As a part of Expedia Group's partnership with AWS we recently took an amazing opportunity to host a DeepRacer competition in our Brisbane office. DeepRacer is designed to introduce people of all backgrounds to Machine Learning. The goal of the competition is to engineer a control loop for an autonomous toy racing car that enables the car to complete a full circuit of a physical race track in the shortest amount of time. This control loop is constructed using a Machine Learning technique called Reinforcement Learning. Reinforcement Learning encourages an autonomous machine to perform certain actions.

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.

Amazon wants companies to take advantage of artificial intelligence -- and, more importantly, it wants to sell them the tools to do so. Today, the online retailer's business subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS), unveiled a suite of new products to help with this goal. Chief among them is a $250 AI-powered camera called DeepLens; a new platform for developing and deploying machine learning algorithms named SageMaker; and services for AI-powered transcription and translation. With these and other tools, Amazon is making it clear that during the current AI boom, it wants to be the one getting rich shelling shovels. At the same time, these announcement show it butting heads with rival Google, which has been busy building its own AI enterprise stack.

Amazon wants companies to take advantage of artificial intelligence -- and, more importantly, it wants to sell them the tools to do so. Today, the online retailer's business subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS), unveiled a suite of new products to help with this goal. Chief among them is a $250 AI-powered camera called DeepLens; a new platform for developing and deploying machine learning algorithms named SageMaker; and services for AI-powered transcription and translation. With these and other tools, Amazon is making it clear that during the current AI boom, it wants to be the one getting rich shelling shovels. At the same time, these announcement show it butting heads with rival Google, which has been busy building its own AI enterprise stack.

Amazon's newest product won't tell you a joke or turn on your lights. The new DeepLens camera is instead custom-built for artificial intelligence developers, who will be able to build AI systems on Amazon Web Services and have them run on the camera, according to the company. This means the camera itself will be able to recognize objects, look for faces, or label what actions people are doing, all without needing to call back to Amazon's servers. Amazon Web Services has been a financial lifeline for Amazon, which notoriously ekes out the thinnest of profit margins. The cloud services business generated $4.6 billion in revenue in the latest quarter, up 42% from the same period a year earlier.

Far from the stuff of science fiction, artificial intelligence is becoming just another tool for developers to build the next big thing. It's built in to Photoshop to help you knock out backgrounds, Google is using AI to figure out if you have a person peeping on your phone and Microsoft uses the technology to teach you Chinese. As Amazon's Jeff Barr says, "I think it is safe to say, with the number of practical applications for machine learning, including computer vision and deep learning, that we've turned the corner" towards practical applications for AI. To that end, Amazon has announced AWS DeepLens, a new video camera that runs deep learning models right on the device. The DeepLens has a 4 megapixel camera that can capture 1080P video, along with a 2D microphone array.