Seattle and Las Vegas, US, November 29 — During the re:Invent event, Amazon announced their new products and services to make machine learning available to developers. One of these products was even a developer-focused camera, that they want to release next year.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world’s most utilized cloud platforms for more than eleven years now. It’s very likely that websites you visit and apps you use every day partially or entirely rely on these services as well. In order to compete with competitors in various segments, it is important for them to stay ahead in the game of latest technology and proceed with cutting-edge research.
What’s new?
There are various new services and products being released by Amazon now. Here’s a quick summary for you:
- Amazon SageMaker: Lets users build, train and deploy machine learning models
- AWS DeepLens: Deep-learning-enabled wireless video camera
- Amazon Transcribe: Creating text from audio or video feed
- Amazon Translate: Real-time translation of different languages
- Amazon Comprehend: Sentiment analysis service
- Amazon Rekognition Video: Real-time content analysis within video feed
“Our original vision for AWS was to enable any individual in his or her dorm room or garage to have access to the same technology, tools, scale, and cost structure as the largest companies in the world. Our vision for machine learning is no different,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Machine Learning, AWS. “We want all developers to be able to use machine learning much more expansively and successfully, irrespective of their machine learning skill level. Amazon SageMaker removes a lot of the muck and complexity involved in machine learning to allow developers to easily get started and become competent in building, training, and deploying models.”
How could that be used?
All these have a heavy focus on machine learning and content analysis and will improve over time. It’s likely that many of the final products will be offered as a service to businesses or public sector. Especially the real-time analysis of real-time video could be interesting in advertising just as much as it could be in security industries and other areas.
“Today, customers are storing more data than ever before, using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as their scalable, reliable, and secure data lake. These customers want to put this data to use for their organization and customers, and to do so they need easy-to-use tools and technologies to unlock the intelligence residing within this data,” Sivasubramanian continued, “We’re excited to deliver four new machine learning application services that will help developers immediately start creating a new generation of intelligent apps that can see, hear, speak, and interact with the world around them.”
Details on the AWS DeepLens
Initially, there were some comments that the DeepLens product might have been a consumer device to join the Alexa / Echo family of Amazon, similar to how Google introduced the Clips camera, earlier this year. After the keynote and the published press releases, however, it is now clear that AWS DeepLens is focused to be used by developers who work with Machine Learning models. Here are the known tech specs:
- CPU: Intel Atom
- Memory: 8GB RAM
- OS: Ubuntu OS-16.04 LTS
- Storage: 16GB (expandable)
- Graphics: Intel Gen9 Graphics Engine
When will AWS DeepLens be available for developers?
In the AWS DeepLens announcement, Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, says that the product will be available starting next year. If you follow the pre-order instructions, you will end up on this Amazon product page, that lets you purchase an AWS DeepLens unit already. The price is $249 and release is planned for April 14, 2018.
YouTube: AWS re:Invent 2017 – Announcing AWS DeepLens
Photo credit: Amazon
Source: Business Wire / Jim Lundy (Aragon Research)
