AWS re:Invent 2021: How to maximize your in-person learning experience as a new Machine Learning practitioner
The 10th edition of AWS re:Invent is scheduled from November 29th to December 3rd, 2021. AWS is offering two options to attend re:Invent — either virtually or in-person. While this post is directed primarily to in-person attendees, virtual attendees are encouraged to participate in the AWS BugBust challenge and create a new world record for the “Largest Bug Fixing Competition” as recognized by Guinness World Records.
Most in-person attendees that I’ve met at previous AWS re:Invents have mentioned that they’ve learned a lot from hands-on workshops, builder sessions and chalk talks. While AWS re:Invent offers several sessions on Machine Learning (ML), I’d recommend the following five sessions for new ML practitioners:
DPR204 — Learn the basics of ML through hands-on projects (Session type: Workshop) Session1 Calendar Invite, Session2 Calendar Invite
The AWS educational devices (DeepLens, DeepRacer and DeepComposer) provide fun and practical ways of learning the fundamentals of ML. This session will cover all three devices and attendees can expect to learn concepts related to computer vision, generative adversarial networks and reinforcement learning.
GPS304 — Building enterprise AI applications: No ML expertise required (Session type: Workshop) Session Calendar Invite
AWS AI services provide pre-trained models that are upgraded frequently for several ML use cases. This session will cover three AWS AI services — Rekognition, Transcribe and Textract — and developers can learn how to embed these services in their applications.
ANT205 — Create and train ML models with ease using Amazon Redshift ML (Session type: Workshop) Session1 Calendar Invite, Session2 Calendar Invite
Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse solution that can store petabytes of structured data. Wrangling and moving petabytes of data for training ML models are two expensive tasks for any data scientist. This session will teach developers to train ML models using SQL directly on the data available in an Amazon Redshift warehouse.
AIM324 — Explore, analyze, and process data using Jupyter notebooks (Session type: Chalk Talk) Session1 Calendar Invite, Session2 Calendar Invite
Prior to building any ML model, it’s always a good idea to perform a quality check on the input dataset. This session will walk attendees through the steps to ensure good data quality. The abstract of this chalk talk mentions a “Jupyter notebook environment” and I hope that it means Amazon SageMaker Studio.
AIM314 — Build and deploy a custom computer vision model in 60 minutes (Session type: Builders’ Session) Session Calendar Invite
Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels is an AWS AI service that enables developers to build computer vision solutions with minimal coding. This session will enable attendees to build a complete computer vision application in an hour.
In summary, these five sessions are a tiny sample of the 100+ ML sessions offered at AWS re:Invent 2021. In order to view all ML sessions, register for AWS re:Invent 2021 at https://reinvent.awsevents.com/register/ .