2021 - My Year in Review

It is time for a traditional end of year blogpost in which I try to summarise what happened during the year. Most of the happenings this year were still online, but it was great to get back to some in-person events in the second half of the year. I worked on some interesting projects, had many personal achievements, joined a new company, and overall for me it was a great year.

In January, Sherry List and I continued with the Maker Show, a series of monthly one hour shows which highlight awesome projects from the community that can inspire new creations and inventions. Maker Show is streamed live on Youtube and Microsoft Learn TV. In this episode we hosted Uri Shaked with his session about building a mind-bending Arduino based hardware puzzle "The Skull".

I co-hosted a Hello World series interview with Asim Hussain about sustainable software engineering in February. Sara Olsson joined us for the Maker Show with a session about "TinyML for wildlife conservation".

I had an opportunity to try out the Azure Percept device in an early preview, once it got announced in March I published my first blogpost about it, "Edge computing with Azure Percept". I helped out the production team of FTW Conf 2021, a free community conference celebrating International Women's Day. Kim Hedberg and I attended Microsoft’s Data & AI dat with session "Using AI to create smart sales". Peter Gallagher joined the Maker Show with session "Remote controlled Robot Arms with Raspberry Pi, .NET, Azure, Blazor and SignalR". Climate Hackathon took place online during week 12 tackling challenges NGOs are facing and having participants from all over the world, I was co-hosting daily streams and made a lot of work behind the scenes to make it happen.

In April, I co-hosted panel debates "How will AI change healthcare in the next years" and "Open Data & Data Collaboratives – to tackle the COVID-19 challenge". I held a session at NVIDIA's GTC conference on "Smart City - Video Analytics".

Global Azure communities around the world organised localised live streams for everyone to join and learn about Azure from the best-in-class community leaders, Kim Hedberg and I held a session on Global Azure Norway. What came a bit unexpected to me was being recognised as "Next Generation Leader 2021" from Whizlabs on their list of "150+ Top Global Cloud Thought Leaders and Next Generation Leaders of 2021". I worked on organisation and co-hosted streams of AI for Healthcare hackathon that took place online over 3 weeks from April to mid May, and it was great to work on this project with Microsoft, NVIDIA, SAS and Women in AI.

At end of April I made project with Azure Percept called Perceptmobile, I initially posted about project on Hackster, and followed up with blogpost on Microsoft’s Tech Community IoT Blog due to high interest in the project. I was happy to see Perceptmobile also got assembled by Michelle Sandford on the other side of the world in Perth, Australia.

Enterprise Architecture methodology and framework TOGAF? is used by the world’s leading organisations to improve business efficiency, I got TOGAF? 9.2 Foundation certified in May. I presented Perceptmobile at DevShow, series of weekly one hour show from developers to developers hosted by Sherry List and Rasmus Jaqué, and I also co-hosted next episode of DevShow with session from Eva Pardi on "Predicting earthquake damages with Azure ML workspaces". Lee Stott reached out asking for contributions to Microsoft's Tech Community Educator Developer Blog so I wrote blog post "Saving Tweety with Azure Percept".?Sherry List and I hosted a livestream on Microsoft Reactor Green Tech Series where we spoke with Climate hackathon winning teams. Kim Hedberg and I wrote a blogpost on "Industrial IoT and Preventive Maintenance" where we explained few scenarios how Azure Percept and its AI speech and vision capabilities can be used in the industry.

In June, I had the honour to judge projects in Microsoft Imagine Cup Junior 2021. Clifford Agius joined us for the Maker Show where he told us an amazing story of helping out young man Kayden, and how with use of modern technology we can improve lives.

During July, in the first week of JulyOT focused on content dedicated to "Artificial Intelligence at the Edge" my project Perceptmobile was featured amongst some other cool projects from the community. In my free time I spent some more time working with Azure Percept and I created a cool Air guitar project. I became a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and joined the MCT community of technical and instructional experts in Microsoft technologies. Pernilla Klein and I wrote a blogpost on "Using Azure Percept to build the next Smart Building", showcasing how AI on the Edge can be used by Real Estate.

In August, I published follow up blogpost "Detecting room occupancy with Azure Percept" on Microsoft’s Tech Community IoT Blog, which got featured on AzUpdate.

RLML 2021, a free mini conference focused on real life Machine Learning scenarios, took place online in September, and I held a session on "Azure Percept in Action". TechBBQ is one of the biggest tech events in the Nordic, it was great to attend an in-person conference and to be on stage again this time together with Sherry List and session on "Mind-Controlled Drones and Robots".

I was mentor and judge for "Data & AI hackathon" at?Zealand - Sj?llands Erhvervsakademi?(Zealand - Academy of Technologies and Business, Denmark).

Microsoft's Industry Circles Healthcare panel on "Innovation in action: how to accelerate the move from research to clinical practice" took place online, where we spoke on how to innovate in the healthcare domain by organising hackathons.

Microsoft Global Hackathon 2021, the largest private hackathon on this planet took place online in October, it was great to be part of it where I joined team led by Wassim Chegham and Olivier Leplus, I met some really cool people and it was great to see this hackathon project got awarded as Challenge Winner. Sherry List and I got invited by Michael Jonsson to hold sessions at Avanade Innovation Day held at Danish Architecture Center, where we spoke about mind controlling drones and robots and IoT at the edge.

In November, I held my session "Azure Percept in action" for Azure User Group Sweden, an online meetup hosted by Jonah Andersson and H?kan Silfvernagel. I joined Microsoft Ignite Watch Party by AI User Group hosted by?Ruth Yakubu?and?Alexander Wachtel where we spoke about new AI announcements from the conference. It was an honour to be a judge at Nordic Women in Tech Awards, and to announce the winner of "Innovator of the year" category at the conference.

I joined Pandora as Engineering manager in December where I lead the data infrastructure team. Located centrally in Copenhagen, Pandora Digital Hub is an awesome place to work, we have openings for many different IT roles especially in data engineering, if you are interested to work with me or want to hear more about it feel free to reach out.

At end of this year I kicked off syntheticAIdata project, web based tool for generation of synthetic data that is used to train and improve AI models. Project is supported by Microsoft for Startups and it is currently in the development stage, first demo videos will be published early next year, feel free to follow syntheticAIdata for updates.

As a small teaser for happenings in the next year check out the video below, "Microsoft Envision: Fast Forward on Innovation" will take place on January 21st, Sherry List and I will hold an inspirational session at the conference.

Writing this blog post gave me a great overview of what happened during the year and what I managed to achieve, and I can say that for me 2021 was an awesome year.

Huge thank you goes out to everyone who supported me or helped me out with making all these achievements happen! Thank you for reading, enjoy the holidays and all the best in the New Year!