The Indian Institute of Technology – Banaras Hindu University (IIT-BHU) and Amazon Internet Services have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop cloud-ready job skills by providing access to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Educate program, and to help establish an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Cloud Research Lab. The Cloud Research Lab will provide students with opportunities to use AWS Cloud technology to pursue research initiatives that focus on AI and ML innovation for India. Under the MoU agreement, IIT-BHU gains access to the resources in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Educate program and curriculum designed for higher education institutions to incorporate in to their courses. This collaboration will help accelerate cloud-related technical expertise for students and boost their readiness as they prepare to undertake the industry-recognized certification. "As Chairman of the Committee on Leveraging AI for National Missions in Key Sectors, I am acutely aware of the critical need to develop a proficient and robust talent base in the country in core areas such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning applied to problems in various sectors. As IITs are the premier engineering institutes in India, we have an obligation to ensure that our brightest and the most talented students in the country have easy access to best-in-class technology," said Professor Rajeev Sangal, Director, IIT-BHU.

E-commerce giant Amazon's cloud services company, Amazon Web Services, has started shipping its $249 camera DeepLens geared for deep-learning tasks, said Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS. Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, which in turn is a part of artificial intelligence. DeepLens is a video camera that runs deep-learning models, Barr said. The camera can be used in several verticals such as military, healthcare, hospitality and education. In terms of hardware, the DeepLens comes with a four megapixel camera (1080p video), a 2D microphone array, and draws power from an Intel Atom Processor.