Author: Dr. Matt Wood

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has launched a multi-year, innovative research program on how machine learning can improve patient care, supported by an academic research sponsorship grant from AWS.  The Harvard Medical School-affiliated teaching hospital will use a broad array of AWS machine learning services to uncover new ways that machine learning technology can enhance […]

A research paper and associated article published yesterday made claims about the accuracy of Amazon Rekognition. We welcome feedback, and indeed get feedback from folks all the time, but this research paper and article are misleading and draw false conclusions. This blog post shares details which we hope will help clarify several ‎misperceptions and inaccuracies. […]

Today, I’m excited to share that, for the first time, the same machine learning courses used to train engineers at Amazon are now available to all developers through AWS. We’ve been using machine learning across Amazon for more than 20 years. With thousands of engineers focused on machine learning across the company, there are very […]

We’ve seen a ton of progress in machine learning during the past 12 months, with customers using Amazon SageMaker – a fully-managed service which has put ML into the hands of tens of thousands of developers and data scientists – to find fraud, predict pitches, and tune engines. We’ve added nearly 100 new features and […]

At AWS re:Invent last year we announced Amazon Comprehend, a natural language processing service which extracts key phrases, places, peoples’ names, brands, events, and sentiment from unstructured text. Comprehend – which is powered by sophisticated deep learning models trained by AWS – allows any developer to add natural language processing to their applications without requiring […]

This blog shares some brief thoughts on machine learning accuracy and bias. Let’s start with some comments about a recent ACLU blog in which they ran a facial recognition trial. Using Rekognition, the ACLU built a face database using 25,000 publicly available arrest photos and then performed facial similarity searches on that database using public […]

We have seen a lot of discussion this past week about the role of Amazon Rekognition in facial recognition, surveillance, and civil liberties, and we wanted to share some thoughts.

Amazon Rekognition is a service we announced in 2016. It makes use of new technologies – such as deep learning – and puts them in the hands of developers in an easy-to-use, low-cost way. Since then, we have seen customers use the image and video analysis capabilities of Amazon Rekognition in ways that materially benefit both society (e.g. preventing human trafficking, inhibiting child exploitation, reuniting missing children with their families, and building educational apps for children), and organizations (enhancing security through multi-factor authentication, finding images more easily, or preventing package theft). Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not the only provider of services like these, and we remain excited about how image and video analysis can be a driver for good in the world, including in the public sector and law enforcement.

Dr. Matt Wood is the GM of Artificial Intelligence at AWS I sat down with Simon Elisha from the AWS Podcast to talk about the emerging world of artificial intelligence. In addition to speaking about Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition, and Apache MXNet, we also do a little reminiscing about days gone by. Listen now on SoundCloud Like the […]