Earlier this year at the QCon.ai conference, I gave a short presentation, "The Case for R, for AI developers". I also presented an interactive workshop, using R and the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs, to automatically generate captions for images, and to create a tool to recognize images of hotdogs. Video from both the presentation, and the workshop (which starts at the 10:00 mark), is now available to view the QCon.ai website.
You can find the slides for the presentation here. The R code for the "Not Hotdog" workshop is available as an Azure Notebook which you can clone and use to follow along with the workshop.
InfoQ: R for AI developers