Arriving at the Las Vegas airport, the city welcomed us with its infamous banners reading, โWelcome to the Fabulous Las Vegasโย and, of course, conveniently placed gambling machines ๐ฐ. The conference vibe started right at the airport, upon touchdown, with badge pickup seamlessly integrated into the arrival experience. Las Vegas was transformed into an AWS re:Invent playground, from the airport to the hotels to the conference areas โค๏ธ.
My networking adventure kicked off with a shared ride from the airport with Aditi Singh. Little did I know this would be the beginning of an amazing week of connections. After a swift hotel check-in, I found myself exploring the All Builders Welcome lounge, where I snagged some special swag waiting for me. In the midst of one conversation to the next, I made a new friend, Roger Cruz, and little did I know we’d be spending a significant portion of the upcoming week together.
Wandering and familiarising with the perimeter, I soaked in the sights of The Wynn, The Palazzo, The Mirage, Venetian, Bellagio, Encore, MGM Grand, and Mandalay Bay – and yes, they were as fancy as their names sound.
Mandalay Bay, in particular, showcased the power of AWS in sports, using computer vision and sensors to capture and process different metrics in sports – from golf to F1.
In soccer, AWS is used to process captured computer vision and sensor data to compute ball speed and accuracy. I got a chance to test this out. Seems I still have it in me.
In F1, each car has more than 300 sensors generatingย 1.1 millionย telemetry data points per second that are transmitted from cars to boxes. Data can easily accumulate to more than 1.5 terabytes of data over the course of a race which is used to make decisions on the fly, post race analysis and other simulations.
In chess, I met Paul Vincent, who was working with his team on an IoT/ML/AI project that involved a robotic arm that was capable of playing chess, detecting the state of the board through chess pieces with different induction windings detected by the energising board to know which piece is where. The brains of the game were 2 LLM instances hosted using AWS Bedrock and were playing like any human would. He also architected and worked on a device/software that I use regularly which makes life easier through technology while he was at Abott.
Later in the evening at AREA15, the All Builders Welcome reception became a hub of connections. From meeting Gerardo, Christina, and Meghana Sai to connecting with my mentor Rahul & other grant recipients, the networking opportunities were abundant.
After a 20+ hour journey spanning 10 time zones, jet-lagged but determined, I rested up, only to find myself wide awake at 3 am. With a disoriented circadian rhythm, I embraced the restlessness, gearing up to hit the ground running for the exciting week ahead. ๐
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