Conclusions & Future Work

Conclusion

When the project was initially introduced to the team, there was great enthusiasm and a collective drive to try and make a fully fledged solution that can introduce something new and unique to the Data Science community. Throughout the project, the team stayed true and stuck to the development strategy which enabled great progress to be made early on. Good team chemistry and a broad skill-base meant that the team was able to adapt quickly to new development challenges introduced by client and customer feedback who demanded greater functionality and efficiency. The team worked with incredible efficiency with over 400 commits and almost 100 issues resolved within the given time-frame.

Microsoft was very pleased with the product we had delivered to them and praised the success of the product launch at the hack booth presentation. The team has developed a great attachment to this project as it was the product of hundreds of hours of dedicated work. Team neuron has learnt a great deal on how to listen and value the opinions of users and leverage the strengths of each individual member. The team has great confidence that the future of neuron is safe in the hands of Microsoft and we have no doubt that they will take great strides in enhancing the extension.

Future Work

The modular structure of the project allows new features to be implemented: neuron was built as a language-agnostic extension, such that new languages can be easily added in the future. One example would be integrating the C# kernel which was a project taken on by another Imperial group. Appropriate modifications to the back-end would enable neuron to support the C# language, as the front-end side remains a separate modular part of the project. A countless number of languages can be added this way and new features can also be added provided user requirements are a prime consideration.

This extension was envisioned to be an open source project, with intentions that Microsoft will publish it to the Visual Studio Marketplace for all users to access for free.