Richard Conway
My name is Richard Conway. I'm a Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Azure. I'm a Director of Elastacloud which is a Data Science consultancy working across key business sectors such as retail, finance, engineering and others.
As well as my role in business, I'm an author of books and courses and a key contributor to Apache open source projects with a love for all things cloud and data. Over the years I've become proficient in C++, C#, Java, Scala, Python and R and I mix and match these skills for my customers and community on a daily basis.
I love speaking to new audiences on aspects of cloud, data science and data platform and have spoken all across Europe over the last few years.
I'm a strong advocate of communities and over the years founded @ukazure and a few others.
As an advocate for child education in IT I've been working closely with Code Club in the UK. My most recent community contribution has been AzureCraft, an annual two day event for developers, parents and kids to teach the Cloud and Programming through Minecraft.
Richard Conway's Sessions
Fuzzy Matching with Azure OpenAI Vector EmbeddingsSQLBits 2025
This session will look to use new Vector Embeddings features in Azure Services, prompt engineering along with new AI patterns and practices to build AI-led fuzzy matching for Enterprise use cases. We'll look at novel non-search use cases where embeddings become a powerful and quick tool to solve a common class of problem in a new way.
Performance Optimization with Azure DatabricksSQLBits 2020
Azure Databricks has become one of the staples of big data processing. See how to make the most of it by understanding how Spark works under the covers.
Machine Learning at Scale with Apache SparkSQLBits 2017
Richard will show you, from no knowledge of Spark, how to navigate the Spark framework ecosystem and build complex batch and near real time applications that use Spark's machine learning library mllib
Time Travel with Azure MLSQLBits 2016
This session looks at building time series analysis with AzureML in R
Performance Optimization with Azure DatabricksSQLBits 2020
Azure Databricks has become one of the staples of big data processing. See how to make the most of it by understanding how Spark works under the covers.
Machine Learning at Scale with Apache SparkSQLBits 2017
Richard will show you, from no knowledge of Spark, how to navigate the Spark framework ecosystem and build complex batch and near real time applications that use Spark's machine learning library mllib