Tag: AWS

Amazon Wants to Train 29 Million People to Work in the Cloud – WSJ

Amazon . com Inc. announced an effort Thursday aimed at helping 29 million people world-wide retrain by 2025, giving them new skills for cloud-computing roles as the pandemic upends many careers.

The online giant committed $700 million last year to reskilling 100,000 of its own workers in the U.S. The new effort will build on existing programs and include new ones in partnership with nonprofits, schools and others.

Amazon’s latest initiative is geared toward those who aren’t already employed at the company. The idea, it says, is to equip people with the education needed to work in cloud-computing at a number of employers seeking to fill high-tech positions. While some participants might find jobs at Amazon, it is more likely they would get hired at other companies, including many that use Amazon Web Services, the online retailer’s cloud division.

Source: Amazon Wants to Train 29 Million People to Work in the Cloud – WSJ

KVTA 1590 Interview on the AWS Cloud at CSUCI

Interview on the partnership between CSUCI and Amazon Web Services, Dec 7, 2020

Main Points of the interview:

  1. Can you explain what a“cloud” is for the laypeople?
    • In some sense it is giant warehouses filled with computers
    • But more importantly it is a new paradigm of computing, described often as on demand access to IT resources via the Internet with a pay-as-you-go plan
    • A good analogy is the power grid; instead of running your own generator, and its backup, and being responsible for its maintenance and operation, you connect to the grid, and outsource those responsibilities to the power company. Then you are just responsible for paying the bills. 
  2. Give a short history of the Cloud.
    • Started over a 100 years ago with the telegraph, smart terminal and operator at the edges, but “dumb” inside (just a cable and repeaters)
    • Then the telephone, dumb at the edges, but smart inside with the switchboard / circuit switching
    • Then the Internet, again flipping the paradigm, smart at the edges, dumb inside – 50 years ago
    • Finally the cloud, going back to the original, dumb at the edges, smart inside – 15 year ago
  3. How is Artificial Intelligence, in particular Machine Learning, connected to the Cloud?
    • Machine Learning is a method of computing where the computation is data driven, rather than instruction driven. A good example, is Optical Character Recognition – you can train the computer to recognize hand written digits, e.g., depositing a check the OCR software extracts the amount from the check.
    • The mathematical idea behind it is a perceptron, that models the neurons in the human brain, and this was first discovered in the 1960s but at that time we lacked the computer power to implement it in practice.
    • Suddenly, 15 years ago or so with the advent of the data center, more companies and institutions had access to the necessary computer power.
    • But since 5 years, maybe a little longer, individuals have access to it via the Cloud. Our AWS Pilot in Machine Learning – students have access to the latest.
  4. What are some examples of the Cloud?
    • Service that we all use: Dropbox, Netflix, Gmail, etc.
    • Your handheld device does not have a lot of compute power, so in some sense it is a portal into the cloud – google maps directions are computed for you in the cloud
  5. Is the cloud secure?
    • That is a very good question, but it does not have a yes/no answer. Security is assessed with risks and probabilities.
    • But, in general, a company like Dropbox has tremendous resources and expertise at its disposal to secure your data.
    • On the other hand, how secure is your data in on-premises solution? 
    • In any case, businesses are moving swiftly into the cloud, because the pricing is so attractive, but their number one concern is: will my data be secure? 
    • Famous saying of Gene Spafford: “The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards – and even then I have my doubts.”
  6. What is the job market in the cloud?
    • Excellent, LinkedIn has listed cloud skill as the #1 skill searched for by employers since 2014.
    • That is why we have been growing our Cloud offering at CSUCI. 

How can I learn more about the cloud

  1. List of certification classes
  2. Link to sign up

Why 4-year colleges are tapping Amazon to help deliver cloud computing degrees

Amazon Web Services is one of a handful of tech employers, including Google and Microsoft, helping colleges offer credentials in the field.

Cal State Channel Islands is part of the growing list of AWS Academy institutions, a group of mostly colleges that select at least one instructor to be authorized by the cloud computing giant to teach its courses to students.

Source: Why 4-year colleges are tapping Amazon to help deliver cloud computing degrees | Education Dive

Cloud Computing certification training open to the public at CSUCI

This year I am teaching (online) a sequence of 4 courses in Cloud Computing, in conjunction with the AWS Academy. Students receive AWS accounts, explore AWS services with hands-on labs, and prepare for certification (if they wish to). All classes are open to the public, and can be joined independently of each other (or all taken in sequence!). Please contact jeff.ziskin@csuci.edu to book an information session meeting on Zoom.

Computer Science selected for an AWS Pilot program in Machine Learning

We are very happy to have been selected for an SageMaker Pilot for AWS Educate Classrooms! Machine Learning (ML) is a top hard skill for graduates, and it is also becoming a premier tool for research in all areas. SageMaker Studio is a complete development environment for ML.

The theory of ML can always be taught, but in order to have hands on experience with ML, a computing infrastructure is required that is beyond the means of most educational institutions. Our students will have access to AWS Educate accounts with credits to use the SageMaker Studio environment, and access to to powerful CPU/GPU resources (ml.m5.xlarge, ml.c5.xlarge, and ml.g4dn.xlarge) for training ML models.

ML use cases include SPAM filtering for emails, recommender systems, e.g., Netflix show recommendations, and uncovering credit card fraud. There are three types of ML: supervised, where the data is labeled and the expected outputs are well understood (is an, is this email SPAM or not); unsupervised, where the ML algorithm has to discover the salient properties of the data; and, reinforcement, where some agent (e.g., RoboMaker) interacts with an environment and learns to navigate it through a system of rewards.

SageMaker supports many leading deep learning frameworks, including: TensorFlow, PyTorch, Apache MXNet, Chainer, Keras, Gluon, Horovod, Scikit-learn, and Deep Graph Library.

We applied last July to be part of the AWS pilot program to make SageMaker available to our students, and we were approved to start this fall 2020. We have a group of about 10 students who are going to be learning to use under my supervision.

We are building on our growing expertise in Artificial Intelligence. This fall term, professor Reza Abdolee is teaching a graduate class in AI (COMP569) and professor Bahareh Abbasi is teaching both an undergraduate course in AI (COMP469) and a graduate class in Neural Networks (COMP572).

ML is one of the areas of AWS certification.

Students will learn a variety of auxiliary tools; as you will see from this list, the Python programming language is central to Data Analytics:

  • Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Lab: an open-source web application that allows the creation and sharing of documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, etc.
  • Pandas: a software library written for the Python programming language for data manipulation and analysis. In particular, it offers data structures and operations for manipulating numerical tables and time series.
  • Seaborn: a library for making statistical graphics in Python. It is built on top of Matplotlib and closely integrated with Pandas data structures.
  • Scikit-learn: a free software machine learning library for the Python programming language. It features various classification, regression and clustering algorithms.
  • Matplotlib: a comprehensive library for creating static, animated, and interactive visualizations in Python.
  • NumPy: a library for the Python programming language, adding support for large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices, along with a large collection of high-level mathematical functions to operate on these arrays.
  • PyTorch (AWS testimonials): an open source machine learning library based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, primarily developed by Facebook’s AI Research lab.

In the words of Jose Cahue:

One of the major hurdles to learn ML as a student is having access to a machine optimized for model training. Cloud computing can be one practical solution to provide the computation resources needed to learn ML.

Jose Cahue

OnDemand AWS Educate Professional Learning Series

Today I participated in Webinars and Training Sessions for Educators and Students, which is a follow-up to the popular April AWS workshop on Remote Learning.

From the AWS page supporting the rapid transition to Remote Learning:

With the global move from in-classroom delivery to remote learning due to temporary and sustained school closings, AWS Educate wants to help educators and students with  webinars and workshops ranging from beginner to advanced levels. Any educator or student is invited to join, and there’s no cost for participating. Each webinar will be recorded and available on-demand in over 100 languages. 

https://aws.amazon.com/education/remote-instruction-resources-for-educators/

AWS training at CI in the Fall 2020

For questions please contact: jeff.ziskin@csuci.edu (805-437-2653). To register for an information session, or to register for the classes:

https://ext.csuci.edu/programs/professional-community-ed/aws

These classes are open to the public, and they are given in partnership with the AWS Academy.

  1. Cloud Foundations: online from August 24 to October 5:
  2. Cloud Architecting: online from October 19 to December 14:

We are following exactly the AWS curriculum, and students will be provided AWS Educate cloud accounts with credits for the duration of the classes, as well as vouchers for writing the corresponding certification exams.

New paper on setting up WordPress in the AWS cloud

This new paper was just posted as a technical report at Cornell’s arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01823), but it will be submitted for publication in the future. PDF of the paper.

From the abstract: Every organization needs to communicate with its audience, and social media is an attractive and inexpensive way to maintain dialogic communication. About 1/3 of the Internet web pages are powered by WordPress, and about a million companies have moved their IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud. Together, AWS and WordPress offer an attractive, effective and inexpensive way for companies, both large and small, to maintain their presence on the web.

This paper starts from the following premise:

you have been hired by a company with a small Communication budget, but ambitious plans. You have been tasked with setting up an effective web presence; in this role you have to combine both your CS/IT skills, as well as your Communication savvy. The decision has been made to deploy the web page as WordPress hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), integrated with social media, as well as robust Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your communication campaigns.

From introduction to WordPress on AWS: a Communication Framework

This paper is a third paper in a sequence on cloudification with AWS; the first one, Cloudifying the Curriculum with AWS, can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04020, and it was mentioned in this blog post, the second on Cybersecurity in the Cloud here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12905, and it was mentioned in this blog post.