Dr. Thomas K Abraham is a cloud solution architect (advanced analytics and AI) at Microsoft in the South Central Region of the USA. Since January 2016, he's been assisting organizations in leveraging technologies such as SQL, Spark, Hadoop, NoSQL, BI, and AI on Azure. Prior to that, Thomas spent 10 years in Ecolab, where he designed algorithms for IoT devices and built solutions for anomaly detection. In the oil and gas division, he designed and built customer-facing analytics solutions for multiple super majors. His work was focused on preventing equipment failure by modeling corrosion, scale, and other stresses. He has a PhD in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2005. His thesis focused on the use of nonlinear optimization with reaction models. Parashar Shah is a Senior Program Manager in the Azure Machine Learning platform team.Currently, he works on making Azure Machine Learning services the best place to do e2e machine learning for building custom AI solutions using big data. Previously at Microsoft, he has been a Data Scientist and a Data Solutions Architect in various Cloud and AI teams. Prior to joining Microsoft, Parashar worked at Nokia Networks as a Solutions Architect & Product Manager building customer experience analytics solutions for global telcos. He also co-founded a carpooling startup, which helped employees carpool safely. He has 10+ years of global work experience. He is an alum of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Gujarat University. Jen Stirrup is a data strategist and technologist, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), and a Microsoft Regional Director, a tech community advocate, a public speaker and blogger, a published author, and a keynote speaker. Jen is the founder of a boutique consultancy based in the UK, Data Relish, which focuses on delivering successful business intelligence and artificial intelligence solutions that add real value to customers worldwide. She has featured on the BBC as a guest expert on topics relating to data. Lauri Lehman is a data scientist who is focused on machine learning tools in Azure. He helps customers to design and implement machine learning solutions in the cloud. He works for the software consultancy company, Zure, based in Helsinki, Finland. For the past 4 years, Lauri has specialized in data and machine learning in Azure. He has worked on many machine learning projects, developing solutions for demand estimation, text analytics, and image recognition, for example. Lauri has previously worked as an academic researcher in theoretical physics, after obtaining his PhD on topological quantum walks. He still likes to follow the progress of modern physics and is eagerly a waiting the era of quantum machine learning! Anindita Basak is a cloud architect with almost 15+ years of experience, the last 12 years of which she has been extensively working on Azure. She has delivered various real-time implementations on Azure data analytics, and cloud-native and real-time event-driven architecture for Fortune 500 enterprises, ranging from banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI)to retail sectors. She is also a cloud and DataOps trainer and consultant, and author of cloud AI and DevOps books. Ryan Murphy, one of the key Co-authors of Stream Analytics with Microsoft Azure is a Solution Architect living in Saint Louis, Missouri. He has been building and innovating with data for nearly twenty years, including extensive work in the gaming and agriculture industries. Currently, Ryan is helping some of the worlds largest organizations modernize their business with data solutions powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud.
