Azure Machine Learning. What is that anyway? And even more important, how do I use it? Those questions were discussed by Hassan al Mokdad and Cherif Haidra during their Machine Learning workshop at Accenture. Twenty participants were present and left the workshop happy and satisfied at the end of the day.

In short, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning is a tool you can use to build, test, and deploy predictive analytics solutions on your data. Difficult, isn’t it? Hassan and Cherif taught the basics to a group of twenty talented refugees, with backgrounds in data science, mathematics and IT. We started with an introduction, explaining clouds.

Cherif: “In part one of the training, I have had the opportunity to give the Cloud Training where I gave an introduction of cloud and provided the insight on the three main cloud services that are Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).”

After the introduction, Hassan explained more about Azure Machine Learning. After a nice lunch, the participants went to work for the rest of the day on their own laptops. Hassan took the participants through different steps and processes of Machine Learning. The participants were motivated and asked a lot of questions. Several participants already had a lot of experience in the field of machine learning, but even without experience it turned out to be an interesting training:

Waleed: “It’s really interesting for me. I did not know anything about Azure Machine Learning, so it is a lot of information, but very interesting.”

After the training, Hassan and Cherif tell how they experienced the training. Hassan: “I was surprised by the skills and experience this group has, a lot of them were actually data scientist experts. This made the course a lot more interactive and attractive for the attendees, and a lot of nice discussions popped out!”

Cherif: “Giving this training was very inspiring to me as a trainer. The training was interactive as the participants were interested in the topic and they came up with lots of inspirational questions.”

The day after the workshop, we received an email from one of the participants saying: “I found it very useful to learn Microsoft Azure and Machine Learning and the opportunities those provided us.”