Richard is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Azure. He is Director of Elastacloud which is a Data Science consultancy working across key business sectors such as retail, finance, engineering and others.

As well as his role in business, Richard is 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 he has become proficient in C++, C#, Java, Scala, Python and R and he mixes and matches these skills for his customers and community on a daily basis.

Richard loves speaking to new audiences on aspects of cloud, data science and data platform and have spoken all across Europe over the last few years.

He is a strong advocate of communities and over the years founded @ukazure and a few others.

As an advocate for child education in IT Richard has been working closely with Code Club in the UK. His 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.

Talk to Richard about: Microsoft Azure, Big Data, Apache Spark, Statistics, Machine Learning, Deep Learning