LAS VEGAS DAY03 - Keynote Address by AWS CEO (Adam Selipsky), DeepRacer, Builder's Fair, Girls who Code, Singapore Public Sector Get-Together

November 29, 2023

LAS VEGAS DAY03 - Keynote Address by AWS CEO (Adam Selipsky), DeepRacer, Builder's Fair, Girls who Code, Singapore Public Sector Get-Together

Breakfast at the Venetian

As usual, the first activity of the day is to grab breakfast.

Down the long hall to the lift...

Past the Venetian Casino - AI dealer take your jobs!

Today's breakfast - I deliberately got as much fibre as I could...

Here I am at breakfast - Selfie just for mum to know I am safe.

Keynote Address by AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky

Venetian | Level 2 | Venetian Ballroom F | 0800 – 1030

Synopsis:

Join Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services, as he shares his perspective on cloud transformation. He highlights innovations in data, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence and machine learning that are helping AWS customers achieve their goals faster, mine untapped potential, and create a better future.

Takeaways:

Having a rock band to announce your CEO's arrival is pretty cool and entertaining
AWS technology is used by many different types of businesses worldwide. Many new services are launched to support new AI use cases across a wide range of industries
Cloud computing is a disruptive technology. There is a skill gap in cloud computing skills
AI is a disruptive technology, with the potential to bring about impactful changes that make everything faster, better, and cheaper. However, there is a concern that AI can be broken, and that the responsible use of AI is a global concern.
AWS is taking bold bets to address the needs of the future. AWS Kuiper Satellite project that aims to provide internet access to people with no internet coverage.

Digital poster of the speaker, Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS

Live band performs before the CEO appears. Great music

Feeling like I was in a concert waiting for the main act to arrive

And here he comes, the main act, Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS

AWS is powering innovations for a wide variety of customers, provides access to cloud technology to all people, even those with low resources such as start-ups

The reinvention of storage: By moving storage to the cloud, AWS cloud services have closed server rooms, having 3x more data centres than anyone else. A way Amazon S3 is reinventing storage is automated tiering of pricing based on users’ needs.

New! Amazon S3 Express One Zone – Faster, better, cheaper

Use case example of Amazon S3 Express One Zone - Pinterest achieved 10x write speed and 40% cost reduction

Evolution of the Graviton processor, custom-built by AWS to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads

New! Graviton 4 – Faster, better, cheaper!

Reinventing with generative AI - FM (Foundation Models) Training is resource intensive, so you need good processors

AWS has partnered with Nvidia to develop new GPUs, processing resources for gen AI applications

Nvdia CEO Jensen Huang speaks of new expanded partnership with Nvidia. Nvdia’s stacks and libraries integrate into AWS’s ecosystem, GPU + CPU work together with NV link. For example, Nvdia's DGX Cloud is an AI Supercomputing service used in training AIs for Robots and Self-driving cars. This requires the use of custom AIs from partners, of which all are integrated to work on AWS cloud.

New! Trainium 2 - Purpose-built chip for generative AI and ML training

Different AI models work best in different situations, so a user’s access to a wide range of good AI models is important (2nd level of stack)

Amazon Bedrock – Gives customers a choice of the best AI models to use

Chat with Anthropic CEO and Co-founder, Dario Amodei. His company is made of people who formerly worked on Open AI. They work on things such as using AI to pull citations for medical science. One of their concerns of AI is to prevent AI hallucinations and other people trying to break AI models. Claude is Anthropic’s AI, and has been proven to be more resistant to breaking than other AIs.

RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) allows you to supplement your prompts with customized data

Delta Airlines uses Bedrock to answer customer queries in a very human way

Use FMs (Foundational Models) to take actions

Bedrock makes it easy to set-up and customize AIs to perform actions securely and privately. AWS is also working with governments to be responsible with AI.

Chat with Pfizer’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Lidia Fonseca.

Last year, Pfizer treated 1.3 billion patients – one out of every six humans.

Generative AI will help identify new oncology targets. Today, this is a manual process to aggregate information across data sources. But AI can help to identify and collate relevant data and scientific content from many more sources in a fraction of the time. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, AWS and Pfizer leaned in to apply technology in meaningful ways. It took just 269 days from when Pfizer announced plans to co-develop a COVID-19 vaccine with BioNTech to the day the FDA granted emergency use authorization. This process normally takes 8-10 years.

There is a skill gap in cloud computing skills, to which AWS is providing scholarships for.

Code Whisperer – generates code suggestions ranging from snippets to full functions in real time in the IDE (integrated development environment) based on your comments and existing code. Free for individual use.

New! Amazon’s cloud business AWS launched a chat tool called Amazon Q, where businesses can ask questions specific to their companies. For example, employees can query Amazon Q on the company’s latest guidelines for logo usage or understand another engineer’s code to maintain an app. Q can surface the information instead of the employee sifting through dozens of documents.

Fast, accurate, integrated and secure.

Developers often resist updating code when the programming language upgrades due to the fear of the huge effort required in updating the code. Q will help with this migration.

Amazon Q can also be used to tell data stories (using AI)

The full stack

Speech by Stephan Durach, SVP, Connected Company Development and Technical Operations, BMW Group

AWS technology used in BMW, such as Alexa being used as an in-vehicle PA and their Fire TV entertainment system

Figures expected to triple within the next two years

New! Amazon Data Zone. a new data management service that makes it faster and easier for customers to catalog, discover, share, and govern data stored across AWS, on-premises, and third-party sources. With Amazon DataZone, administrators and data stewards who oversee an organization’s data assets can manage and govern access to data using fine-grained controls to ensure it is accessed with the right level of privileges and in the right context.

Bold bets - AWS Kuiper Satellite project that aims to provide internet access to people with no internet coverage.

Exploring the Expo

Venetian | 1030 Onwards (2 different visits)

Just outside the Expo, there are arcade booths to entertain participants...

In this game, an AWS ambassador helps a participant play a gamified version that helps participants learn about systems architecture. For example, if you do not protect your nodes, your opponent (a gorilla) destroys your node placements.

Back to the Expo

The DeepRacer area

Meeting Vincent a familiar face from AWS Singapore

Inside the DeepRacer control room, with many DeepRacer cars kept in top condition for the finals race.

Above the DeepRacer control room, the commentators have a clear view of the entire track

The leader board for the wildcard race

Off to the Builder's Fair (something like a maker fair) just next to the DeepRacer area.

Play a table soccer game...

And a commentary is created on the screen. Viewers can also scan a QR code to watch a virtual replay of the match later.

I'm not even going to pretend I understand this.

In this showcase, the maker creates a calming sand drawing based on an AI generated image...

The sand drawing is made by moving the ball through the sand.

This project sorts Lego pieces using computer vision

It assesses the pieces you have...

And then proposes what you can make with these pieces.

And now to my favourite game... An escape room game! The person at the booth used to create these games to teach STEM to kids.

The story is that an evil AI cat has disabled your rocket and fled to space. Your mission is to solve 4 puzzles so that you can chase the evil AI cat

Based on these clues in the clue book...

Match up the ice cream sticks and apply the correct symbol to the ipad.

Use the cipher to find the code word (it is TITAN)

Assemble the correct Lego man that can go to space...

The ipad camera checks if this is the correct Lego man. After you solve all 4 puzzles, it is time to go after the evil AI cat!

A diner themed booth at the Expo

Spray painted hats at one of the booths

The AWS area

Selfie at the logo

Udemy - Controversial in Singapore

Providing 360 environments

Massage break

The Intel booth

Who doesn't love a bear?

The claw is a draw

Photo AI booth

AWS DeepRacer crew shows you what the car does

The car below the hood

Alright, I'll hold it.

Virtual DeepRacer - This could make it much easier to onboard beginners

Virtual DeepRacer - Leader Board

A final check on the wildcard - Nope, Singapore reps didn't make it but we are still proud of them. The competition was very tough.

Showing what is inside the DeepRacer (3D rendering)

Back to the Builder's Fair for Hook a Duck

First you and your opponent hook as many ducks as you can within a certain time...

When the timer runs out, the camera reads how many ducks were "hooked" and assigns score based on their colour. In this round, I lost because I had no special ducks which were blue.

Ooh...ice cream. This convention has a lot of food.

I wish I knew Kubernetes...whatever that is.

AR experience for this F1 car exhibit. Go to one of the four nodes and overlay the node with the ipad to bring up more AR information.

IDE110 | Understanding the gender gap in technology with Girls Who Code

Venetian | Level 2 | Hall B, Expo, Booth #1460, Theater 4 | 1730 - 175

Join the Girls Who Code Research and Analytics team to learn how they evaluate the gender gap in the technology industry. In this lightning talk, explore the data, analyses, architectures, improvements, and challenges involved in deepening an organizational understanding of the gender gap.