Last week I had the pleasure of giving an open AI workshop for the awesome Girls who Code Iasi community. They had approached me earlier this year about such a workshop, and I suggested teaching the audience about Azure Automated Machine Learning, since this is a topic near and dear to me - I think it’s a great way for beginners to start dabbling with machine learning, and for experts to have something up and running in no time.

Long title, I know 🤫. It used to be shorter, as some earlier versions of this talk were called ‘Predicting Survivability on the Titanic’, but this time I wanted to experiment a bit and make it real easy for the audience to decide whether or not this would be interesting for them. And so they did. You see, they wanted to learn more about machine learning. And, the way I see it, the two tools I talked about - Azure Machine Learning Studio and Kaggle Competitions - can help you get started with ML, while also making it fun to do so.

This is a more detailed version of my Boy meets Girl talk, created specially for Microsoft Ignite | The Tour Amsterdam 2019. Whereas Boy meets Girl was mostly focused on how to deploy a trained model using either Azure ML Service or ML Studio, here I wanted to create a more in-depth comparison of the two tools. This is what led me to the concept of having multiple rounds, with the audience voting for their favourite tool (truth be told, I think I just wanted another go at delivering something similar to my TypeScript versus CoffeeScript talk 🤓).

This was a fun talk to write :). Ever since I saw Azure ML Service being announced, I knew I wanted to compare it with ML Studio, a tool with which I had a bit more experience. And so I did. Since 45 minutes is nowhere near enough to compare the two tools (lesson re-learned the hard way while designing Service versus Studio), I decided to only compare their deployment capabilities, given an already trained model.