Category: Artificial Intelligence

What’s more fun than an all-night hackathon in Vegas? Why, a Vegas hackathon involving self-driving cars, of course. During AWS’s 2017 re:Invent conference, 25 teams were given kits to build an autonomous car that could learn how to drive around a track on its own. In this video, we explain what deep learning has to do with autonomous driving and how even a light-hearted Robocar Rally can have deeper implications for learning and the cloud.

Imagine, for a moment, that you discover an irregular mole on yourself. Whereas nowadays you still need to take time to schedule a dermatological appointment and then wait weeks to get your test results, Caltech Professor Pietro Perona is eagerly awaiting the day when you can snap a picture of the mole with your smartphone and then learn instantaneously if it’s dangerous or not. And he should know. As the co-creator, with Cornell Tech Professor Serge Belongie, of the AI and machine learning-based visual classification system Visipedia, Perona has spent the past seven years working on a “switchboard” that lets anyone, everywhere ask questions and immediately obtain an answer.

AWS’s annual re:Invent conference may not traditionally be known for its startup scene, but at this year’s iteration, Global Startup Evangelist Mackenzie Kosut took advantage of the massive event to chat with five hot startups for his Startups on Air video series.

Assigning credit risk to people who apply for business loans, credit cards, and home mortgages has mostly been done by weighing some 10 or 20 attributes. Take those attributes—and we’re all familiar with some of the things that make our credit scores rise and fall, including timeliness of payments, debt to income ratio, and defaults—and crank them through your favorite logistic regression model or scorecard. The result is your assigned credit risk, and depending on the number, you either get your loan or you don’t.

When Antoine Blondeau, the co-founder and chairman of Sentient Technologies, first began working with artificial intelligence, the concept was still known as “algorithmic science.” In the decades since, AI has evolved into a much sexier topic because, according to Blondeau, when operating on mission speed and plugged into the right workflow, AI will learn quicker and faster than humans—resulting in business models that can evolve at machine speed. “That is the revolution,” notes Blondeau.

Forget talking microwaves or smart refrigerators. To kick off his recent keynote speech on voice at Lisbon’s Web Summit technology conference, Dr. Werner Vogels began with a story about rice farmers.

In Season 4 of the hit HBO show, “Silicon Valley,” the character Jian Yang attempts to build an app that uses image recognition artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and label the foods in captured pictures. But there is a fairly major glitch: his app can only differentiate between hot dogs and… not hot dogs. Once I stopped laughing, the episode prompted a question that centers on my role as a Solutions Architect at AWS: How easily could I build my own hotdog identifying app? Turns out, pretty easily.

In their 2016 Forecast: Internet of Things (IoT) report, Gartner projected that 8.4 billion connected IoT devices will be in use by the end of 2017. That’s up 31% from 2016 with the greatest concentration of use in China, North America, and Western Europe. That’s why it’s no surprise that all of Amazon Web Services’ […]

Serverless. The Internet of Things. Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Nascent ideas that were barely mentioned at the first Web Summit in 2009 are now front and center eight years later. Such concepts are exciting, especially as they get adopted by more and more consumers, but they are also trickier to understand than one might […]

Guest post by Varun Badhwar, CEO and Cofounder, RedLock The adoption of public cloud computing among established businesses and startups is outpacing the adoption of new cybersecurity defenses. In fact, the average customer’s traditional security tools are incompatible with the cloud, as they were designed for on-premises networks—and according to Gartner, 95% of cloud security […]