From Data to AI: Loan Approval Prediction with VSC & Microsoft Fabric
How can we turn raw data into intelligent predictions using modern data science tools? Join us for a hands-on session where we explore a real-world FinTech use case: Loan Approval Prediction. We’ll walk through the data science workflow, from exploring and preparing data to building a machine learning model, while connecting the power of Visual Studio Code (VS Code) with Microsoft Fabric. In this session, you’ll discover how VS Code and Microsoft Fabric work together to support a seamless data science workflow, including working with Fabric notebooks and bringing machine learning concepts into practice. What You’ll Learn: Explore a real-world loan approval prediction use case. Understand the key steps of a data science and machine learning workflow. Work with data and develop a predictive model using Python. Connect VS Code with Microsoft Fabric and work with Fabric notebooks. Explore how Microsoft Fabric supports end-to-end data science workflows. Who Should Attend? This session is ideal for data science enthusiasts, data analysts, aspiring machine learning practitioners, and anyone interested in exploring Microsoft Fabric and integrating it into their data science workflow. Let’s connect data, code, and AI to turn insights into predictions! Time: 07:00 PM (Sudan) | 8:00 PM (Saudi Arabia) | 05:00 PM (CST) Join us for an interactive, hands-on session filled with practical insights, real-world applications, and valuable discussions on how data science, machine learning, and Microsoft Fabric can transform data into intelligent predictions. Join us: - User Group - LinkedIn - Join us on WhatsAppFabCon 2026 Barcelona: Beyond the Announcements
Data Engineers in Toronto October 2026 Semimonthly Meeting Topic: FabCon 2026 Barcelona - Beyond the Announcements Abstract: What was it like to attend Microsoft's flagship Fabric conference in Barcelona? Which announcements generated the most excitement? And more importantly, which ones are likely to matter in real-world customer projects? Join me for an informal recap of FabCon 2026 as I share photos, conference highlights, conversations with Microsoft engineers and community members, and a curated selection of Fabric announcements that caught my attention. Speaker: Alexander Turlov, Principal Consultant at Alta Computing Speaker Profile: Alexander Turlov is a professional consultant, specializing in cloud data architecture and Microsoft Fabric solutions. He helps organizations design scalable data platforms and integrate modern tools like GitHub Copilot and VS Code to accelerate development workflows. Alexander is a certified Microsoft Fabric Data Engineer and an active community contributor, sharing practical insights through presentations and workshops on AI-assisted data engineering and analytics. The meeting is over Microsoft Teams, and the joining link is https://vip.dataengineersintoronto.org/webinar See you at the meeting!TFPUG Oct 2026 Event: FabCon Data Eng Updates, Osmos AI & Medallion Architecture
Please read the registration instructions very carefully to make sure you can attend the event: You must register on the event page: TFPUG Oct 2026 Event: FabCon Data Eng Updates, Osmos AI & Medallion Architecture | Microsoft Fabric Community Complete the mandatory registration form required by the event host: Toronto Fabric & Power BI User Group Oct 2026 Event Registration Form (Please note that seating is limited and priority will be given only to attendees who complete this additional registration form) Register only if you are confident you can attend, as no-shows may prevent others from participating and result in wasted catering and event resources. Please arrive on time. We will begin promptly at 5:30 PM sharp and have a full agenda planned for the evening. We are excited to have our Oct 2026 event sponsored by Protiviti Canada and hosted at Robert Half Toronto Office. Join our learning session and live demo focused on Fabric Data Engineering, Osmos AI and Medallion Architecture, where you’ll learn more about those topics. In this event we are privileged to have 2 main speakers and one demo from one of our user group community members. Agenda: 5:30 - Doors Open 5:45 - Welcome and Intro | Ashraf Ghonaim and Haniel Croitoru 6:00 - FabCon Data Engineering Updates and Osmos AI | Anuyogam Venkataraman 6:45 - Building Trusted Analytics with Microsoft Fabric: A Practical Guide to Medallion Architecture | Yashvardhan Vashistha 7:30 - Empowering Executive Decision-Making with Power BI Copilot | Sudhir Mehta 8:00 - Networking Snack 8:30 - Closing Anuyogam Venkataraman, Senior Program Manager - Microsoft | FabCon Data Engineering Updates and Osmos AI: A valuable session covering the latest FabCon Data Engineering updates and the innovative capabilities of Osmos AI. The discussion provided insights into emerging trends, new features, and practical applications that can help organizations enhance their data engineering strategies and accelerate AI-driven innovation. Yashvardhan Vashistha, Manager - Technology Consulting at Protiviti | Building Trusted Analytics with Microsoft Fabric: A Practical Guide to Medallion Architecture: Organizations often struggle with inconsistent data quality, duplicate transformations, and a lack of trust in reporting. Microsoft Fabric addresses these challenges through Medallion Architecture, a modern data design approach that organizes data into Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers. This presentation explores how raw source data is ingested into a Bronze Lakehouse, transformed and validated in the Silver layer, and ultimately modeled into business-ready Gold datasets that support reporting, analytics, and AI initiatives. Sudhir Mehta, Manager at Tredence, an active member of our user group community, demonstrates "Empowering Executive Decision-Making with Power BI Copilot." This session will showcase how Power BI Copilot transforms complex data into clear, actionable insights, enabling executives to identify trends, uncover opportunities, and make faster, more informed decisions through AI-powered analytics. Learn practical ways leaders can leverage Copilot to enhance strategic decision-making and drive better business outcomes. Looking forward to seeing you all there at 5:30 pm sharp. TFPUG Team Toronto Fabric & Power BI User Group | Microsoft Fabric Community Toronto Fabric & Power BI User Group | Meetup Toronto Fabric & Power BI User Group | LinkedInTalk to Your Insurance Data: Better Answers Start with the Semantic Model
News and Announcements Jenn and Dean will begin with news and exciting announcements from FabCon handing it over to the guest speaker. Spotlight Content What if exploring data and building reports could start with a conversation? Generative AI can only be as effective as the data foundation behind it. In this session, we'll explore how semantic models influence the quality, accuracy, and business relevance of the answers users receive from conversational AI experiences across Power BI and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Using a client-neutral auto insurance claims semantic model, we'll compare how the same questions are interpreted and answered in Power BI reports, the Power BI service, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. You'll see firsthand why context matters, what drives trustworthy responses, and how semantic model design directly impacts the end-user experience. Next, we'll introduce an AI-powered semantic model assessment scorecard that evaluates AI readiness and identifies opportunities to improve terminology, business definitions, measures, and contextual metadata. Together, we'll review the findings, prioritize enhancements, and then use an AI agent to help implement those improvements within the model. Finally, we'll return to the original business questions and measure the impact of those enhancements, demonstrating how targeted semantic model improvements can significantly improve answer quality and user trust. Whether you're building semantic models, supporting analytics teams, or preparing your organization for AI-powered analytics, you'll leave with a practical framework to assess, improve, and accelerate AI readiness using agentic tools and modern data modeling practices. Key Takeaways Understand how conversational experiences differ across Power BI and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Learn what factors influence the quality and accuracy of AI-generated answers. Evaluate semantic models using an AI-readiness scorecard. Identify high-impact improvements to measures, terminology, and business context. Use AI agents to streamline semantic model optimization. Build semantic models that deliver more reliable, business-friendly AI experiences. Guest Speaker Amol Manocha Microsoft | Data, Analytics, and AI Amol Manocha is a Senior Data & AI Solution Engineer at Microsoft, helping insurance organizations turn complex data challenges into practical, AI-powered solutions. His work spans Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Copilot, and agentic analytics, with a focus on making data easier to explore, understand, and act on. Drawing from real-world customer scenarios, Amol brings a practical perspective on how AI is reshaping business intelligence, from conversational analytics to building trusted, intelligent data experiences. User Group Leaders
Open Source Sprint, Hyderabad's Open Source Hackathon (14–15 Oct)
Hi everyone, Open Source Sprint, Hyderabad's largest open source hackathon, is happening on 14–15 October 2026 at Malla Reddy University. 📅 14–15 Oct | Day 1: 10 AM–3 PM, Day 2: 9 AM–3 PM 🏆 Prizes worth ₹4.5 Lakh+ 👥 Teams of 2–4 | Open Innovation, no fixed tracks 🎟️ Free entry Build anything: data pipelines, dashboards, AI/ML apps, or tools on Fabric and Azure. All projects will be open sourced on GitHub. Organised by Beyond | Title Sponsor: ElevenLabs | Tech Partner: Unifesto 🔗 Register: unifesto.app/event/oss-beyond 🌐 Details: wegobeyond.in/open-source-sprint See you there! Microsoft Fabric, Data & AI Community HyderabadOpen Source Sprint 2026: Hyderabad's Largest Open Source Hackathon
Open Source Sprint is a free, in-person open source hackathon at Malla Reddy University, Hyderabad. 📅 14–15 October 2026 🏆 Prizes worth ₹4.5 Lakh+ 👥 Teams of 2–4 💡 Open Innovation, no fixed tracks 🎟️ Free entry Build anything: data pipelines, dashboards, AI/ML apps, or tools on Microsoft Fabric and Azure. All projects will be open sourced on GitHub. Organised by Beyond | Title Sponsor: ElevenLabs | Tech Partner: Unifesto 🔗 Register: https://unifesto.app/event/oss-beyond 🌐 Details: https://wegobeyond.in/open-source-sprint 📧 Queries: [email protected]Agentic Loops in the Data Stack: From Pipeline Failure to Auto-Remediation
Data Engineers in Toronto January 2027 Semimonthly Meeting Topic: Agentic Loops in the Data Stack: From Pipeline Failure to Auto-Remediation Abstract: Every data engineer knows the 2 AM pipeline failure, the one nobody notices until Friday's report is wrong. In this session, we break down five AI agents that are changing how data teams operate: from monitoring pipelines 24/7 and catching schema drift at ingestion, to closing the gap between a production failure and its root cause in minutes. We'll walk through real implementation patterns, including a baseline-learning monitoring agent and a tool-use driven incident response loop, and discuss what the shift to agentic data engineering actually means for the way teams are built and how engineers grow. Whether you're evaluating agents for your platform or already running them in production, you'll leave with concrete patterns you can apply immediately. Speaker: Varun Joshi, Senior Data Engineer at AWS Speaker Profile: Highly motivated and results-oriented Data Engineer with 12+ years of experience in designing, building,and optimizing scalable data pipelines and architectures.Proven expertise in data warehousing, ETL/ELT processes, and cloud platforms. Passionate about leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Designed and deployed AI-driven Data solutions, integrating LLM-powered coding assistants into Data Engineering to produce AI solutions for customers. Focused on leveraging LLMs and advanced engineering to build scalable, secure, and trustworthy platforms, resulting in significant efficiency gains, reduced on-call burden,and improved customer trust. Driving AI adoption across teams to enhance productivity, streamline deployments, and improve end-user experience. The meeting is over Microsoft Teams, and the joining link is https://vip.dataengineersintoronto.org/webinar See you at the meeting!Deep Dive into Scalable, AI-Ready Spark in Microsoft Fabric
Data Engineers in Toronto November 2026 Semimonthly Meeting Topic: Deep Dive into Scalable, AI-Ready Spark in Microsoft Fabric Abstract: In this session, we’ll take a practical deep dive into Spark-based data engineering in Microsoft Fabric. We’ll walk through proven techniques and repeatable patterns for solving common and advanced data engineering challenges, covering advanced Spark SQL functions, effective approaches to semi-structured data, and strategies for building reliable, maintainable pipelines. We will be focusing on Fabric-specific aspects of Spark Notebooks, including table optimization. AI-related capabilities in Fabric Spark will also be covered, including built-in and integrated functions that support text processing, enrichment, classification, and feature engineering directly within Spark workloads, along with guidance on where these functions fit. Speaker: Iurii Iurchenko, Sr Data Engineer at Life Line Screening Speaker Profile: Iuril is an Azure advocate, Fabcon speaker, Senior Data Engineer & Tech Lead with 13 years of deep, hands-on expertise in Data Analytics, Microsoft Fabric, and the Azure data ecosystem. 2x certified in Microsoft Fabric, with 6+ successfully delivered complex projects leveraging Microsoft Fabric. Two-time SQL Saturday speaker in San Diego, Top-1% ADPList mentor, former entrepreneur, and active OHDSI CDM contributor with 7 years in consulting and 6 years in product engineering. He brings a highly practical, frontier-level skillset at the intersection of Fabric, AI, and healthcare analytics. He is currently innovating at Life Line Screening, bringing the best of Microsoft Fabric to its modern data analytics platform. The meeting is over Microsoft Teams, and the joining link is https://vip.dataengineersintoronto.org/webinar See you at the meeting!Beyond the Prompt: Tuning Fabric Data Agents for Flawless Results
Data Engineers in Toronto August 2026 Semimonthly Meeting Topic: Beyond the Prompt - Tuning Fabric Data Agents for Flawless Results Abstract: As organizations race to deploy AI Agents, it quickly becomes clear that standard prompt engineering isn't enough. To achieve production-grade accuracy, you have to go beyond the prompt and fundamentally change how you feed your data layers to the AI. In Microsoft Fabric, your choice of data artifact directly dictates your agent's reasoning style and native language. In this session, we will deep-dive into how Fabric Data Agents interact with four distinct data paradigms: Semantic Models, Ontology, Data Warehouses, and Lakehouses. Moving past high-level theory, we will practically map the three pillars of data agent optimization across the data paradigms: Agent Instructions (System Prompts) Data Source Descriptions (Grounding) Example Queries (Few-Shot Prompting) You will walk away with an actionable blueprint showing you exactly how to write context rules, embed semantic metadata, and supply technical query examples to ensure your Fabric Data Agents deliver flawless, trusted results every time. Speaker: Thimantha Vidanagamage, Data Engineer at OMERS, Canada Speaker Profile: Thimantha has over 8 years of experience in Data and AI. He currently works as a Senior Data Engineer at OMERS in Canada, where he plays an active role in the organization’s adoption of Microsoft Fabric. He holds multiple Microsoft certifications, including Microsoft Certified: AI Transformation Leader and Fabric Data/Analytics Engineer Associate. Thimantha is also a co-organizer of the Toronto Data Professionals Community. The meeting is over Microsoft Teams, and the joining link is https://vip.dataengineersintoronto.org/webinar See you at the meeting!
Credit Unions User Group Monthly Meeting - August 2026
Join the Credit Union Fabric User Group Monthly Meeting Come connect with fellow users, learn from industry peers, and participate in an interactive discussion. This Month's Featured Session Vibe-Coded Power BI with ChatGPT Desktop and PBIP Presented by Devin Carlson, Homebase Credit Union Meeting Agenda Welcome & Announcements Featured Presentation Open Discussion & Questions Wrap-Up Date: Friday August 21, 2026 Time: 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM PST Location: Microsoft Teams We hope you'll join us for another great session and discussion!
