New Name for Our Blog

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You would have noticed that the Machine Learning Blog now has a new name, namely the Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog.

Curious why? Read on...

When we launched the Machine Learning blog in the summer of 2014, Microsoft had just announced an early preview version of Azure Machine Learning, an innovative fully-managed cloud service designed to democratize ML. Azure ML would make it easy for data scientists and developers to embed predictive analytics into their apps, and help their organizations discover actionable insights from their mountains of data. And the goal for the blog was to share our progress in the fields of big data analytics and ML, keeping things grounded in the practical expertise that Microsoft had accumulated (and continues to accumulate) in this space.

Of course, extracting value from big data and analytics is a much broader problem than is addressed by just ML alone. Correspondingly, there have been several other investments and developments at Microsoft during the past couple of years. Among other things:

  • We acquired Revolution Analytics, a leading provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. We have since released Microsoft R Server, Microsoft R Open, R Tools for Visual Studio, and embedded R Services in SQL Server 2016.
  • We released many leading-edge cloud services during that time - a list that, in addition to Azure ML, includes Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Catalog, Azure HDInsight (Hadoop) as well as preview versions of Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Data Lake.
  • We announced a new suite of services from Microsoft that packages the above cloud services (and other related ones) into a single offering, making it easy for customers to get all the tools for their big data and advanced analytics needs in one place. This suite, recently enhanced with "intelligent" Cognitive Services APIs and the ability to create agents via the Bot Framework, was renamed the Cortana Intelligence Suite - a name that reflects our company's all up bet on Cortana and intelligence.

Meanwhile, our blog posts were attracting a global audience of tens of thousands of data professionals such as yourself, people with an inherent passion around big data and analytics, eager to learn more about this space and the very latest developments in it. Our engineering teams have benefited tremendously from all your comments and feedback that we have received during this time.

Things have clearly come a long ways since our initial blog launch, and today's name change merely reflects our evolution. As before, we will continue to bring you interesting new posts about the machine learning, analytics and data science space, and share Microsoft's own unique insights and offerings pertaining to it.

So continue to stay tuned. And, if you didn't do so already, subscribe to the blog feed here.

Cortana Intelligence & ML Blog Team