Ruchi Kakkad and Muni Doddala from AWS Solutions Architects presented at Boise State University’s Research Computing Days in March 2023. Their presentation introduced Amazon SageMaker and other AWS services for machine learning and provided examples of how these technologies are leveraged in the education industry.
Kakkad began by introducing Amazon SageMaker, a suite of machine learning services offered by AWS. She explained the different components of SageMaker, including Canvas for non-coders, Studio for building ML models with notebooks, and Studio Lab for providing free access to ML tools. Ruchi then demonstrated some of the capabilities of SageMaker services like Data Wrangler for preparing data and SageMaker Studio for training machine learning models.
Next, Doddala gave an overview of core AWS infrastructure services like the EC2 virtual machines, VPC networking, and S3 storage. He provided a demo of launching an EC2 instance right from the AWS console to illustrate the simplicity and flexibility of provisioning cloud resources. Muni also discussed various AI services available on AWS, including Amazon Rekognition for analyzing image content, Amazon Polly for text-to-speech conversion, and Amazon Personalize for generating recommendations.
Muni then covered examples of how machine learning is applied in the education sector to identify at-risk students, accelerate research, localize learning content, and improve student retention. He explained how universities are building data lakes and leveraging AWS ML services to gain insights from their student data.
