Every day there is something new going on in the world of AWS Machine Learning--from launches to new use cases to interactive trainings. Check back at the end of each month for the latest roundup. This month we announced native support for TorchServe in Amazon SageMaker, launched a new NFL Next Gen Stat, and enhanced our language services including Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend. TorchServe is now natively supported in Amazon SageMaker as the default model server for PyTorch inference to help you bring models to production quickly without having to write custom code. Want more news about developments in ML? Check out the following stories: Laura Jones is a product marketing lead for AWS AI/ML where she focuses on sharing the stories of AWS's customers and educating organizations on the impact of machine learning.

In the United States, more than half of all households are expected to have a digital assistant or smart speaker like Google Home or Amazon Echo by 2022, and many people already today use these devices for shopping. In the Nordic region, however, relatively few consumers have purchased or plan to purchase an AI-based digital assistant. Those Nordic residents who do have one primarily use assistants to play music, do research and manage to-do lists. Yet when it comes to online shopping, the purchasing journey is to a high degree driven by convenience. In the next few years, AI solutions that save customers time and energy are expected to become increasingly common.

To date, most retailers who adopted artificial intelligence (AI) have done so purely to boost profits. However, now we are seeing a whole new driver for uptake, as there's a growing realisation that it can be used to help retailers become more sustainable as well. The good news is that these two drivers are not as separate as they might first appear: AI can make decisions that achieve sustainability and profits at the same time. Initiatives designed to drive profit and sustainability have always been linked. In fact, PwC research revealed that using AI to make decisions about environment-related areas, such as agriculture, water, energy and transport could add more than $5 trillion to the global economy over the next decade.

This smart speaker deal is too good to pass up. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. By now, Amazon lovers the world over know that life with a trusty, voice-controlled, Alexa-enabled smart speaker is just easier: These handy little devices help to keep households organized, informed and entertained. If you've been on the fence about snagging one for your own home or waiting for a price drop to add another to your collection, get thee to your virtual Amazon cart for a two-for-one special on the Echo Dot 3rd generation that's sure to knock your socks off. As part of the retailer's early Prime Day 2020 deals (shop our favorites here), Prime members (sign up for a free 30-day trial now, then pay $12.99 per month) can add two Amazon Echo Dot speakers, normally $49.99 and on sale for $39.99, to their cart and enter coupon code DOTPRIME2PK at checkout to get both speakers for just $39.98.

Since 2014, Amazon has touted the efficiency and safety benefits of its new automated fulfillment centers where robots assist human workers in processing packages. But it turns out automation may be doing far more harm to the company's employees than Amazon has led the public and lawmakers to believe. In a new report, the Center for Investigative Reporting's Reveal publication found that between 2016 and 2019, the rate at which Amazon employees sustained serious injuries was 50 percent higher at warehouses where the company has robots that at ones where it does not. Those facilities have among the highest rates of employee injuries of any of Amazon's warehouses. Last year, for instance, a fulfillment center south of Amazon's Seattle headquarters called BFI3 had a rate of 22 serious injuries for every 100 workers.

Smart speakers with artificial intelligence technology are increasingly being employed to help older people or those with disabilities in their daily lives, with their voice-activated functionalities proving especially convenient for those with mobility issues or wanting to connect. The daily routine of Katsunori Endo, a 63-year-old resident of Yamagata Prefecture, includes greeting his AI speaker and asking for the day's weather and news. "It's convenient because it tells me the weather for specific regions," Endo said, adding that it will also tell him what happened on a particular day in history, or alert him to seasonal dates. Developed by e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc., Alexa is a smart speaker capable of performing a plethora of tasks in response to voice commands, including providing real-time information and controlling several other smart devices as a home automation system.

A typical machine learning (ML) workflow involves processes such as data extraction, data preprocessing, feature engineering, model training and evaluation, and model deployment. As data changes over time, when you deploy models to production, you want your model to learn continually from the stream of data. This means supporting the model's ability to autonomously learn and adapt in production as new data is added. In practice, data scientists often work with Jupyter notebooks for development work and find it hard to translate from notebooks to automated pipelines. In this post, we demonstrate how to orchestrate an ML training pipeline using AWS Glue workflows and train and deploy the models using Amazon SageMaker.

Amazon announced that it's annual Prime Day shopping event would be on October 13 and 14 this year, but we're already starting to see Prime-exclusive deals available. One of them knocks the 3rd-generation Echo Dot to its lowest price ever -- only $20 -- when you buy two of them and use the code DOTPRIME2PK at checkout. That means you'll spend a total of $40 for two Echo Dots, which is $10 less than the normal price and $2 less than their 2019 Black Friday sale price. Remember -- this is an early Prime Day deal, so you must be an Amazon Prime member to get the savings. The company continues to offer 30-day free trials to new Prime subscribers, so you can sign up and take advantage of this deal as well as be all set for Prime Day when it rolls around in about two weeks. It's also worth calling out that the Echo Dots in this deal are the previous models.

The prevalence of e-commerce has made detailed customers' personal information readily accessible to retailers, and this information has been widely used in pricing decisions. When involving personalized information, how to protect the privacy of such information becomes a critical issue in practice. In this paper, we consider a dynamic pricing problem over $T$ time periods with an \emph{unknown} demand function of posted price and personalized information. At each time $t$, the retailer observes an arriving customer's personal information and offers a price. The customer then makes the purchase decision, which will be utilized by the retailer to learn the underlying demand function. There is potentially a serious privacy concern during this process: a third party agent might infer the personalized information and purchase decisions from price changes from the pricing system. Using the fundamental framework of differential privacy from computer science, we develop a privacy-preserving dynamic pricing policy, which tries to maximize the retailer revenue while avoiding information leakage of individual customer's information and purchasing decisions. To this end, we first introduce a notion of \emph{anticipating} $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy that is tailored to dynamic pricing problem. Our policy achieves both the privacy guarantee and the performance guarantee in terms of regret. Roughly speaking, for $d$-dimensional personalized information, our algorithm achieves the expected regret at the order of $\tilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-1} \sqrt{d^3 T})$, when the customers' information is adversarially chosen. For stochastic personalized information, the regret bound can be further improved to $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{d^2T} + \varepsilon^{-2} d^2)$

It was reported that Venture Capital investments into AI related startups made a significant increase in 2018, jumping by 72% compared to 2017, with 466 startups funded from 533 in 2017. PWC moneytree report stated that that seed-stage deal activity in the US among AI-related companies rose to 28% in the fourth-quarter of 2018, compared to 24% in the three months prior, while expansion-stage deal activity jumped to 32%, from 23%. There will be an increasing international rivalry over the global leadership of AI. President Putin of Russia was quoted as saying that "the nation that leads in AI will be the ruler of the world". Billionaire Mark Cuban was reported in CNBC as stating that "the world's first trillionaire would be an AI entrepreneur".