Microsoft Reactor

Are you part of any group chats? Do you need to coordinate with friends & family? Do you sometimes forget to remember something? We do! Bots allow for new interactions with a message centric interface instead of the user interfaces we are used to. As such they are a perfect answer to our questions. They can be part of group chats to coordinate with friends & family and keep us accountable for these small tasks in life.

What is this session about?
Together we will build a a shared shopping list as a chatbot using the Microsoft Bot Framework. The chatbot uses the LUIS API for natural language processing to find out the chat participant's intent (add a shopping list item, mark an item as done, remove an item from the shopping list, ...) and entities (5 kg bananas, three apples, 2 liters of orange juice, ...).
If any information is missing, the bot starts a dialogue with the chat participants to retrieve the remaining information needed. Afterwards, the Azure Function for the respective intent is called which operates (add, update, delete) on a Cosmos DB.

Who is it aimed at?
Developers with no prior knowledge about chat bots, that want to learn more about building bots and have a basic understanding of any programming language.

Why should I attend?
This workshop will guide you through building a real world bot with zero knowledge about any of the technologies we are using. Because this is a full stack scenario you will also learn more about language understanding with LUIS, non relational databases with Cosmos DB and serverless computing through Azure Functions.

What should I do now?
If this workshop interests you do not forget to add it to your calendar.
However, basic understanding of any programming language will be helpful.

This event is presented by Sandro Speth & Malte Reimann, who are our Gold Microsoft Student Ambassadors.
Speakers Bio:
Sandro is an expert in cloud computing, component-based, service-oriented and microservice architectures, and model-driven software engineering. Currently, he is researching as a PhD student at the Software Quality and Architecture group of the University of Stuttgart in those topics. Before, he studied M.Sc. Software Engineering and B.Sc. Computer Science. Additionally, he loves to give talks and lectures in this area and teach object-oriented programming to beginners.

Malte is an expert in technology. Which one? Well, that is hard to say. From cloud computing, artificial intelligence, smart contracts, game development to low level system programming; many areas are interesting to him. Furthermore, human aspects of technologies are important. Such as ethics and sustainability. Hence, he is grateful to be in a life situation were he can explore. Currently, he is completing his Bachelor degree in Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of technology. In his leisure time he likes to learn new technologies and share his learnings with others at events.