Attended the AWS Summit 2017 in Singapore today.
The keynote session had more members of the Jacket-and-Jeans family (see Microsoft Tech Summit), but unlike the Microsoft Tech Summit there was no ushering. There were some not-particularly-executive seats reserved for executives, in the centre was the stage, but no ropes around it, so it's not a boxing ring.
Of course there was the usual disco taking place as people took their seats and introductions were made.
The speakers gave some compelling stories for why to choose AWS over other providers, particularly in the areas of innovation and the rate of innovation.
The talks for the separate sessions here all a "silent disco" with the keynote hall curtained into four separate quarters, each taking a quarter of the central stage whilst the separate audiences listened to the respective speakers with the aid of the radio and uncomfortable headphones included in the goody bag.
Between the sessions there were queues for booths (to get stamps for the draw), queues for cakes, queues for drinks, and queues for lunch.
The curse of the Demo Gods struck at least once.
The machine learning demonstrations did highlighted the lack of intelligence, artificial or otherwise, in machine learning - a picture of someone's face with a shadow cast over the eyes from an overhead light looks like sunglasses to the machine learning system. The fast, dumb calculator of a machine may have learnt a correlation, but it does not understand what sunglasses are.
