AWS Announces Two New Initiatives That Make Machine Learning More Accessible

Today, at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced two new initiatives designed to make machine learning more accessible for anyone interested in learning and experimenting with the technology. The AWS AI & ML Scholarship is a new education and scholarship program aimed at preparing underrepresented and underserved students globally for careers in machine learning. The program uses AWS DeepRacer and the new AWS DeepRacer Student League to teach students foundational machine learning concepts by giving them hands-on experience training machine learning models for autonomous race cars, while providing educational content centered on machine learning fundamentals. AWS is further increasing access to machine learning through Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab, which gives everyone access to a no-cost version of Amazon SageMaker—an AWS service that helps customers build, train, and deploy machine learning models.

“The two initiatives we are announcing today are designed to open up educational opportunities in machine learning to make it more widely accessible to anyone who is interested in the technology,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning at AWS. “Machine learning will be one of the most transformational technologies of this generation. If we are going to unlock the full potential of this technology to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems, we need the best minds entering the field from all backgrounds and walks of life. We want to inspire and excite a diverse future workforce through this new scholarship program and break down the cost barriers that prevent many from getting started with machine learning.”

New $10 million education and scholarship program is designed to prepare underrepresented and underserved students globally for careers in machine learning

The World Economic Forum estimates that technological advances and automation will create 97 million new technology jobs by 2025, including in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. While the job opportunities in technology are growing, diversity is lagging behind in science and technology careers. Making educational resources available to anyone interested in technology is critical to encouraging a more robust, diverse pipeline of people in artificial intelligence and machine learning careers. The new AWS AI & ML Scholarship aims to help underrepresented and underserved high school and college students learn foundational machine learning concepts and prepare them for careers in artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition to no-cost access to dozens of hours of free machine learning model training and educational materials, 2,000 qualifying students from underrepresented and underserved communities will win a scholarship for the AI Programming with Python Udacity Nanodegree program, designed to give scholarship recipients the programming tools and techniques fundamental to machine learning. Graduates from the first Nanodegree program will be invited to take a technical assessment. Five hundred students who receive the highest scores in this assessment will earn a second Udacity Nanodegree program scholarship on deep learning and machine learning engineering to help further prepare them for a career in artificial intelligence and machine learning. These top 500 students will also have access to mentorship opportunities from tenured Amazon and Intel technology experts for career insights and advice.