Amazon announced today that the machine learning courses used to train engineers at Amazon are now being made available to all developers through AWS for free.

Amazon ReInvent is now underway so while this announcement from Dr. Matt Wood, General Manager of Artificial Intelligence at AWS was made via the AWS Machine Learning Blog it has to be seen as news from this annual event.

It was at last year's ReInvent that we reported Amazon's Giant Push Into Machine Learning. Now opening up its training resources will enable AWS users to make better use of all its AI Services. This is in addition to partnering with Coursera in courses that introduce the core services and infrastructure of AWS itself, see Learn About AWS On Coursera

In the 5-minute Introduction to the AWS Machine Learning Services, Dave Pearson Principal Technical Business Development Manager, AWS explains that machine learning is part of Amazon's heritage and has seen huge investment over 20 years to position machine learning at heart of many core Amazon functions such as:

• Product Recommendations
• Path Optimization for Robotic pickers working in fulfillment centres
• Alexa's natural language understanding and automated speech recognition
• Computer vision technology used in Amazon's drone initiative, Prime Air and in the retail experience with Amazon Go.

Pearson goes on to explains that Amazon sees the machine learning stack as having three layers:

• Frameworks & Infrastructure
• Machine learning  platforms
• API driven services

He concludes:

To do machine learning well, customers need capabilities across all three layers of the stack and the right data store and security and analytic services, and they need these services to work together. This is why so many customers use AWS for machine learning.

This video makes the case for all AWS customers to know about machine learning using the new freely available training: 

The training courses, which were formerly only available to its own, admittedly thousands of, engineers, consists of  self-paced digital content for beginners, advanced developers, and everyone in between. It includes 30 courses in total, with over 45 hours of course material, videos, and lab tests and for four key groups: 

• developers
• data scientists
• data platform engineers
• business professionals 

These training plans are for the first two of these groups:

According to Amazon:

Each course starts with the fundamentals, and builds on those through real-world examples and labs, allowing developers to explore machine learning through some fun problems we have had to solve at Amazon. These include predicting gift wrapping eligibility, optimizing delivery routes, or predicting entertainment award nominations using data from IMDb (an Amazon subsidiary). Coursework helps consolidate best practices, and demonstrates how to get started on a range of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Comprehend.

Amazon also announced a new “AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty” certification, costing $300 after an introductory half-price period. Customers at re:Invent can sit for the exam this week during Amazon's Training and Certification exam sessions.

More Information

Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

AWS Training and Certification Portal 

Related Articles

Amazon's Giant Push Into Machine Learning 

Learn About AWS On Coursera

Better Face Detection in Amazon Rekognition  

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