Incremental Group was delighted to contribute to the Celebration of STEM event at Glasgow Science Centre, organised by SCDI. Over 300 primary and secondary school children from all over Scotland attended to celebrate science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Over 50 STEM clubs were invited to participate in challenges held by leading partners in STEM industries.
Incremental STEM Ambassadors, Craig Porteous and Zoe Mackay, designed an emoji based challenge for the participants built on Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft Power Platform, to show the budding technologists how AI, machine learning and cognitive processing work in practice.
As part of the Incremental Emoji Challenge, children were asked to pick a card with an emoji on it, representing an emotion. They then had to take a photo of them expressing that emotion. Microsoft Azure’s cognitive services machine learning then graded the photo based on which emotions it detected, and displayed their matching score and photo on a Power BI report.
Thanks to the speed and sophistication of the Microsoft suite of applications, the STEM clubs were able to see their photos appear and scored in real time, allowing them to work together to achieve better scores. Although the concept of facial recognition was nothing new to most of the children, this was the first time they had the chance to experiment with it and gain an understanding of cognitive processing.
Craig Porteous, Senior Data Engineer at Incremental and Microsoft MVP, said,
“It was great fun to get involved with the Celebration of STEM event in Glasgow. As a registered STEM Ambassador, it was a brilliant opportunity to support the next generation of digital technologists and show them what Microsoft Azure can do.”
Following the challenges, MSP Clare Adamson presided over the prize-giving where schools were awarded a share of funding for further STEM based activities.
As well as supporting the Young Engineers and Science Clubs (YESC) and the SCDI in delivering the Celebration of STEM, Incremental Group is also involved in many other initiatives aimed at encouraging young people into technology careers. Incremental proudly supports the Digital Xtra Fund.
