RE:INVENT 2020 SESSIONS PICKS FOR DEVELOPERS AND MACHINE LEARNING PRACTITIONERS

This year will be remembered for many reasons. It has been a year of big changes in our lives and habits and a time when we found new ways to do the things we love. 2020 will be remembered as the first year without Amazonians from everywhere gathering in Vegas for the traditional re Invent.

Luckily, it won’t be a year without re:Invent because AWS decided to shift the conference completely online, with a catalog of almost 2000 unique sessions ranging from IoT to machine learning applications to infrastructure and serverless.

As a developer and a machine learning practitioner, digging into such a vast list to extract the best sessions to watch while doing our everyday job is not easy. Here this article comes in handy, trying to enucleate the talks you can’t miss, grouped into four main themes, with a bit of context to support deep diving into each topic. …

CAN YOU OBTAIN THE SAME ACCURACY OF A CUSTOM TRAINED ML MODEL WITH AMAZON REKOGNITION CUSTOM LABELS?

ML classification: Amazon Rekognition or Amazon SageMaker?

Computer vision problems have been tackled using neural networks in recent years, obtaining unprecedented results and continuously raising the bar of accuracy to near-human performances.
In this article, the focus is set on image classification in an uncommon context related to a Neosperience customer that provided the opportunity to compare two different approaches: Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels and Amazon SageMaker custom model.
Both approaches have advantages and could find their spot in a given context, but Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels offer an interesting tradeoff between time-to-market and cost.

Alisea

Machine Learning applications are steadily shifting from research domains to industry, opening a wide range of applications from simple object detection to people tracking in dangerous environments.
In this scenario, brands decide to innovate their target market, introducing smart products with features made possible by modern machine learning applications.
Alisea has led the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems sanitization market for almost two decades with over 3000 customers in Italy and abroad. Back in 2005, Alisea was born with a single mission: to offer the market the best HVAC hygienic management service with state-of-the-art innovations, without compromise. …

DEMOCRATIZING AI FOR EVERY DATA SCIENTIST, WITH MODERN TOOLS

In real-world applications, managed AI services such as Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Comprehend offer a viable alternative to dedicated data science teams building models from scratch. Even when a use case requires model re-training with purpose-built datasets such as custom image labels or text entities, it can be easily achieved with Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels or Amazon Comprehend Custom Entities.

These services offer state of the art machine learning model implementations, covering several use cases. Such models are not a feasible approach in some contexts. It could happen either because the underlying network requires being deeply customized to data scientists need to implement network architectures that are above state of the art, such as LSTMs, GANs, OneShot learners, Reinforcement Learning Models, or even model ensembles. …

Some of the companies joining us in the last few months brought non only strong domain expertise and technical competencies in their field (i.e., MIkamai, LinkMe) but also widely adopted products, like Workup RubinRed Digital Commerce platform. Many to come in the next months as soon as we find top performers in their fields, willing to scale up and join our family. On a product strategy basis, it has not been easy to think which evolution model was the best to provide the best value for our customers.
On one side, we could adopt a centralized model with firm product feature decisions coming from a steering committee, including domain experts from our subsidiaries, at the risk of losing some particular point of view that gets flooded into an enormous backlog. …

Since we started scaling up Neosperience from a single company to a group, while onboarding people with different stories and experiences, making everyone feel comfortable has been one of our top priorities.
We know this posed several challenges we had to consider to reach the ambitious goal of having everyone “feel like being at home” within Neosperience.
We know that the three keys driving people’s motivation are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Such principles are good at keeping a single person engaged with a company or a team. Unfortunately, they do not provide sufficient enough guidelines about the strategies to help employees participate in a shared vision. Moreover, they do not explain an inclusive and supportive behavior between different teams. …

On June, 16th Amazon Web Services released the long-awaited feature of AWS Elastic File System (EFS) support for their AWS Lambda service. It is a huge leap forward in serverless computing, enabling a whole set of new use cases, and could have a massive impact on our AI infrastructure, thus reducing machine learning inference costs down to pennies for a wide number of applications.

The most exciting feature of Elastic File System is its capability to be mounted both on EC2 virtual machines, Fargate containers, and AWS Lambda. This feature is not anything new on the EFS domain. It has been primarily used by many application sharing stored data, helping customers evolve their applications towards stateless services: a couple of EC2 or containers could save vast amounts of data on an EFS volume and share them with producers and consumers. It avoids the complexity (and latencies) of storing objects on S3, then downloading them every time they are needed. …

Il mondo IT non è esente dal fascino delle “mode del momento”: soluzioni che magari sono state adottate da aziende considerate punti di riferimento e che assumono nell’immaginario collettivo il ruolo di “no brainer” diventando il nuovo status quo, almeno per alcuni mesi, in attesa che la nuova “moda” prenda il posto della precedente. Il più delle volte si tratta di soluzioni che hanno più di un razionale forte nella loro adozione da parte delle aziende che le hanno proposte per prime. …

Amazon Web Services ha rafforzato la sua presenza in Europa mediante l’introduzione di una region dedicata agli utilizzatori dei servizi AWS in Italia, prevedendo nei prossimi anni uno sviluppo significativo di questo mercato.

La nuova region prende il nome di eu-south-1 oppure AWS Europe (Milan). Sebbene sia disponibile a tutti gli utenti AWS, non è abilitata di default quindi è necessario effettuare alcune semplici operazioni per poter accedere ai servizi localizzati nel nostro paese.

Infatti, selezionando la region eu-south-1 dal menu a discesa si viene portati ad una pagina che ci informa che è necessario chiedere l’abilitazione. …