Tiny cars and big talent show Canadian policymakers the power of machine learning

In the end, it came down to 213 thousandths of a second! That was the difference between the two best times in the finale of the first AWS AWS DeepRacer Student Wildcard event hosted in Ottawa, Canada this May. I watched in awe as 13 students competed in a live wildcard race for the AWS DeepRacer Student League, the first global autonomous racing league for students offering educational material and resources to get hands on and start with machine learning (ML). Students hit the starting line to put their ML skills to the test in Canada's capital where members of parliament cheered them on, including Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Andy Fillmore. Daphne Hong, a fourth-year engineering student at the University of Calgary, won the race with a lap time of 11:167 seconds.