My Key Takeaways from Amazon AI Conclave 2019

For over 20 years, Amazon has been investing deeply in Artificial Intelligence. Today, Machine learning (ML) algorithms drive many of their internal systems. It's also core to the capabilities their customers experience – from the path optimisation in their fulfilment centres, and Amazon.com’s recommendations engine, to Echo powered by Alexa, their drone initiative Prime Air, and even their new retail experience Amazon Go. The e-commerce giant is now on a bigger mission to share their learnings and ML capabilities as fully managed services, and put them into the hands of every developer and data scientist. The Amazon AI Conclave is a step in that direction.

The Conclave brought together key contributors from the AI ecosystem, showcasing leading work in the field and driving broader awareness and adoption of AI. This year, the event had both business and technical sessions, awards, demos, showcases and enterprise and investor connection sessions.

I attended the technical edition which happened on Day 2, which had 15+ breakout sessions across four tracks delivered by Amazon and industry experts. I will delve deep into technological sessions attended by me.

Keynotes

Amazon and its evangelists have still not recovered from the re:Invent 2019 fever. Every session which had Amazon employees as speakers started with the typical AI stack at Amazon and the new services launched by AWS this year.

AWS re:Invent 2019 update

by Denis Batalov, Worldwide Technical Leader, ML & AI, AWS

The first keynote was on the re:Invent 2019 updates and the services announced by AWS. The most noticeable one for this conference was the AWS ML Stack which had pretty heavy feature rich portfolio of services.

Software –Your Journey from Data to Insight

by Akanksha Balani, Region lead -Intel? Software

The second keynote started with Intel and AWS 13+ year engineering relationship, building custom hardware to ensure AWS services run on a platform optimized for customer workloads at the best value.

“We all know that cloud computing has taken over the entire world, but for it to be effective and for it perform - It needs 3 things - performance, performance and performance”, says Akanksha Balani.

Intel made its vision for AI loud and clear. The unveiling of oneAPI and a lot of talk about the convergence of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence, along with building foundations of exascale computing were key takeaways from the event.

Intel’s ambitions to have a unified programming model is steered by the recent paradigm shift in the way hardware is being used for deep learning applications. 

With oneAPI, Intel marks a game-changing evolution from today’s limiting, proprietary programming approaches to an open standards-based model for cross-architecture developer engagement and innovation.

Alexa, what can I do now?

by Sohan Maheshwar, Evangelist, Alexa Skills

“Voice interface is the new wave in AI” said by Sohan Maheshwar, Evangelist, Alexa Skills speaks about how they are making the Alexa smarter and making it more relevant with AI.

An energy packed super informative keynote on various skills which Alexa has to offer. It revealed a slew of Echo devices, Alexa-powered wearables. The session had the right mix of humor, knowledge and the wow-factor!

Amazon SageMaker: Rapid Model Development

by Vidhi Kastuar — Senior Product Manager, Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker: Building and Managing ML Pipelines at scale

by Mukesh Karki — Engineering Manager, Amazon SageMaker

Both of these sessions were a repeat of the keynote on new features of Amazon Sagemaker.

AWS launched Amazon SageMaker Studio which they claim unifies all the tools needed to develop ML models. The single IDE is meant to help developers "write code, track experiments, visualize data, and perform debugging and monitoring all within a single, integrated visual interface."

Amazon SageMaker Studio offers five experiences of note. First, Amazon SageMaker Notebooks helps users create and share Jupyter notebooks. The Amazon SageMaker Experiments feature lets devs organize, track, and compare ML jobs. AWS says that these jobs can be "training jobs, or data processing and model evaluation jobs run with Amazon SageMaker Processing." Next, the Amazon SageMaker Debugger is set up for debugging and analyzing model training issues, with real-time advice for optimizing models. Related, Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor detects "quality deviations for deployed models." Finally, Amazon SageMaker Autopilot gives devs the option to build models automatically by inspecting data sets to generate models.

Then they introduced Amazon SageMaker multi-model endpoints which allows to deploy multiple trained models to an endpoint and serve them using a single serving container, thus saving on inference costs.

Order Forecasting for Wastage Reduction in Quick Service Restaurants & Food Retail

by Anjna Bhati — Head-Data Analytics & AI, BluePi Consulting Pvt Ltd

BluePi shared the challenges faced by quick service restaurants in their daily business and how it is affecting their profits as well as causing a big wastage of food. They work in providing retail optimization solutions that are tailor-made keeping their specific supply chain nuances. The session was followed by a quick answer the question contest.

Here are some more photos from the event...

Demo

a) Wipro: HOLMES? E-KYC Controller/Financial Extractor.

b) Blazeclan: Real Time actionable insights and sentiment analytics.

c) Lumiq: Autom8.ai — Automating customer center and enhanced customer experience.

d) Quantiphi: AthenasOwl — AI Product for Video content analysis and tagging.

e) AWS DeepComposer - AWS DeepComposer is world's first musical keyboard combined with a generative AI service to create a melody that will transform into a completely original song in seconds.

f) Rephrase.ai — Generative AI tools to ease video creation just by typing text.

I personally liked the demo by “Quantiphi”. The number of analytics they run over a single video clip is mind boggling. AI and ML are here to rule the data…!

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After visiting such an amazing event, I have to believe that...

“Data is the new Disruptor”

Lastly need to mention the delicious food and some souvenir