Back in June, Microsoft first revealed Azure ML will be available as public preview in July. Azure ML allows organizations to create new solutions that bring together big data insights, the Internet of things and predictive analytics. In current scenario, machine learning is usually self-managed and on premises, requiring the training and expertise of data scientists. Since, data scientists are in short supply, commercial software licenses can be expensive and popular programming languages for statistical computing have a steep learning curve, Microsoft has come up with Azure ML. Azure ML is a fully-managed cloud service for building predictive analytics solution.
At the 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit which took place in Redmond, MSR announced a grants program for researchers and students.
There are two flavor of these access grants. The first is a data science instructional award which will provide an individual account on Azure ML for each student in an intermediate or advanced data science class, along with 500 GB of cloud data storage for each student. The second is a research collaboration award which will provide a shared workspace on Azure ML, along with 10 TB of cloud data storage, to enable a group of researchers interested in hosting a data collection in Microsoft Azure ML to discover and share predictive models.
Read more about the MSR Azure ML grant program here.