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Highlights from FOSSASIA Open Tech Summit 2017

  • By Microsoft + Open Source, Microsoft’s commitment to open source is ingrained in our business. Investments in this space began several years ago and continue to be reinforced through technology decisions, partner momentum, customer adoption, and community contributions.
a group of people standing in front of a crowd

In an unprecedented partnership, Microsoft and FOSSASIA (the largest open source technology advocate in Asia) worked together to showcase Microsoft’s commitment towards open source software (OSS) communities through the FOSSASIA Open Tech Summit 2017 event, as well as the satellite community events and influencer engagements. There were more than 500 OSS developers from around the region who witnessed key Microsoft technologies, including Azure, LUIS Cognitive Services, and Visual Studio.
FOSSASIA 2017 - Attendees in Singapore

Networking session for FOSSASIA Summit Speakers

A Networking session was held for FOSSASIA Summit speakers. These speakers are influencers of OSS technologies who flew in from around the region to Singapore for the FOSSASIA Summit. Microsoft was honored to be the chosen partner to host them. The 30 speakers attended the networking event to get to know one another, as well as to share ideas and feedback for the event.

Andrey Terekhov, Delivering keynote at FOSSASIA

Andrey Terekov, delivering keynote at FOSSASIA

The Summit and Mission Mars Workshop

The FOSSASIA Open Tech Summit 2017 was a two-day engagement that was attended by more than 3000 OSS developers and practitioners. Andrey Terekov (Microsoft OSS Lead for Asia Pacific) delivered the plenary (keynote) session for the Summit.

Dr. Graham Williams (Microsoft Director of Data Science) and Ben Sadeghi (Advance Analytics GBB) delivered the track sessions – Machine Learning using Open Source R and Introduction to CNTK respectively.

The Mission Mars Workshop is another collaboration with FOSSASIA on top of the regular summit sessions. The FOSSASIA content team saw the content and the fun that the workshop could bring, hence they partnered with Microsoft to host the workshop onsite at the summit. This workshop was done with support from Corp DX, allowing OSS content to be fused into the Mission Mars challenge.
In this rendition of the Mission Mars challenge, Microsoft exposed Azure to the OSS crowd through the use of Microsoft’s open source Bot Framework and LUIS Cognitive Services. The participants experienced Azure by hosting a bot in the cloud to help the crew stranded on Mars to identify objects through image recognition and also keeping them up-to-date of the happenings on Earth through news updates. An average of 1.5 hours was needed for the participants to complete all missions.
FOSSASIA Mission To Mars

Some feedback from FOSSASIA partners and attendees

“Microsoft is the most active and committed partner this year and we really look forward to further the partnership with Microsoft in OSS advocacy.” – Hong Phuc Dang, Founder, FOSSASIA
“The workshop was great, it was nice to be able to experience these technologies.” – Cendekia Putra, Developer, Indonesia
“The Staff (MSPs) were helpful, thanks to them that I could complete the workshop” – Clement Wee, Developer, Singapore

Microsoft + Open Source
Microsoft’s commitment to open source is ingrained in our business. Investments in this space began several years ago and continue to be reinforced through technology decisions, partner momentum, customer adoption, and community contributions.

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