Machine learning and functional programming are two exciting programming trends of the recent years. To a newcomer, both of these may sound very complicated. If you attend this workshop, you'll see that this could not be further from the truth. We will look at solving real-world machine learning problems with the functional-first programming language F# and you'll see that this is a perfect match - functional programming makes it easy to express machine learning algorithms in a clear and easy to understand way.

In this workshop, we'll implement a machine learning algorithm for automatically detecting the language of text, using pages downloaded from Wikipedia (using an F# web crawler) as a training data set. Along the way you'll learn about machine learning concepts, the F# language and the functional approach to data processing.

What you can expect to learn:

• How to use F# to implement machine learning algorithms
• Writing simple code using functional style
• The core ideas behind artificial neural networks

No prior machine learning or F# knowledge is needed.

About the speaker...

Evelina Gabasova

Evelina is a Senior Research Data Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national centre for data science and artificial intelligence. She is passionate about making data science understandable and accessible to everyone. She originally started as a programmer but got interested in machine learning early on and did a mathematics PhD at the University of Cambridge. During her PhD, she worked on Bayesian models for unsupervised learning that integrate heterogeneous biomedical datasets. After that, she worked in cancer research at the MRC Cancer unit in Cambridge, where she focused on helping biologists analyse genomic data.

C# is a great language for developing Line of Business applications but F# is even better! If you want to write code that expresses your requirements clearly, ensures correctness and supports rapid and fun development then guess what, F# does all that and more! In this session we will explore how the F# type system helps us to create domain models that we can use in any .Net application. No prior experience of F# is necessary for this session but be warned, once you've seen what F# can do, you won't want to go back to C#!

About the speaker...

Ian Russell

Ian Russell has nearly 20 experience as a hands-on software developer/solution architect, specialising in data-intensive OLTP solutions on the Microsoft stack.

He is a regular speaker at user groups throughout the Midlands delivering sessions on a range of topics including ASP.NET MVC, MicroORMs, RavenDb, MongoDb and Dependency Injection. He is a co-founder of CraftyCoders, a principles-focused user group for the West Midlands .Net community.

Handling errors, asynchronous computations, and hiding the behind-the-scenes plumbing are just some of the use cases of computation expressions. They can be a little bit tricky to learn, specially at the start.

In this hands-on workshop we'll learn how to use some common computation expressions with varying levels of difficulty and then learn how to roll our own computation expressions from scratch.

About the speaker...

Andrea Magnorsky

I ended up as a Software Developer, I am pretty sure there was no other viable option. My current technical interests are F#, games, programming languages and philosophy of computing . I really enjoy finding different ways to write code, sometimes for performance, other times for succinctness, sometimes, just because you can, there is no better way to learn than trying. When I am not working I tend to play with Haskell or other languages or cats Conferences and meetups are a great way to learn more, so I try to help when I can to make them happen. For that reason I co-organise Functional Kats and GameCraft. I also speak at local and international conferences like CodeMesh, Progressive.Net, ProgF#, Lambda Days and many more.

Follow Andrea on her Roundcrisis twitter or her programming-focused twitter, and check out BatCat Games here.

Nerd Dinner is the canonical example of a MVC application and is very familiar to web devs who want to learn MVC the Microsoft way. For everything that Nerd Dinner is, it is not terribly smart, for example, there are no business rules outside of some basic input validation. The tutorial is going to take the Nerd Dinner forms over data and inject some analytics into the application. We will make the UI much more intelligent about who is using it and we will start predicting attendance of upcoming dinners. The session will use JavaScript, C# and F#. Basic statistics will be used.

You can see Nerd Dinner here and the walk-through here.

IMPORTANT

You will need to have Visual Studio in order to attend this workshop.

About the speaker...

Jamie Dixon

Jamie Dixon has been writing code for as long as he can remember and has been getting paid to do it since 1995. He was using C# and JavaScript almost exclusively until discovering F# and now combines all three languages for the problem at hand. He has a passion for discovering overlooked gems in data sets and merging software engineering techniques to scientific computing. When he codes for fun, he spends his time using the .NET Micro framework with Netduinos, Raspberry Pi2s, and the Kinect.

Jamie has a BSCS in Computer Science and has been a MCSD since 2001. He is the Chair of his town's Information Services Advisory Board and is an outspoken advocate for Open Data. He also is involved with his local .NET User Group (TRINUG) with an emphasis on data analytics, machine learning, and the internet of things (IoT).

Jamie's most recent failures is getting voted off of tech-ed idol for saying that end users are stupid, destroying several hundred dollars of robotic equipment in an ill-advised experiment involving lawnmowers, and finishing in the bottom 25% of a high-stakes Kaggle competition

Jamie lives in Cary, North Carolina with his wonderful wife Jill and their three awesome children: Sonoma, Sawyer, and Sloan. He blogs weekly at jamessdixon.wordpress.com and can be found on Twitter.

One of the myths about F# and functional programming is that it is only good for complex mathematics. This could not be further from truth. A web server is essentially a function from a request to a response and so functional programming is a perfect fit for it.

In this tutorial, you'll learn all you need to get started with building web applications in F# using the Suave.io server. We'll start with an walkthrough that introduces the basic F# concepts and constructs and uses them to build a simple interactive web site. By the end of the workshop, you'll write an application that accesses multiple external data sources asynchronously, presents data through a web page and can be easily deployed to Azure or Heroku.

You will learn:

· Domain modelling with F# - how can we model what data structures we're working with

· How to use F# type providers to access JSON-based REST services as well as XML and CSV files

· How to write web applications using Suave.io and how to deploy them to Heroku and Azure

Requirements:

· No prior knowledge of F# or Suave.io is required. You also don't need too much .NET knowledge, so people coming from other communities are more than welcome!

· You'll need a Mac, Windows or Linux laptop with F# installed. See www.fsharp.org for installation instructions.

About the speaker...

Tomas Petricek

Tomas is a computer scientist and open-source developer. He is a Visiting Researcher at the Alan Turing Institute working on tools for open data-driven storytelling. He wrote a popular book called "Real-World Functional Programming" and is a lead developer of several F# open-source libraries.

He is a partner at fsharpWorks where he provides trainings and consulting services. Tomas recently submitted his PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge focused on context-aware programming, but his most recent writings also includes two essays try to understand programming through the perspective of philosophy of science.

Tomas tweets at @tomaspetricek, and his website can be found here.

Read Tomas' Blog

Write your own Excel in 100 lines of F#

Cloud computing services offer unlimited and on-demand computational power including large amounts of data storage. The combination of built in support for asynchronous workflows, event combinators and data processing make F# uniquely suited to develop scalable cloud solutions efficiently. In this session we will build and deploy a service “in the cloud”, more specifically in Azure, leveraging its infrastructure for distributed computations across clusters of machines using Microsoft Orleans and the “Orleankka” library. Moreover, we will develop a simple mobile application to interact with the API of the deployed service.

Microsoft Orleans is a framework for .NET platform built by the Microsoft Research to simplify building and deploying cloud services that can scale to thousands of servers and millions of users. Orleankka is a powerful library which provides a set of API for supporting Microsoft Orleans framework in F#.

About the speaker...

Riccardo Terrell

Riccardo Terrell is a seasoned software engineer and Microsoft MVP who is passionate about functional programming. He is active in the .NET community and believes in polyglot programming as a mechanism for finding the right tool for the job.

He is currently working on NPL in F#, and his book, "Functional Concurrency in .NET", which features scaleable system development in F# and C#, will be released in the UK in 2018!

Private Eye is a profiler designed to be scripted in F# interactive. This give developers low level control over profiling data. This gives developers greater flexibility in how they investigate performance data. It not only allows developers to visualize the performance data the way they want to, but also to use all available date, unlike most commercially available which often throw away metrics on all but the most called methods/allocations.

In this tutorial you'll the basics of Private Eye. You'll learn how to show text tables of the data gathered in the F# console. You'll also learn how to use FSharp.Charting to visualize the data. Finally you'll see how to use F#'s agent/mailboxes to aggregated data to make it easier to understand.

Find out more about Private Eye

About the speaker...

Robert Pickering

Robert Pickering is a software engineer with an interested in using functional programming, particularly F#, to solve real world problems.

Concurrent/distributed programming is a brave new world that opens new challenges and opportunities. The introduction of abstractions such as MapReduce and LINQ has made it easier to tame cloud resources, but they can often be restrictive in the types of problems that they solve. A standout exception are the powerful asynchronous workflows -F#'s most significant intellectual export- which enable the articulation of asynchronous, concurrent and parallel code just as if it were sequential.

MBrace is an open source project that extends asynchronous workflows to the cloud setting. MBrace can leverage commodity cloud computing services, allowing instant deployment of distributed code to hundreds of CPU cores straight from Visual Studio.

In this tutorial we will be offering a brief introduction to multicore programming using async, progressing to distributed code using MBrace on Azure. Examples of computations will be covered, progressing from the sequential, on to multicore, to the distributed context. In the process we will be exposing the differing qualities inherent in multicore and distributed code. This will be a hands-on tutorial, so an available Azure account will be required to work on the examples.

http://mbrace.io/

About the speakers...

Eirik Tsarpalis

Eirik George Tsarpalis is software engineer at Jet Dublin, a mathematician and .NET developer who's been writing F# for the past 6 years.

He's core developer and primary contributor to the MBrace project and has authored an assortment of open source tools including FsPickler, Argu, Vagabond and QuotationCompiler.

Isaac Abraham

Isaac Abraham is an F# MVP and a .NET developer since .NET 1.0 with an interest in cloud computing and distributed data problems. He nowadays lives in both the UK and Germany and is the director of Compositional IT. He specializes in consultancy, training and development, helping customers adopt high-quality, functional-first solutions on the .NET platform.