Intro to Artificial Intelligence (AI) on AWS

When you read this, Amazon will have taken out of the market to 200 data scientists per day with an update to its Machine Learning platform. Ok, I made up that number, but I think is really close to the truth. With each platform update the internet behemoths (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc) are lowering the entry barriers to the AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) worlds.

In a no-too-distant future domain-experts of every industry will be able to design and use their own AI tools, with the same ease in which today they create an Excel macro. I call this process “digital retransformation”, and I define it as “the introduction of Robotic Process Automation[1] concepts and tools at every level of the organizations”. As an example of relevancy of the topic check out this Forbes article from this june: Robotic Process Automation And Artificial Intelligence In HR And Business Support - It's Coming[2]

This is the first post of a series that will help the reader to understand the opportunities that this trend possesses, and how to better prepare for the future. The next posts will be tutorials, so you can immediately apply the learnt concepts. I’ve chosen Amazon and AWS as our platform because is arguably the market leader today and because it provides a free usage tier, perfect for our experiments.

Some of the AI and ML related AWS services which we will be covering are:

AWS Comprehend: An automated Natural Language Processing tool. You can use it, for example, to make automated sentiment analysis of your customer feedback, or summarize a long document automatically.
AWS Rekognition: To do automated image analysis using deep learning. This tool enables you to get information from an image, for example, to know which kind of objects are, or to know if there are humans.
AWS SageMaker: It’s the low-level interface to the AWS AI and ML platform, where (if you know how) you can create your own predictive models. This tool requires a deeper knowledge of data science, and it will not be included in this series.

The next post in the series will be a tutorial on AWS Comprehend, where we will walk through the process from creating your free account, configure it and use it from your work environment. If you want to be notified when the next post is available, please subscribe to teracloud’s Twitter and Instagram accounts.

Author: Carlos José Barroso (http://www.cjbarroso.com)

[1] Wikipedia: Robotic Process Automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation
[2] Forbes Magazine: Robotic Process Automation And Artificial Intelligence In HR And Business Support - It's Coming https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/06/06/robotic-process-automation-and-artificial-intelligence-in-hr-and-business-support-its-coming/#7f0c57355d7d