse". But we will look beyond the buzzword and talk about what value those capabilities provide, specifically those that are already part of Microsoft Azure or related to Microsoft Azure.
Our goal is to look at what can you leverage today to build the Metaverse solutions of tomorrow and why does it make sense to do so.
Particularly we will look at aspects of the industrial metaverse and what it has to do with IoT, we will talk about how to interact with and understand physical environments.
To be more specific, you may see appearances of technologies such as Azure IoT, Azure Kinect, Azure Spatial Anchors, Azure Remote Rendering, but also Azure Cognitive Services, and more.
We will talk about some of the challenges of developing Metaverse applications regarding some typically involved toolchains which in many case come from the game development background such as Unity3D and suggest some approaches to get started.
Python: A quickstart for non-Python developers
Python is one of the most popular development languages, and by some measures currently the most popular language for beginners. In Artificial Intelligence and Data Science it is practically impossible to not use Python in one way or the other.
Yet, many Enterprise Developers have not started yet.
This fast focus provides regular developers a quickstart to start using Python.
This is for everybody who has not used Python yet and wants a quick overview on how to get started.
Hackathons - unleashing hidden potential in organizations and empower individuals
Hackathons are a hot topic to drive innovation. Organizations across the globe have discovered that it enables them to help their digital transformation endeavors through unleashing hidden potential within the organization or across an industry.
For individuals, hackathons can help to dive into a new subject matter, empowering to work on subjects they always wanted to work on, and in some cases hackathons have changed career paths.
This session will discuss topics around hackathons:
What different types of hackathons exist? What value do hackathons have for organizations and for participants? How does one best prepare for a hackathon?
Most importantly, hackathons are about culture and in some cases helping to change culture in a positive way. The best hackathons are inclusive and empower people to succeed.
Attendees will learn about the value of hackathons for organizations and individuals, and tips will be shared how to run or participate in a successful hackathon. This session is for everyone who cares about innovation, digital transformation, and how to disrupt and reinvent themselves.
Get started: What, I need to use Python? Help!
Python has rapidly become the most popular software development language measured by online searches. The daily responsibilities of many Web-Developers and Enterprise Developers do not allow diving into this completely new ecosystem as part of their role, yet they are increasingly often expected to know Python. This focused session provides the starting point for software developers to begin working with Python.
Jupyter Notebooks - a quick look for regular developers
Jupyter Notebooks are a popular tool for many professionals and are very prevalent with Python developers and Data Scientists.
But they are actually useful for many more scenarios.
In this session, attendees will see a variety of applications of Jupyter Notebooks to expand their toolbox through quick demos.
Starting with vanilla Python use cases, the session will also introduce Microsoft Azure's flavor of Jupyter Notebooks.
From there demonstrations will branch out into different development languages and use cases, such as connecting to a SQL Server or writing C# code in a Jupyter Notebook.
Intelligent Spatial Applications
The availability of cloud based services such as Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services unlock advanced computer vision capabilities for regular developers. At the same time, with AR/VR and Mixed Reality Devices such as Microsoft HoloLens, a new paradigm has emerged: Spatial Computing.
Here new concepts such as "Spatial Anchors" have been introduced that have on-device and cloud-based tools that let developers contextualize information to fixed locations in space.
In this session attendees will see computer vision capabilities in action and then those tools will be applied to gain a better understanding of a real 3-dimensional space by being able to annotate what a camera has recognized in that space.
Sounds complicated? It is powerful but you will see that the tools are actually straightforward to use.
Introducing Kinect for Azure for Developers
This session introduces Kinect for Azure and provides a quick overview what developers can accomplish with this latest iteration of the popular depth camera.
Through demos and samples code, attendees will receive the necessary information how to start developing applications that leverage Kinect for Azure.
Space is what matters - looking at the core value of Mixed Reality and HoloLens 2
In this session attendees will learn why it is different and valuable to pursue Mixed Reality solutions compared to 2-dimensional apps. Many MR applications display graphics in 3 dimensions in a visually appealing way but stop there. Often this results in a lost opportunity: Interacting in 3D-space enables completely new scenarios that would be impossible with 2D-applications.
The presenter will discuss what insights and value can be gained with spatially aware applications.
Developers will receive the necessary starting points to start building apps, including for HoloLens 2, and decision makers will receive guidance, enabling them to think about solutions differently.
Understanding the Human Body with Depth Cameras
Since the arrival of Microsoft Kinect for the XBOX 360, depth cameras created new possibilities for software developers and researchers to use democratized “skeletal tracking” capabilities to understand the human body. With the announcement of Kinect for Azure, the ecosystem providing intelligence and perception capabilities on the edge is getting richer and it is a good time to understand what developers can do with Skeletal Tracking.
This session will discuss skeletal tracking and introduce some simple math concepts that are helpful to reason on the provided tracking data. Tips and guidance how to build applications that work with skeletal tracking systems will empower developers to get started immediately.
Attendees will learn about specific scenarios like human posture recognition, fall detection, or energy expenditure estimation for sports applications and how those scenarios can be implemented in their own applications.
Successful hackathons: value for organizations and hackers, experiences as organizer or participants
Hackathons are a hot topic in digital transformation to unleash hidden potential in your organization or across your industry. On an individual level, they can also help you to dive into new subject matters, empower you to work on something you always wanted to work on, or even change your career path. What different types of hackathons exist? What value do hackathons have for organizations and for me? How do I prepare for a hackathon?
After organizing, mentoring, and participating in various hackathons, I see it is necessary to share my bigger picture view of hackathons for a larger audience. Often the unanticipated was the most interesting of the participation. I will provide tips for both organizers and participants.
Mixed Reality - It's all about that space, not pixels
Most coverage of Mixed Reality, especially about Microsoft HoloLens is all about great looking applications with pretty looking pixels.
I hate to break it to you: But it's all about that space, not pixels.
In this session we will talk about scenarios you can implement when utilizing spatial information.
It can be all about you, as the user: Where are you? What are you looking at? How do you roam around?
But it can also be about making smart use of the space around you.
We will discuss various ways to make use of spatial information in solutions. Comfortably leave your safe space and dive into Mixed Reality.
Red-Teaming your own prompts
Generative AI can create wonderful but also horrible things. With it come new types of risks and attack vectors on systems.
In this session the presenter talks about some of his experiences trying to understand risks and limitations by "red-team"ing his own usage.
The presenter will share observations he made as to some of the patterns that he believes can often circumvent prompt- or content filter-based protections.
With plenty of hands-on examples some of the unique properties of Large Language Models will be explored, and the cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders will be discussed.
You will also hear about various attack vectors that you may need to defend against when building AI systems based on Large Language Models or even building Large Language Models.
Furthermore you will also get some insights into existing "off-the-shelf" solutions such as various Copilots that can be exposed through Red-Teaming and gain an understanding how your own solutions may be subject to similar attacks.
Andreas Erben
CTO for Applied AI and Metaverse at daenet
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, United States
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