April 17, 2019

AWS Summit and Deepracer

On the 17th of May, the Datalab visited the AWS Summit in Amsterdam. The goal of this Summit was to learn more about AWS products, and to keep up with the fast-growing cloud solutions and developments in the field of machine learning. We attended different keynotes about the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence and learned how to deliver high-quality cloud solutions to customers. Using this knowledge, we can offer more reliable applications for our customers. In addition, we took place in an AWS Deep Racer workshop and learned how to apply state of the art Reinforcement Learning to create a self-driving car.

During the event, participants could apply for the AWS Deepracer League; a competition in which you program an autonomous race car with the use of Artificial Intelligence. The best model, the one with the fastest track times, wins the competition. The Datalab created this model and won the competition! The prize included a Deepracer, as well as two tickets to the AWS conference in Las Vegas.

AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale race car which gives you an interesting and fun way to get started with reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is an advanced machine learning technique, which takes a very different approach to training models than other machine learning methods. Its super power is that it learns very complex behaviors without requiring any labeled training data, and can make short term decisions while optimizing for a longer term goal.