Tag Archives: deep learning

Predict Billboard Top 10 Hits Using RStudio, H2O and Amazon Athena

Post Syndicated from Gopal Wunnava original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/predict-billboard-top-10-hits-using-rstudio-h2o-and-amazon-athena/

Success in the popular music industry is typically measured in terms of the number of Top 10 hits artists have to their credit. The music industry is a highly competitive multi-billion dollar business, and record labels incur various costs in exchange for a percentage of the profits from sales and concert tickets.

Predicting the success of an artist’s release in the popular music industry can be difficult. One release may be extremely popular, resulting in widespread play on TV, radio and social media, while another single may turn out quite unpopular, and therefore unprofitable. Record labels need to be selective in their decision making, and predictive analytics can help them with decision making around the type of songs and artists they need to promote.

In this walkthrough, you leverage H2O.ai, Amazon Athena, and RStudio to make predictions on whether a song might make it to the Top 10 Billboard charts. You explore the GLM, GBM, and deep learning modeling techniques using H2O’s rapid, distributed and easy-to-use open source parallel processing engine. RStudio is a popular IDE, licensed either commercially or under AGPLv3, for working with R. This is ideal if you don’t want to connect to a server via SSH and use code editors such as vi to do analytics. RStudio is available in a desktop version, or a server version that allows you to access R via a web browser. RStudio’s Notebooks feature is used to demonstrate the execution of code and output. In addition, this post showcases how you can leverage Athena for query and interactive analysis during the modeling phase. A working knowledge of statistics and machine learning would be helpful to interpret the analysis being performed in this post.

Walkthrough

Your goal is to predict whether a song will make it to the Top 10 Billboard charts. For this purpose, you will be using multiple modeling techniques―namely GLM, GBM and deep learning―and choose the model that is the best fit.

This solution involves the following steps:

  • Install and configure RStudio with Athena
  • Log in to RStudio
  • Install R packages
  • Connect to Athena
  • Create a dataset
  • Create models

Install and configure RStudio with Athena

Use the following AWS CloudFormation stack to install, configure, and connect RStudio on an Amazon EC2 instance with Athena.

Launching this stack creates all required resources and prerequisites:

  • Amazon EC2 instance with Amazon Linux (minimum size of t2.large is recommended)
  • Provisioning of the EC2 instance in an existing VPC and public subnet
  • Installation of Java 8
  • Assignment of an IAM role to the EC2 instance with the required permissions for accessing Athena and Amazon S3
  • Security group allowing access to the RStudio and SSH ports from the internet (I recommend restricting access to these ports)
  • S3 staging bucket required for Athena (referenced within RStudio as ATHENABUCKET)
  • RStudio username and password
  • Setup logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs (if needed for additional troubleshooting)
  • Amazon EC2 Systems Manager agent, which makes it easy to manage and patch

All AWS resources are created in the US-East-1 Region. To avoid cross-region data transfer fees, launch the CloudFormation stack in the same region. To check the availability of Athena in other regions, see Region Table.

Log in to RStudio

The instance security group has been automatically configured to allow incoming connections on the RStudio port 8787 from any source internet address. You can edit the security group to restrict source IP access. If you have trouble connecting, ensure that port 8787 isn’t blocked by subnet network ACLS or by your outgoing proxy/firewall.

  1. In the CloudFormation stack, choose Outputs, Value, and then open the RStudio URL. You might need to wait for a few minutes until the instance has been launched.
  2. Log in to RStudio with the and password you provided during setup.

Install R packages

Next, install the required R packages from the RStudio console. You can download the R notebook file containing just the code.

#install pacman – a handy package manager for managing installs
if("pacman" %in% rownames(installed.packages()) == FALSE)
{install.packages("pacman")}  
library(pacman)
p_load(h2o,rJava,RJDBC,awsjavasdk)
h2o.init(nthreads = -1)
##  Connection successful!
## 
## R is connected to the H2O cluster: 
##     H2O cluster uptime:         2 hours 42 minutes 
##     H2O cluster version:        3.10.4.6 
##     H2O cluster version age:    4 months and 4 days !!! 
##     H2O cluster name:           H2O_started_from_R_rstudio_hjx881 
##     H2O cluster total nodes:    1 
##     H2O cluster total memory:   3.30 GB 
##     H2O cluster total cores:    4 
##     H2O cluster allowed cores:  4 
##     H2O cluster healthy:        TRUE 
##     H2O Connection ip:          localhost 
##     H2O Connection port:        54321 
##     H2O Connection proxy:       NA 
##     H2O Internal Security:      FALSE 
##     R Version:                  R version 3.3.3 (2017-03-06)
## Warning in h2o.clusterInfo(): 
## Your H2O cluster version is too old (4 months and 4 days)!
## Please download and install the latest version from http://h2o.ai/download/
#install aws sdk if not present (pre-requisite for using Athena with an IAM role)
if (!aws_sdk_present()) {
  install_aws_sdk()
}

load_sdk()
## NULL

Connect to Athena

Next, establish a connection to Athena from RStudio, using an IAM role associated with your EC2 instance. Use ATHENABUCKET to specify the S3 staging directory.

URL <- 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/athena-downloads/drivers/AthenaJDBC41-1.0.1.jar'
fil <- basename(URL)
#download the file into current working directory
if (!file.exists(fil)) download.file(URL, fil)
#verify that the file has been downloaded successfully
list.files()
## [1] "AthenaJDBC41-1.0.1.jar"
drv <- JDBC(driverClass="com.amazonaws.athena.jdbc.AthenaDriver", fil, identifier.quote="'")

con <- jdbcConnection <- dbConnect(drv, 'jdbc:awsathena://athena.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:443/',
                                   s3_staging_dir=Sys.getenv("ATHENABUCKET"),
                                   aws_credentials_provider_class="com.amazonaws.auth.DefaultAWSCredentialsProviderChain")

Verify the connection. The results returned depend on your specific Athena setup.

con
## <JDBCConnection>
dbListTables(con)
##  [1] "gdelt"               "wikistats"           "elb_logs_raw_native"
##  [4] "twitter"             "twitter2"            "usermovieratings"   
##  [7] "eventcodes"          "events"              "billboard"          
## [10] "billboardtop10"      "elb_logs"            "gdelthist"          
## [13] "gdeltmaster"         "twitter"             "twitter3"

Create a dataset

For this analysis, you use a sample dataset combining information from Billboard and Wikipedia with Echo Nest data in the Million Songs Dataset. Upload this dataset into your own S3 bucket. The table below provides a description of the fields used in this dataset.

Field Description
year Year that song was released
songtitle Title of the song
artistname Name of the song artist
songid Unique identifier for the song
artistid Unique identifier for the song artist
timesignature Variable estimating the time signature of the song
timesignature_confidence Confidence in the estimate for the timesignature
loudness Continuous variable indicating the average amplitude of the audio in decibels
tempo Variable indicating the estimated beats per minute of the song
tempo_confidence Confidence in the estimate for tempo
key Variable with twelve levels indicating the estimated key of the song (C, C#, B)
key_confidence Confidence in the estimate for key
energy Variable that represents the overall acoustic energy of the song, using a mix of features such as loudness
pitch Continuous variable that indicates the pitch of the song
timbre_0_min thru timbre_11_min Variables that indicate the minimum values over all segments for each of the twelve values in the timbre vector
timbre_0_max thru timbre_11_max Variables that indicate the maximum values over all segments for each of the twelve values in the timbre vector
top10 Indicator for whether or not the song made it to the Top 10 of the Billboard charts (1 if it was in the top 10, and 0 if not)

Create an Athena table based on the dataset

In the Athena console, select the default database, sampled, or create a new database.

Run the following create table statement.

create external table if not exists billboard
(
year int,
songtitle string,
artistname string,
songID string,
artistID string,
timesignature int,
timesignature_confidence double,
loudness double,
tempo double,
tempo_confidence double,
key int,
key_confidence double,
energy double,
pitch double,
timbre_0_min double,
timbre_0_max double,
timbre_1_min double,
timbre_1_max double,
timbre_2_min double,
timbre_2_max double,
timbre_3_min double,
timbre_3_max double,
timbre_4_min double,
timbre_4_max double,
timbre_5_min double,
timbre_5_max double,
timbre_6_min double,
timbre_6_max double,
timbre_7_min double,
timbre_7_max double,
timbre_8_min double,
timbre_8_max double,
timbre_9_min double,
timbre_9_max double,
timbre_10_min double,
timbre_10_max double,
timbre_11_min double,
timbre_11_max double,
Top10 int
)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
STORED AS TEXTFILE
LOCATION 's3://aws-bigdata-blog/artifacts/predict-billboard/data'
;

Inspect the table definition for the ‘billboard’ table that you have created. If you chose a database other than sampledb, replace that value with your choice.

dbGetQuery(con, "show create table sampledb.billboard")
##                                      createtab_stmt
## 1       CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `sampledb.billboard`(
## 2                                       `year` int,
## 3                               `songtitle` string,
## 4                              `artistname` string,
## 5                                  `songid` string,
## 6                                `artistid` string,
## 7                              `timesignature` int,
## 8                `timesignature_confidence` double,
## 9                                `loudness` double,
## 10                                  `tempo` double,
## 11                       `tempo_confidence` double,
## 12                                       `key` int,
## 13                         `key_confidence` double,
## 14                                 `energy` double,
## 15                                  `pitch` double,
## 16                           `timbre_0_min` double,
## 17                           `timbre_0_max` double,
## 18                           `timbre_1_min` double,
## 19                           `timbre_1_max` double,
## 20                           `timbre_2_min` double,
## 21                           `timbre_2_max` double,
## 22                           `timbre_3_min` double,
## 23                           `timbre_3_max` double,
## 24                           `timbre_4_min` double,
## 25                           `timbre_4_max` double,
## 26                           `timbre_5_min` double,
## 27                           `timbre_5_max` double,
## 28                           `timbre_6_min` double,
## 29                           `timbre_6_max` double,
## 30                           `timbre_7_min` double,
## 31                           `timbre_7_max` double,
## 32                           `timbre_8_min` double,
## 33                           `timbre_8_max` double,
## 34                           `timbre_9_min` double,
## 35                           `timbre_9_max` double,
## 36                          `timbre_10_min` double,
## 37                          `timbre_10_max` double,
## 38                          `timbre_11_min` double,
## 39                          `timbre_11_max` double,
## 40                                     `top10` int)
## 41                             ROW FORMAT DELIMITED 
## 42                         FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' 
## 43                            STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 
## 44       'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat' 
## 45                                     OUTPUTFORMAT 
## 46  'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
## 47                                        LOCATION
## 48    's3://aws-bigdata-blog/artifacts/predict-billboard/data'
## 49                                  TBLPROPERTIES (
## 50            'transient_lastDdlTime'='1505484133')

Run a sample query

Next, run a sample query to obtain a list of all songs from Janet Jackson that made it to the Billboard Top 10 charts.

dbGetQuery(con, " SELECT songtitle,artistname,top10   FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE lower(artistname) =     'janet jackson' AND top10 = 1")
##                       songtitle    artistname top10
## 1                       Runaway Janet Jackson     1
## 2               Because Of Love Janet Jackson     1
## 3                         Again Janet Jackson     1
## 4                            If Janet Jackson     1
## 5  Love Will Never Do (Without You) Janet Jackson 1
## 6                     Black Cat Janet Jackson     1
## 7               Come Back To Me Janet Jackson     1
## 8                       Alright Janet Jackson     1
## 9                      Escapade Janet Jackson     1
## 10                Rhythm Nation Janet Jackson     1

Determine how many songs in this dataset are specifically from the year 2010.

dbGetQuery(con, " SELECT count(*)   FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE year = 2010")
##   _col0
## 1   373

The sample dataset provides certain song properties of interest that can be analyzed to gauge the impact to the song’s overall popularity. Look at one such property, timesignature, and determine the value that is the most frequent among songs in the database. Timesignature is a measure of the number of beats and the type of note involved.

Running the query directly may result in an error, as shown in the commented lines below. This error is a result of trying to retrieve a large result set over a JDBC connection, which can cause out-of-memory issues at the client level. To address this, reduce the fetch size and run again.

#t<-dbGetQuery(con, " SELECT timesignature FROM sampledb.billboard")
#Note:  Running the preceding query results in the following error: 
#Error in .jcall(rp, "I", "fetch", stride, block): java.sql.SQLException: The requested #fetchSize is more than the allowed value in Athena. Please reduce the fetchSize and try #again. Refer to the Athena documentation for valid fetchSize values.
# Use the dbSendQuery function, reduce the fetch size, and run again
r <- dbSendQuery(con, " SELECT timesignature     FROM sampledb.billboard")
dftimesignature<- fetch(r, n=-1, block=100)
dbClearResult(r)
## [1] TRUE
table(dftimesignature)
## dftimesignature
##    0    1    3    4    5    7 
##   10  143  503 6787  112   19
nrow(dftimesignature)
## [1] 7574

From the results, observe that 6787 songs have a timesignature of 4.

Next, determine the song with the highest tempo.

dbGetQuery(con, " SELECT songtitle,artistname,tempo   FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE tempo = (SELECT max(tempo) FROM sampledb.billboard) ")
##                   songtitle      artistname   tempo
## 1 Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' Michael Jackson 244.307

Create the training dataset

Your model needs to be trained such that it can learn and make accurate predictions. Split the data into training and test datasets, and create the training dataset first.  This dataset contains all observations from the year 2009 and earlier. You may face the same JDBC connection issue pointed out earlier, so this query uses a fetch size.

#BillboardTrain <- dbGetQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE year <= 2009")
#Running the preceding query results in the following error:-
#Error in .verify.JDBC.result(r, "Unable to retrieve JDBC result set for ", : Unable to retrieve #JDBC result set for SELECT * FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE year <= 2009 (Internal error)
#Follow the same approach as before to address this issue.

r <- dbSendQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM sampledb.billboard WHERE year <= 2009")
BillboardTrain <- fetch(r, n=-1, block=100)
dbClearResult(r)
## [1] TRUE
BillboardTrain[1:2,c(1:3,6:10)]
##   year           songtitle artistname timesignature
## 1 2009 The Awkward Goodbye    Athlete             3
## 2 2009        Rubik's Cube    Athlete             3
##   timesignature_confidence loudness   tempo tempo_confidence
## 1                    0.732   -6.320  89.614   0.652
## 2                    0.906   -9.541 117.742   0.542
nrow(BillboardTrain)
## [1] 7201

Create the test dataset

BillboardTest <- dbGetQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM sampledb.billboard where year = 2010")
BillboardTest[1:2,c(1:3,11:15)]
##   year              songtitle        artistname key
## 1 2010 This Is the House That Doubt Built A Day to Remember  11
## 2 2010        Sticks & Bricks A Day to Remember  10
##   key_confidence    energy pitch timbre_0_min
## 1          0.453 0.9666556 0.024        0.002
## 2          0.469 0.9847095 0.025        0.000
nrow(BillboardTest)
## [1] 373

Convert the training and test datasets into H2O dataframes

train.h2o <- as.h2o(BillboardTrain)
## 
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  |=================================================================| 100%
test.h2o <- as.h2o(BillboardTest)
## 
  |                                                                       
  |                                                                 |   0%
  |                                                                       
  |=================================================================| 100%

Inspect the column names in your H2O dataframes.

colnames(train.h2o)
##  [1] "year"                     "songtitle"               
##  [3] "artistname"               "songid"                  
##  [5] "artistid"                 "timesignature"           
##  [7] "timesignature_confidence" "loudness"                
##  [9] "tempo"                    "tempo_confidence"        
## [11] "key"                      "key_confidence"          
## [13] "energy"                   "pitch"                   
## [15] "timbre_0_min"             "timbre_0_max"            
## [17] "timbre_1_min"             "timbre_1_max"            
## [19] "timbre_2_min"             "timbre_2_max"            
## [21] "timbre_3_min"             "timbre_3_max"            
## [23] "timbre_4_min"             "timbre_4_max"            
## [25] "timbre_5_min"             "timbre_5_max"            
## [27] "timbre_6_min"             "timbre_6_max"            
## [29] "timbre_7_min"             "timbre_7_max"            
## [31] "timbre_8_min"             "timbre_8_max"            
## [33] "timbre_9_min"             "timbre_9_max"            
## [35] "timbre_10_min"            "timbre_10_max"           
## [37] "timbre_11_min"            "timbre_11_max"           
## [39] "top10"

Create models

You need to designate the independent and dependent variables prior to applying your modeling algorithms. Because you’re trying to predict the ‘top10’ field, this would be your dependent variable and everything else would be independent.

Create your first model using GLM. Because GLM works best with numeric data, you create your model by dropping non-numeric variables. You only use the variables in the dataset that describe the numerical attributes of the song in the logistic regression model. You won’t use these variables:  “year”, “songtitle”, “artistname”, “songid”, or “artistid”.

y.dep <- 39
x.indep <- c(6:38)
x.indep
##  [1]  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
## [24] 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Create Model 1: All numeric variables

Create Model 1 with the training dataset, using GLM as the modeling algorithm and H2O’s built-in h2o.glm function.

modelh1 <- h2o.glm( y = y.dep, x = x.indep, training_frame = train.h2o, family = "binomial")
## 
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  |                                                                 |   0%
  |                                                                       
  |=====                                                            |   8%
  |                                                                       
  |=================================================================| 100%

Measure the performance of Model 1, using H2O’s built-in performance function.

h2o.performance(model=modelh1,newdata=test.h2o)
## H2OBinomialMetrics: glm
## 
## MSE:  0.09924684
## RMSE:  0.3150347
## LogLoss:  0.3220267
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.2380168
## AUC:  0.8431394
## Gini:  0.6862787
## R^2:  0.254663
## Null Deviance:  326.0801
## Residual Deviance:  240.2319
## AIC:  308.2319
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0   1    Error     Rate
## 0      255  59 0.187898  =59/314
## 1       17  42 0.288136   =17/59
## Totals 272 101 0.203753  =76/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                         metric threshold    value idx
## 1                       max f1  0.192772 0.525000 100
## 2                       max f2  0.124912 0.650510 155
## 3                 max f0point5  0.416258 0.612903  23
## 4                 max accuracy  0.416258 0.879357  23
## 5                max precision  0.813396 1.000000   0
## 6                   max recall  0.037579 1.000000 282
## 7              max specificity  0.813396 1.000000   0
## 8             max absolute_mcc  0.416258 0.455251  23
## 9   max min_per_class_accuracy  0.161402 0.738854 125
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.124912 0.765006 155
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or ` 
h2o.auc(h2o.performance(modelh1,test.h2o)) 
## [1] 0.8431394

The AUC metric provides insight into how well the classifier is able to separate the two classes. In this case, the value of 0.8431394 indicates that the classification is good. (A value of 0.5 indicates a worthless test, while a value of 1.0 indicates a perfect test.)

Next, inspect the coefficients of the variables in the dataset.

dfmodelh1 <- as.data.frame(h2o.varimp(modelh1))
dfmodelh1
##                       names coefficients sign
## 1              timbre_0_max  1.290938663  NEG
## 2                  loudness  1.262941934  POS
## 3                     pitch  0.616995941  NEG
## 4              timbre_1_min  0.422323735  POS
## 5              timbre_6_min  0.349016024  NEG
## 6                    energy  0.348092062  NEG
## 7             timbre_11_min  0.307331997  NEG
## 8              timbre_3_max  0.302225619  NEG
## 9             timbre_11_max  0.243632060  POS
## 10             timbre_4_min  0.224233951  POS
## 11             timbre_4_max  0.204134342  POS
## 12             timbre_5_min  0.199149324  NEG
## 13             timbre_0_min  0.195147119  POS
## 14 timesignature_confidence  0.179973904  POS
## 15         tempo_confidence  0.144242598  POS
## 16            timbre_10_max  0.137644568  POS
## 17             timbre_7_min  0.126995955  NEG
## 18            timbre_10_min  0.123851179  POS
## 19             timbre_7_max  0.100031481  NEG
## 20             timbre_2_min  0.096127636  NEG
## 21           key_confidence  0.083115820  POS
## 22             timbre_6_max  0.073712419  POS
## 23            timesignature  0.067241917  POS
## 24             timbre_8_min  0.061301881  POS
## 25             timbre_8_max  0.060041698  POS
## 26                      key  0.056158445  POS
## 27             timbre_3_min  0.050825116  POS
## 28             timbre_9_max  0.033733561  POS
## 29             timbre_2_max  0.030939072  POS
## 30             timbre_9_min  0.020708113  POS
## 31             timbre_1_max  0.014228818  NEG
## 32                    tempo  0.008199861  POS
## 33             timbre_5_max  0.004837870  POS
## 34                                    NA <NA>

Typically, songs with heavier instrumentation tend to be louder (have higher values in the variable “loudness”) and more energetic (have higher values in the variable “energy”). This knowledge is helpful for interpreting the modeling results.

You can make the following observations from the results:

  • The coefficient estimates for the confidence values associated with the time signature, key, and tempo variables are positive. This suggests that higher confidence leads to a higher predicted probability of a Top 10 hit.
  • The coefficient estimate for loudness is positive, meaning that mainstream listeners prefer louder songs with heavier instrumentation.
  • The coefficient estimate for energy is negative, meaning that mainstream listeners prefer songs that are less energetic, which are those songs with light instrumentation.

These coefficients lead to contradictory conclusions for Model 1. This could be due to multicollinearity issues. Inspect the correlation between the variables “loudness” and “energy” in the training set.

cor(train.h2o$loudness,train.h2o$energy)
## [1] 0.7399067

This number indicates that these two variables are highly correlated, and Model 1 does indeed suffer from multicollinearity. Typically, you associate a value of -1.0 to -0.5 or 1.0 to 0.5 to indicate strong correlation, and a value of 0.1 to 0.1 to indicate weak correlation. To avoid this correlation issue, omit one of these two variables and re-create the models.

You build two variations of the original model:

  • Model 2, in which you keep “energy” and omit “loudness”
  • Model 3, in which you keep “loudness” and omit “energy”

You compare these two models and choose the model with a better fit for this use case.

Create Model 2: Keep energy and omit loudness

colnames(train.h2o)
##  [1] "year"                     "songtitle"               
##  [3] "artistname"               "songid"                  
##  [5] "artistid"                 "timesignature"           
##  [7] "timesignature_confidence" "loudness"                
##  [9] "tempo"                    "tempo_confidence"        
## [11] "key"                      "key_confidence"          
## [13] "energy"                   "pitch"                   
## [15] "timbre_0_min"             "timbre_0_max"            
## [17] "timbre_1_min"             "timbre_1_max"            
## [19] "timbre_2_min"             "timbre_2_max"            
## [21] "timbre_3_min"             "timbre_3_max"            
## [23] "timbre_4_min"             "timbre_4_max"            
## [25] "timbre_5_min"             "timbre_5_max"            
## [27] "timbre_6_min"             "timbre_6_max"            
## [29] "timbre_7_min"             "timbre_7_max"            
## [31] "timbre_8_min"             "timbre_8_max"            
## [33] "timbre_9_min"             "timbre_9_max"            
## [35] "timbre_10_min"            "timbre_10_max"           
## [37] "timbre_11_min"            "timbre_11_max"           
## [39] "top10"
y.dep <- 39
x.indep <- c(6:7,9:38)
x.indep
##  [1]  6  7  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
## [24] 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
modelh2 <- h2o.glm( y = y.dep, x = x.indep, training_frame = train.h2o, family = "binomial")
## 
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  |=======                                                          |  10%
  |                                                                       
  |=================================================================| 100%

Measure the performance of Model 2.

h2o.performance(model=modelh2,newdata=test.h2o)
## H2OBinomialMetrics: glm
## 
## MSE:  0.09922606
## RMSE:  0.3150017
## LogLoss:  0.3228213
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.2490554
## AUC:  0.8431933
## Gini:  0.6863867
## R^2:  0.2548191
## Null Deviance:  326.0801
## Residual Deviance:  240.8247
## AIC:  306.8247
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0  1    Error     Rate
## 0      280 34 0.108280  =34/314
## 1       23 36 0.389831   =23/59
## Totals 303 70 0.152815  =57/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                         metric threshold    value idx
## 1                       max f1  0.254391 0.558140  69
## 2                       max f2  0.113031 0.647208 157
## 3                 max f0point5  0.413999 0.596026  22
## 4                 max accuracy  0.446250 0.876676  18
## 5                max precision  0.811739 1.000000   0
## 6                   max recall  0.037682 1.000000 283
## 7              max specificity  0.811739 1.000000   0
## 8             max absolute_mcc  0.254391 0.469060  69
## 9   max min_per_class_accuracy  0.141051 0.716561 131
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.113031 0.761821 157
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, valid=<T/F>, xval=<T/F>)`
dfmodelh2 <- as.data.frame(h2o.varimp(modelh2))
dfmodelh2
##                       names coefficients sign
## 1                     pitch  0.700331511  NEG
## 2              timbre_1_min  0.510270513  POS
## 3              timbre_0_max  0.402059546  NEG
## 4              timbre_6_min  0.333316236  NEG
## 5             timbre_11_min  0.331647383  NEG
## 6              timbre_3_max  0.252425901  NEG
## 7             timbre_11_max  0.227500308  POS
## 8              timbre_4_max  0.210663865  POS
## 9              timbre_0_min  0.208516163  POS
## 10             timbre_5_min  0.202748055  NEG
## 11             timbre_4_min  0.197246582  POS
## 12            timbre_10_max  0.172729619  POS
## 13         tempo_confidence  0.167523934  POS
## 14 timesignature_confidence  0.167398830  POS
## 15             timbre_7_min  0.142450727  NEG
## 16             timbre_8_max  0.093377516  POS
## 17            timbre_10_min  0.090333426  POS
## 18            timesignature  0.085851625  POS
## 19             timbre_7_max  0.083948442  NEG
## 20           key_confidence  0.079657073  POS
## 21             timbre_6_max  0.076426046  POS
## 22             timbre_2_min  0.071957831  NEG
## 23             timbre_9_max  0.071393189  POS
## 24             timbre_8_min  0.070225578  POS
## 25                      key  0.061394702  POS
## 26             timbre_3_min  0.048384697  POS
## 27             timbre_1_max  0.044721121  NEG
## 28                   energy  0.039698433  POS
## 29             timbre_5_max  0.039469064  POS
## 30             timbre_2_max  0.018461133  POS
## 31                    tempo  0.013279926  POS
## 32             timbre_9_min  0.005282143  NEG
## 33                                    NA <NA>

h2o.auc(h2o.performance(modelh2,test.h2o)) 
## [1] 0.8431933

You can make the following observations:

  • The AUC metric is 0.8431933.
  • Inspecting the coefficient of the variable energy, Model 2 suggests that songs with high energy levels tend to be more popular. This is as per expectation.
  • As H2O orders variables by significance, the variable energy is not significant in this model.

You can conclude that Model 2 is not ideal for this use , as energy is not significant.

CreateModel 3: Keep loudness but omit energy

colnames(train.h2o)
##  [1] "year"                     "songtitle"               
##  [3] "artistname"               "songid"                  
##  [5] "artistid"                 "timesignature"           
##  [7] "timesignature_confidence" "loudness"                
##  [9] "tempo"                    "tempo_confidence"        
## [11] "key"                      "key_confidence"          
## [13] "energy"                   "pitch"                   
## [15] "timbre_0_min"             "timbre_0_max"            
## [17] "timbre_1_min"             "timbre_1_max"            
## [19] "timbre_2_min"             "timbre_2_max"            
## [21] "timbre_3_min"             "timbre_3_max"            
## [23] "timbre_4_min"             "timbre_4_max"            
## [25] "timbre_5_min"             "timbre_5_max"            
## [27] "timbre_6_min"             "timbre_6_max"            
## [29] "timbre_7_min"             "timbre_7_max"            
## [31] "timbre_8_min"             "timbre_8_max"            
## [33] "timbre_9_min"             "timbre_9_max"            
## [35] "timbre_10_min"            "timbre_10_max"           
## [37] "timbre_11_min"            "timbre_11_max"           
## [39] "top10"
y.dep <- 39
x.indep <- c(6:12,14:38)
x.indep
##  [1]  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
## [24] 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
modelh3 <- h2o.glm( y = y.dep, x = x.indep, training_frame = train.h2o, family = "binomial")
## 
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perfh3<-h2o.performance(model=modelh3,newdata=test.h2o)
perfh3
## H2OBinomialMetrics: glm
## 
## MSE:  0.0978859
## RMSE:  0.3128672
## LogLoss:  0.3178367
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.264925
## AUC:  0.8492389
## Gini:  0.6984778
## R^2:  0.2648836
## Null Deviance:  326.0801
## Residual Deviance:  237.1062
## AIC:  303.1062
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0  1    Error     Rate
## 0      286 28 0.089172  =28/314
## 1       26 33 0.440678   =26/59
## Totals 312 61 0.144772  =54/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                         metric threshold    value idx
## 1                       max f1  0.273799 0.550000  60
## 2                       max f2  0.125503 0.663265 155
## 3                 max f0point5  0.435479 0.628931  24
## 4                 max accuracy  0.435479 0.882038  24
## 5                max precision  0.821606 1.000000   0
## 6                   max recall  0.038328 1.000000 280
## 7              max specificity  0.821606 1.000000   0
## 8             max absolute_mcc  0.435479 0.471426  24
## 9   max min_per_class_accuracy  0.173693 0.745763 120
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.125503 0.775073 155
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, valid=<T/F>, xval=<T/F>)`
dfmodelh3 <- as.data.frame(h2o.varimp(modelh3))
dfmodelh3
##                       names coefficients sign
## 1              timbre_0_max 1.216621e+00  NEG
## 2                  loudness 9.780973e-01  POS
## 3                     pitch 7.249788e-01  NEG
## 4              timbre_1_min 3.891197e-01  POS
## 5              timbre_6_min 3.689193e-01  NEG
## 6             timbre_11_min 3.086673e-01  NEG
## 7              timbre_3_max 3.025593e-01  NEG
## 8             timbre_11_max 2.459081e-01  POS
## 9              timbre_4_min 2.379749e-01  POS
## 10             timbre_4_max 2.157627e-01  POS
## 11             timbre_0_min 1.859531e-01  POS
## 12             timbre_5_min 1.846128e-01  NEG
## 13 timesignature_confidence 1.729658e-01  POS
## 14             timbre_7_min 1.431871e-01  NEG
## 15            timbre_10_max 1.366703e-01  POS
## 16            timbre_10_min 1.215954e-01  POS
## 17         tempo_confidence 1.183698e-01  POS
## 18             timbre_2_min 1.019149e-01  NEG
## 19           key_confidence 9.109701e-02  POS
## 20             timbre_7_max 8.987908e-02  NEG
## 21             timbre_6_max 6.935132e-02  POS
## 22             timbre_8_max 6.878241e-02  POS
## 23            timesignature 6.120105e-02  POS
## 24                      key 5.814805e-02  POS
## 25             timbre_8_min 5.759228e-02  POS
## 26             timbre_1_max 2.930285e-02  NEG
## 27             timbre_9_max 2.843755e-02  POS
## 28             timbre_3_min 2.380245e-02  POS
## 29             timbre_2_max 1.917035e-02  POS
## 30             timbre_5_max 1.715813e-02  POS
## 31                    tempo 1.364418e-02  NEG
## 32             timbre_9_min 8.463143e-05  NEG
## 33                                    NA <NA>
h2o.sensitivity(perfh3,0.5)
## Warning in h2o.find_row_by_threshold(object, t): Could not find exact
## threshold: 0.5 for this set of metrics; using closest threshold found:
## 0.501855569251422. Run `h2o.predict` and apply your desired threshold on a
## probability column.
## [[1]]
## [1] 0.2033898
h2o.auc(perfh3)
## [1] 0.8492389

You can make the following observations:

  • The AUC metric is 0.8492389.
  • From the confusion matrix, the model correctly predicts that 33 songs will be top 10 hits (true positives). However, it has 26 false positives (songs that the model predicted would be Top 10 hits, but ended up not being Top 10 hits).
  • Loudness has a positive coefficient estimate, meaning that this model predicts that songs with heavier instrumentation tend to be more popular. This is the same conclusion from Model 2.
  • Loudness is significant in this model.

Overall, Model 3 predicts a higher number of top 10 hits with an accuracy rate that is acceptable. To choose the best fit for production runs, record labels should consider the following factors:

  • Desired model accuracy at a given threshold
  • Number of correct predictions for top10 hits
  • Tolerable number of false positives or false negatives

Next, make predictions using Model 3 on the test dataset.

predict.regh <- h2o.predict(modelh3, test.h2o)
## 
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print(predict.regh)
##   predict        p0          p1
## 1       0 0.9654739 0.034526052
## 2       0 0.9654748 0.034525236
## 3       0 0.9635547 0.036445318
## 4       0 0.9343579 0.065642149
## 5       0 0.9978334 0.002166601
## 6       0 0.9779949 0.022005078
## 
## [373 rows x 3 columns]
predict.regh$predict
##   predict
## 1       0
## 2       0
## 3       0
## 4       0
## 5       0
## 6       0
## 
## [373 rows x 1 column]
dpr<-as.data.frame(predict.regh)
#Rename the predicted column 
colnames(dpr)[colnames(dpr) == 'predict'] <- 'predict_top10'
table(dpr$predict_top10)
## 
##   0   1 
## 312  61

The first set of output results specifies the probabilities associated with each predicted observation.  For example, observation 1 is 96.54739% likely to not be a Top 10 hit, and 3.4526052% likely to be a Top 10 hit (predict=1 indicates Top 10 hit and predict=0 indicates not a Top 10 hit).  The second set of results list the actual predictions made.  From the third set of results, this model predicts that 61 songs will be top 10 hits.

Compute the baseline accuracy, by assuming that the baseline predicts the most frequent outcome, which is that most songs are not Top 10 hits.

table(BillboardTest$top10)
## 
##   0   1 
## 314  59

Now observe that the baseline model would get 314 observations correct, and 59 wrong, for an accuracy of 314/(314+59) = 0.8418231.

It seems that Model 3, with an accuracy of 0.8552, provides you with a small improvement over the baseline model. But is this model useful for record labels?

View the two models from an investment perspective:

  • A production company is interested in investing in songs that are more likely to make it to the Top 10. The company’s objective is to minimize the risk of financial losses attributed to investing in songs that end up unpopular.
  • How many songs does Model 3 correctly predict as a Top 10 hit in 2010? Looking at the confusion matrix, you see that it predicts 33 top 10 hits correctly at an optimal threshold, which is more than half the number
  • It will be more useful to the record label if you can provide the production company with a list of songs that are highly likely to end up in the Top 10.
  • The baseline model is not useful, as it simply does not label any song as a hit.

Considering the three models built so far, you can conclude that Model 3 proves to be the best investment choice for the record label.

GBM model

H2O provides you with the ability to explore other learning models, such as GBM and deep learning. Explore building a model using the GBM technique, using the built-in h2o.gbm function.

Before you do this, you need to convert the target variable to a factor for multinomial classification techniques.

train.h2o$top10=as.factor(train.h2o$top10)
gbm.modelh <- h2o.gbm(y=y.dep, x=x.indep, training_frame = train.h2o, ntrees = 500, max_depth = 4, learn_rate = 0.01, seed = 1122,distribution="multinomial")
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perf.gbmh<-h2o.performance(gbm.modelh,test.h2o)
perf.gbmh
## H2OBinomialMetrics: gbm
## 
## MSE:  0.09860778
## RMSE:  0.3140188
## LogLoss:  0.3206876
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.2120263
## AUC:  0.8630573
## Gini:  0.7261146
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0  1    Error     Rate
## 0      266 48 0.152866  =48/314
## 1       16 43 0.271186   =16/59
## Totals 282 91 0.171582  =64/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                       metric threshold    value idx
## 1                     max f1  0.189757 0.573333  90
## 2                     max f2  0.130895 0.693717 145
## 3               max f0point5  0.327346 0.598802  26
## 4               max accuracy  0.442757 0.876676  14
## 5              max precision  0.802184 1.000000   0
## 6                 max recall  0.049990 1.000000 284
## 7            max specificity  0.802184 1.000000   0
## 8           max absolute_mcc  0.169135 0.496486 104
## 9 max min_per_class_accuracy  0.169135 0.796610 104
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.169135 0.805948 104
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or `
h2o.sensitivity(perf.gbmh,0.5)
## Warning in h2o.find_row_by_threshold(object, t): Could not find exact
## threshold: 0.5 for this set of metrics; using closest threshold found:
## 0.501205344484314. Run `h2o.predict` and apply your desired threshold on a
## probability column.
## [[1]]
## [1] 0.1355932
h2o.auc(perf.gbmh)
## [1] 0.8630573

This model correctly predicts 43 top 10 hits, which is 10 more than the number predicted by Model 3. Moreover, the AUC metric is higher than the one obtained from Model 3.

As seen above, H2O’s API provides the ability to obtain key statistical measures required to analyze the models easily, using several built-in functions. The record label can experiment with different parameters to arrive at the model that predicts the maximum number of Top 10 hits at the desired level of accuracy and threshold.

H2O also allows you to experiment with deep learning models. Deep learning models have the ability to learn features implicitly, but can be more expensive computationally.

Now, create a deep learning model with the h2o.deeplearning function, using the same training and test datasets created before. The time taken to run this model depends on the type of EC2 instance chosen for this purpose.  For models that require more computation, consider using accelerated computing instances such as the P2 instance type.

system.time(
  dlearning.modelh <- h2o.deeplearning(y = y.dep,
                                      x = x.indep,
                                      training_frame = train.h2o,
                                      epoch = 250,
                                      hidden = c(250,250),
                                      activation = "Rectifier",
                                      seed = 1122,
                                      distribution="multinomial"
  )
)
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##    user  system elapsed 
##   1.216   0.020 166.508
perf.dl<-h2o.performance(model=dlearning.modelh,newdata=test.h2o)
perf.dl
## H2OBinomialMetrics: deeplearning
## 
## MSE:  0.1678359
## RMSE:  0.4096778
## LogLoss:  1.86509
## Mean Per-Class Error:  0.3433013
## AUC:  0.7568822
## Gini:  0.5137644
## 
## Confusion Matrix (vertical: actual; across: predicted) for F1-optimal threshold:
##          0  1    Error     Rate
## 0      290 24 0.076433  =24/314
## 1       36 23 0.610169   =36/59
## Totals 326 47 0.160858  =60/373
## 
## Maximum Metrics: Maximum metrics at their respective thresholds
##                       metric threshold    value idx
## 1                     max f1  0.826267 0.433962  46
## 2                     max f2  0.000000 0.588235 239
## 3               max f0point5  0.999929 0.511811  16
## 4               max accuracy  0.999999 0.865952  10
## 5              max precision  1.000000 1.000000   0
## 6                 max recall  0.000000 1.000000 326
## 7            max specificity  1.000000 1.000000   0
## 8           max absolute_mcc  0.999929 0.363219  16
## 9 max min_per_class_accuracy  0.000004 0.662420 145
## 10 max mean_per_class_accuracy  0.000000 0.685334 224
## 
## Gains/Lift Table: Extract with `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, <data>)` or `h2o.gainsLift(<model>, valid=<T/F>, xval=<T/F>)`
h2o.sensitivity(perf.dl,0.5)
## Warning in h2o.find_row_by_threshold(object, t): Could not find exact
## threshold: 0.5 for this set of metrics; using closest threshold found:
## 0.496293348880151. Run `h2o.predict` and apply your desired threshold on a
## probability column.
## [[1]]
## [1] 0.3898305
h2o.auc(perf.dl)
## [1] 0.7568822

The AUC metric for this model is 0.7568822, which is less than what you got from the earlier models. I recommend further experimentation using different hyper parameters, such as the learning rate, epoch or the number of hidden layers.

H2O’s built-in functions provide many key statistical measures that can help measure model performance. Here are some of these key terms.

Metric Description
Sensitivity Measures the proportion of positives that have been correctly identified. It is also called the true positive rate, or recall.
Specificity Measures the proportion of negatives that have been correctly identified. It is also called the true negative rate.
Threshold Cutoff point that maximizes specificity and sensitivity. While the model may not provide the highest prediction at this point, it would not be biased towards positives or negatives.
Precision The fraction of the documents retrieved that are relevant to the information needed, for example, how many of the positively classified are relevant
AUC

Provides insight into how well the classifier is able to separate the two classes. The implicit goal is to deal with situations where the sample distribution is highly skewed, with a tendency to overfit to a single class.

0.90 – 1 = excellent (A)

0.8 – 0.9 = good (B)

0.7 – 0.8 = fair (C)

.6 – 0.7 = poor (D)

0.5 – 0.5 = fail (F)

Here’s a summary of the metrics generated from H2O’s built-in functions for the three models that produced useful results.

Metric Model 3 GBM Model Deep Learning Model

Accuracy

(max)

0.882038

(t=0.435479)

0.876676

(t=0.442757)

0.865952

(t=0.999999)

Precision

(max)

1.0

(t=0.821606)

1.0

(t=0802184)

1.0

(t=1.0)

Recall

(max)

 1.0 1.0

1.0

(t=0)

Specificity

(max)

 1.0 1.0

1.0

(t=1)

Sensitivity

 

 0.2033898 0.1355932

0.3898305

(t=0.5)
AUC 0.8492389 0.8630573 0.756882

Note: ‘t’ denotes threshold.

Your options at this point could be narrowed down to Model 3 and the GBM model, based on the AUC and accuracy metrics observed earlier.  If the slightly lower accuracy of the GBM model is deemed acceptable, the record label can choose to go to production with the GBM model, as it can predict a higher number of Top 10 hits.  The AUC metric for the GBM model is also higher than that of Model 3.

Record labels can experiment with different learning techniques and parameters before arriving at a model that proves to be the best fit for their business. Because deep learning models can be computationally expensive, record labels can choose more powerful EC2 instances on AWS to run their experiments faster.

Conclusion

In this post, I showed how the popular music industry can use analytics to predict the type of songs that make the Top 10 Billboard charts. By running H2O’s scalable machine learning platform on AWS, data scientists can easily experiment with multiple modeling techniques and interactively query the data using Amazon Athena, without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. This helps record labels make critical decisions on the type of artists and songs to promote in a timely fashion, thereby increasing sales and revenue.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Additional Reading

Learn how to build and explore a simple geospita simple GEOINT application using SparkR.

About the Authors

gopalGopal Wunnava is a Partner Solution Architect with the AWS GSI Team. He works with partners and customers on big data engagements, and is passionate about building analytical solutions that drive business capabilities and decision making. In his spare time, he loves all things sports and movies related and is fond of old classics like Asterix, Obelix comics and Hitchcock movies.

 

 

Bob Strahan, a Senior Consultant with AWS Professional Services, contributed to this post.

 

 

Introducing Gluon: a new library for machine learning from AWS and Microsoft

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-gluon-a-new-library-for-machine-learning-from-aws-and-microsoft/

Post by Dr. Matt Wood

Today, AWS and Microsoft announced Gluon, a new open source deep learning interface which allows developers to more easily and quickly build machine learning models, without compromising performance.

Gluon Logo

Gluon provides a clear, concise API for defining machine learning models using a collection of pre-built, optimized neural network components. Developers who are new to machine learning will find this interface more familiar to traditional code, since machine learning models can be defined and manipulated just like any other data structure. More seasoned data scientists and researchers will value the ability to build prototypes quickly and utilize dynamic neural network graphs for entirely new model architectures, all without sacrificing training speed.

Gluon is available in Apache MXNet today, a forthcoming Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit release, and in more frameworks over time.

Neural Networks vs Developers
Machine learning with neural networks (including ‘deep learning’) has three main components: data for training; a neural network model, and an algorithm which trains the neural network. You can think of the neural network in a similar way to a directed graph; it has a series of inputs (which represent the data), which connect to a series of outputs (the prediction), through a series of connected layers and weights. During training, the algorithm adjusts the weights in the network based on the error in the network output. This is the process by which the network learns; it is a memory and compute intensive process which can take days.

Deep learning frameworks such as Caffe2, Cognitive Toolkit, TensorFlow, and Apache MXNet are, in part, an answer to the question ‘how can we speed this process up? Just like query optimizers in databases, the more a training engine knows about the network and the algorithm, the more optimizations it can make to the training process (for example, it can infer what needs to be re-computed on the graph based on what else has changed, and skip the unaffected weights to speed things up). These frameworks also provide parallelization to distribute the computation process, and reduce the overall training time.

However, in order to achieve these optimizations, most frameworks require the developer to do some extra work: specifically, by providing a formal definition of the network graph, up-front, and then ‘freezing’ the graph, and just adjusting the weights.

The network definition, which can be large and complex with millions of connections, usually has to be constructed by hand. Not only are deep learning networks unwieldy, but they can be difficult to debug and it’s hard to re-use the code between projects.

The result of this complexity can be difficult for beginners and is a time-consuming task for more experienced researchers. At AWS, we’ve been experimenting with some ideas in MXNet around new, flexible, more approachable ways to define and train neural networks. Microsoft is also a contributor to the open source MXNet project, and were interested in some of these same ideas. Based on this, we got talking, and found we had a similar vision: to use these techniques to reduce the complexity of machine learning, making it accessible to more developers.

Enter Gluon: dynamic graphs, rapid iteration, scalable training
Gluon introduces four key innovations.

  1. Friendly API: Gluon networks can be defined using a simple, clear, concise code – this is easier for developers to learn, and much easier to understand than some of the more arcane and formal ways of defining networks and their associated weighted scoring functions.
  2. Dynamic networks: the network definition in Gluon is dynamic: it can bend and flex just like any other data structure. This is in contrast to the more common, formal, symbolic definition of a network which the deep learning framework has to effectively carve into stone in order to be able to effectively optimizing computation during training. Dynamic networks are easier to manage, and with Gluon, developers can easily ‘hybridize’ between these fast symbolic representations and the more friendly, dynamic ‘imperative’ definitions of the network and algorithms.
  3. The algorithm can define the network: the model and the training algorithm are brought much closer together. Instead of separate definitions, the algorithm can adjust the network dynamically during definition and training. Not only does this mean that developers can use standard programming loops, and conditionals to create these networks, but researchers can now define even more sophisticated algorithms and models which were not possible before. They are all easier to create, change, and debug.
  4. High performance operators for training: which makes it possible to have a friendly, concise API and dynamic graphs, without sacrificing training speed. This is a huge step forward in machine learning. Some frameworks bring a friendly API or dynamic graphs to deep learning, but these previous methods all incur a cost in terms of training speed. As with other areas of software, abstraction can slow down computation since it needs to be negotiated and interpreted at run time. Gluon can efficiently blend together a concise API with the formal definition under the hood, without the developer having to know about the specific details or to accommodate the compiler optimizations manually.

The team here at AWS, and our collaborators at Microsoft, couldn’t be more excited to bring these improvements to developers through Gluon. We’re already seeing quite a bit of excitement from developers and researchers alike.

Getting started with Gluon
Gluon is available today in Apache MXNet, with support coming for the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit in a future release. We’re also publishing the front-end interface and the low-level API specifications so it can be included in other frameworks in the fullness of time.

You can get started with Gluon today. Fire up the AWS Deep Learning AMI with a single click and jump into one of 50 fully worked, notebook examples. If you’re a contributor to a machine learning framework, check out the interface specs on GitHub.

-Dr. Matt Wood

New Techniques in Fake Reviews

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/new_techniques_.html

Research paper: “Automated Crowdturfing Attacks and Defenses in Online Review Systems.”

Abstract: Malicious crowdsourcing forums are gaining traction as sources of spreading misinformation online, but are limited by the costs of hiring and managing human workers. In this paper, we identify a new class of attacks that leverage deep learning language models (Recurrent Neural Networks or RNNs) to automate the generation of fake online reviews for products and services. Not only are these attacks cheap and therefore more scalable, but they can control rate of content output to eliminate the signature burstiness that makes crowdsourced campaigns easy to detect.

Using Yelp reviews as an example platform, we show how a two phased review generation and customization attack can produce reviews that are indistinguishable by state-of-the-art statistical detectors. We conduct a survey-based user study to show these reviews not only evade human detection, but also score high on “usefulness” metrics by users. Finally, we develop novel automated defenses against these attacks, by leveraging the lossy transformation introduced by the RNN training and generation cycle. We consider countermeasures against our mechanisms, show that they produce unattractive cost-benefit tradeoffs for attackers, and that they can be further curtailed by simple constraints imposed by online service providers.

AWS Hot Startups – August 2017

Post Syndicated from Tina Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-hot-startups-august-2017/

There’s no doubt about it – Artificial Intelligence is changing the world and how it operates. Across industries, organizations from startups to Fortune 500s are embracing AI to develop new products, services, and opportunities that are more efficient and accessible for their consumers. From driverless cars to better preventative healthcare to smart home devices, AI is driving innovation at a fast rate and will continue to play a more important role in our everyday lives.

This month we’d like to highlight startups using AI solutions to help companies grow. We are pleased to feature:

  • SignalBox – a simple and accessible deep learning platform to help businesses get started with AI.
  • Valossa – an AI video recognition platform for the media and entertainment industry.
  • Kaliber – innovative applications for businesses using facial recognition, deep learning, and big data.

SignalBox (UK)

In 2016, SignalBox founder Alain Richardt was hearing the same comments being made by developers, data scientists, and business leaders. They wanted to get into deep learning but didn’t know where to start. Alain saw an opportunity to commodify and apply deep learning by providing a platform that does the heavy lifting with an easy-to-use web interface, blueprints for common tasks, and just a single-click to productize the models. With SignalBox, companies can start building deep learning models with no coding at all – they just select a data set, choose a network architecture, and go. SignalBox also offers step-by-step tutorials, tips and tricks from industry experts, and consulting services for customers that want an end-to-end AI solution.

SignalBox offers a variety of solutions that are being used across many industries for energy modeling, fraud detection, customer segmentation, insurance risk modeling, inventory prediction, real estate prediction, and more. Existing data science teams are using SignalBox to accelerate their innovation cycle. One innovative UK startup, Energi Mine, recently worked with SignalBox to develop deep networks that predict anomalous energy consumption patterns and do time series predictions on energy usage for businesses with hundreds of sites.

SignalBox uses a variety of AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC, Amazon Elastic Block Store, and Amazon S3. The ability to rapidly provision EC2 GPU instances has been a critical factor in their success – both in terms of keeping their operational expenses low, as well as speed to market. The Amazon API Gateway has allowed for operational automation, giving SignalBox the ability to control its infrastructure.

To learn more about SignalBox, visit here.

Valossa (Finland)

As students at the University of Oulu in Finland, the Valossa founders spent years doing research in the computer science and AI labs. During that time, the team witnessed how the world was moving beyond text, with video playing a greater role in day-to-day communication. This spawned an idea to use technology to automatically understand what an audience is viewing and share that information with a global network of content producers. Since 2015, Valossa has been building next generation AI applications to benefit the media and entertainment industry and is moving beyond the capabilities of traditional visual recognition systems.

Valossa’s AI is capable of analyzing any video stream. The AI studies a vast array of data within videos and converts that information into descriptive tags, categories, and overviews automatically. Basically, it sees, hears, and understands videos like a human does. The Valossa AI can detect people, visual and auditory concepts, key speech elements, and labels explicit content to make moderating and filtering content simpler. Valossa’s solutions are designed to provide value for the content production workflow, from media asset management to end-user applications for content discovery. AI-annotated content allows online viewers to jump directly to their favorite scenes or search specific topics and actors within a video.

Valossa leverages AWS to deliver the industry’s first complete AI video recognition platform. Using Amazon EC2 GPU instances, Valossa can easily scale their computation capacity based on customer activity. High-volume video processing with GPU instances provides the necessary speed for time-sensitive workflows. The geo-located Availability Zones in EC2 allow Valossa to bring resources close to their customers to minimize network delays. Valossa also uses Amazon S3 for video ingestion and to provide end-user video analytics, which makes managing and accessing media data easy and highly scalable.

To see how Valossa works, check out www.WhatIsMyMovie.com or enable the Alexa Skill, Valossa Movie Finder. To try the Valossa AI, sign up for free at www.valossa.com.

Kaliber (San Francisco, CA)

Serial entrepreneurs Ray Rahman and Risto Haukioja founded Kaliber in 2016. The pair had previously worked in startups building smart cities and online privacy tools, and teamed up to bring AI to the workplace and change the hospitality industry. Our world is designed to appeal to our senses – stores and warehouses have clearly marked aisles, products are colorfully packaged, and we use these designs to differentiate one thing from another. We tell each other apart by our faces, and previously that was something only humans could measure or act upon. Kaliber is using facial recognition, deep learning, and big data to create solutions for business use. Markets and companies that aren’t typically associated with cutting-edge technology will be able to use their existing camera infrastructure in a whole new way, making them more efficient and better able to serve their customers.

Computer video processing is rapidly expanding, and Kaliber believes that video recognition will extend to far more than security cameras and robots. Using the clients’ network of in-house cameras, Kaliber’s platform extracts key data points and maps them to actionable insights using their machine learning (ML) algorithm. Dashboards connect users to the client’s BI tools via the Kaliber enterprise APIs, and managers can view these analytics to improve their real-world processes, taking immediate corrective action with real-time alerts. Kaliber’s Real Metrics are aimed at combining the power of image recognition with ML to ultimately provide a more meaningful experience for all.

Kaliber uses many AWS services, including Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 GPU instances, and Amazon S3. These services have been instrumental in helping Kaliber meet the needs of enterprise customers in record time.

Learn more about Kaliber here.

—

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next month!

-Tina

 

From Data Lake to Data Warehouse: Enhancing Customer 360 with Amazon Redshift Spectrum

Post Syndicated from Dylan Tong original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/from-data-lake-to-data-warehouse-enhancing-customer-360-with-amazon-redshift-spectrum/

Achieving a 360o-view of your customer has become increasingly challenging as companies embrace omni-channel strategies, engaging customers across websites, mobile, call centers, social media, physical sites, and beyond. The promise of a web where online and physical worlds blend makes understanding your customers more challenging, but also more important. Businesses that are successful in this medium have a significant competitive advantage.

The big data challenge requires the management of data at high velocity and volume. Many customers have identified Amazon S3 as a great data lake solution that removes the complexities of managing a highly durable, fault tolerant data lake infrastructure at scale and economically.

AWS data services substantially lessen the heavy lifting of adopting technologies, allowing you to spend more time on what matters most—gaining a better understanding of customers to elevate your business. In this post, I show how a recent Amazon Redshift innovation, Redshift Spectrum, can enhance a customer 360 initiative.

Customer 360 solution

A successful customer 360 view benefits from using a variety of technologies to deliver different forms of insights. These could range from real-time analysis of streaming data from wearable devices and mobile interactions to historical analysis that requires interactive, on demand queries on billions of transactions. In some cases, insights can only be inferred through AI via deep learning. Finally, the value of your customer data and insights can’t be fully realized until it is operationalized at scale—readily accessible by fleets of applications. Companies are leveraging AWS for the breadth of services that cover these domains, to drive their data strategy.

A number of AWS customers stream data from various sources into a S3 data lake through Amazon Kinesis. They use Kinesis and technologies in the Hadoop ecosystem like Spark running on Amazon EMR to enrich this data. High-value data is loaded into an Amazon Redshift data warehouse, which allows users to analyze and interact with data through a choice of client tools. Redshift Spectrum expands on this analytics platform by enabling Amazon Redshift to blend and analyze data beyond the data warehouse and across a data lake.

The following diagram illustrates the workflow for such a solution.

This solution delivers value by:

  • Reducing complexity and time to value to deeper insights. For instance, an existing data model in Amazon Redshift may provide insights across dimensions such as customer, geography, time, and product on metrics from sales and financial systems. Down the road, you may gain access to streaming data sources like customer-care call logs and website activity that you want to blend in with the sales data on the same dimensions to understand how web and call center experiences maybe correlated with sales performance. Redshift Spectrum can join these dimensions in Amazon Redshift with data in S3 to allow you to quickly gain new insights, and avoid the slow and more expensive alternative of fully integrating these sources with your data warehouse.
  • Providing an additional avenue for optimizing costs and performance. In cases like call logs and clickstream data where volumes could be many TBs to PBs, storing the data exclusively in S3 yields significant cost savings. Interactive analysis on massive datasets may now be economically viable in cases where data was previously analyzed periodically through static reports generated by inexpensive batch processes. In some cases, you can improve the user experience while simultaneously lowering costs. Spectrum is powered by a large-scale infrastructure external to your Amazon Redshift cluster, and excels at scanning and aggregating large volumes of data. For instance, your analysts maybe performing data discovery on customer interactions across millions of consumers over years of data across various channels. On this large dataset, certain queries could be slow if you didn’t have a large Amazon Redshift cluster. Alternatively, you could use Redshift Spectrum to achieve a better user experience with a smaller cluster.

Proof of concept walkthrough

To make evaluation easier for you, I’ve conducted a Redshift Spectrum proof-of-concept (PoC) for the customer 360 use case. For those who want to replicate the PoC, the instructions, AWS CloudFormation templates, and public data sets are available in the GitHub repository.

The remainder of this post is a journey through the project, observing best practices in action, and learning how you can achieve business value. The walkthrough involves:

  • An analysis of performance data from the PoC environment involving queries that demonstrate blending and analysis of data across Amazon Redshift and S3. Observe that great results are achievable at scale.
  • Guidance by example on query tuning, design, and data preparation to illustrate the optimization process. This includes tuning a query that combines clickstream data in S3 with customer and time dimensions in Amazon Redshift, and aggregates ~1.9 B out of 3.7 B+ records in under 10 seconds with a small cluster!
  • Guidance and measurements to help assess deciding between two options: accessing and analyzing data exclusively in Amazon Redshift, or using Redshift Spectrum to access data left in S3.

Stream ingestion and enrichment

The focus of this post isn’t stream ingestion and enrichment on Kinesis and EMR, but be mindful of performance best practices on S3 to ensure good streaming and query performance:

  • Use random object keys: The data files provided for this project are prefixed with SHA-256 hashes to prevent hot partitions. This is important to ensure that optimal request rates to support PUT requests from the incoming stream in addition to certain queries from large Amazon Redshift clusters that could send a large number of parallel GET requests.
  • Micro-batch your data stream: S3 isn’t optimized for small random write workloads. Your datasets should be micro-batched into large files. For instance, the “parquet-1” dataset provided batches >7 million records per file. The optimal file size for Redshift Spectrum is usually in the 100 MB to 1 GB range.

If you have an edge case that may pose scalability challenges, AWS would love to hear about it. For further guidance, talk to your solutions architect.

Environment

The project consists of the following environment:

  • Amazon Redshift cluster: 4 X dc1.large
  • Data:
    • Time and customer dimension tables are stored on all Amazon Redshift nodes (ALL distribution style):
      • The data originates from the DWDATE and CUSTOMER tables in the Star Schema Benchmark
      • The customer table contains attributes for 3 million customers.
      • The time data is at the day-level granularity, and spans 7 years, from the start of 1992 to the end of 1998.
    • The clickstream data is stored in an S3 bucket, and serves as a fact table.
      • Various copies of this dataset in CSV and Parquet format have been provided, for reasons to be discussed later.
      • The data is a modified version of the uservisits dataset from AMPLab’s Big Data Benchmark, which was generated by Intel’s Hadoop benchmark tools.
      • Changes were minimal, so that existing test harnesses for this test can be adapted:
        • Increased the 751,754,869-row dataset 5X to 3,758,774,345 rows.
        • Added surrogate keys to support joins with customer and time dimensions. These keys were distributed evenly across the entire dataset to represents user visits from six customers over seven years.
        • Values for the visitDate column were replaced to align with the 7-year timeframe, and the added time surrogate key.

Queries across the data lake and data warehouse 

Imagine a scenario where a business analyst plans to analyze clickstream metrics like ad revenue over time and by customer, market segment and more. The example below is a query that achieves this effect: 

The query part highlighted in red retrieves clickstream data in S3, and joins the data with the time and customer dimension tables in Amazon Redshift through the part highlighted in blue. The query returns the total ad revenue for three customers over the last three months, along with info on their respective market segment.

Unfortunately, this query takes around three minutes to run, and doesn’t enable the interactive experience that you want. However, there’s a number of performance optimizations that you can implement to achieve the desired performance.

Performance analysis

Two key utilities provide visibility into Redshift Spectrum:

  • EXPLAIN
    Provides the query execution plan, which includes info around what processing is pushed down to Redshift Spectrum. Steps in the plan that include the prefix S3 are executed on Redshift Spectrum. For instance, the plan for the previous query has the step “S3 Seq Scan clickstream.uservisits_csv10”, indicating that Redshift Spectrum performs a scan on S3 as part of the query execution.
  • SVL_S3QUERY_SUMMARY
    Statistics for Redshift Spectrum queries are stored in this table. While the execution plan presents cost estimates, this table stores actual statistics for past query runs.

You can get the statistics of your last query by inspecting the SVL_S3QUERY_SUMMARY table with the condition (query = pg_last_query_id()). Inspecting the previous query reveals that the entire dataset of nearly 3.8 billion rows was scanned to retrieve less than 66.3 million rows. Improving scan selectivity in your query could yield substantial performance improvements.

Partitioning

Partitioning is a key means to improving scan efficiency. In your environment, the data and tables have already been organized, and configured to support partitions. For more information, see the PoC project setup instructions. The clickstream table was defined as:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE clickstream.uservisits_csv10
…
PARTITIONED BY(customer int4, visitYearMonth int4)

The entire 3.8 billion-row dataset is organized as a collection of large files where each file contains data exclusive to a particular customer and month in a year. This allows you to partition your data into logical subsets by customer and year/month. With partitions, the query engine can target a subset of files:

  • Only for specific customers
  • Only data for specific months
  • A combination of specific customers and year/months

You can use partitions in your queries. Instead of joining your customer data on the surrogate customer key (that is, c.c_custkey = uv.custKey), the partition key “customer” should be used instead:

SELECT c.c_name, c.c_mktsegment, t.prettyMonthYear, SUM(uv.adRevenue)
…
ON c.c_custkey = uv.customer
…
ORDER BY c.c_name, c.c_mktsegment, uv.yearMonthKey  ASC

This query should run approximately twice as fast as the previous query. If you look at the statistics for this query in SVL_S3QUERY_SUMMARY, you see that only half the dataset was scanned. This is expected because your query is on three out of six customers on an evenly distributed dataset. However, the scan is still inefficient, and you can benefit from using your year/month partition key as well:

SELECT c.c_name, c.c_mktsegment, t.prettyMonthYear, SUM(uv.adRevenue)
…
ON c.c_custkey = uv.customer
…
ON uv.visitYearMonth = t.d_yearmonthnum
…
ORDER BY c.c_name, c.c_mktsegment, uv.visitYearMonth ASC

All joins between the tables are now using partitions. Upon reviewing the statistics for this query, you should observe that Redshift Spectrum scans and returns the exact number of rows, 66,270,117. If you run this query a few times, you should see execution time in the range of 8 seconds, which is a 22.5X improvement on your original query!

Predicate pushdown and storage optimizations 

Previously, I mentioned that Redshift Spectrum performs processing through large-scale infrastructure external to your Amazon Redshift cluster. It is optimized for performing large scans and aggregations on S3. In fact, Redshift Spectrum may even out-perform a medium size Amazon Redshift cluster on these types of workloads with the proper optimizations. There are two important variables to consider for optimizing large scans and aggregations:

  • File size and count. As a general rule, use files 100 MB-1 GB in size, as Redshift Spectrum and S3 are optimized for reading this object size. However, the number of files operating on a query is directly correlated with the parallelism achievable by a query. There is an inverse relationship between file size and count: the bigger the files, the fewer files there are for the same dataset. Consequently, there is a trade-off between optimizing for object read performance, and the amount of parallelism achievable on a particular query. Large files are best for large scans as the query likely operates on sufficiently large number of files. For queries that are more selective and for which fewer files are operating, you may find that smaller files allow for more parallelism.
  • Data format. Redshift Spectrum supports various data formats. Columnar formats like Parquet can sometimes lead to substantial performance benefits by providing compression and more efficient I/O for certain workloads. Generally, format types like Parquet should be used for query workloads involving large scans, and high attribute selectivity. Again, there are trade-offs as formats like Parquet require more compute power to process than plaintext. For queries on smaller subsets of data, the I/O efficiency benefit of Parquet is diminished. At some point, Parquet may perform the same or slower than plaintext. Latency, compression rates, and the trade-off between user experience and cost should drive your decision.

To help illustrate how Redshift Spectrum performs on these large aggregation workloads, run a basic query that aggregates the entire ~3.7 billion record dataset on Redshift Spectrum, and compared that with running the query exclusively on Amazon Redshift:

SELECT uv.custKey, COUNT(uv.custKey)
FROM <your clickstream table> as uv
GROUP BY uv.custKey
ORDER BY uv.custKey ASC

For the Amazon Redshift test case, the clickstream data is loaded, and distributed evenly across all nodes (even distribution style) with optimal column compression encodings prescribed by the Amazon Redshift’s ANALYZE command.

The Redshift Spectrum test case uses a Parquet data format with each file containing all the data for a particular customer in a month. This results in files mostly in the range of 220-280 MB, and in effect, is the largest file size for this partitioning scheme. If you run tests with the other datasets provided, you see that this data format and size is optimal and out-performs others by ~60X. 

Performance differences will vary depending on the scenario. The important takeaway is to understand the testing strategy and the workload characteristics where Redshift Spectrum is likely to yield performance benefits. 

The following chart compares the query execution time for the two scenarios. The results indicate that you would have to pay for 12 X DC1.Large nodes to get performance comparable to using a small Amazon Redshift cluster that leverages Redshift Spectrum. 

Chart showing simple aggregation on ~3.7 billion records

So you’ve validated that Spectrum excels at performing large aggregations. Could you benefit by pushing more work down to Redshift Spectrum in your original query? It turns out that you can, by making the following modification:

The clickstream data is stored at a day-level granularity for each customer while your query rolls up the data to the month level per customer. In the earlier query that uses the day/month partition key, you optimized the query so that it only scans and retrieves the data required, but the day level data is still sent back to your Amazon Redshift cluster for joining and aggregation. The query shown here pushes aggregation work down to Redshift Spectrum as indicated by the query plan:

In this query, Redshift Spectrum aggregates the clickstream data to the month level before it is returned to the Amazon Redshift cluster and joined with the dimension tables. This query should complete in about 4 seconds, which is roughly twice as fast as only using the partition key. The speed increase is evident upon reviewing the SVL_S3QUERY_SUMMARY table:

  • Bytes scanned is 21.6X less because of the Parquet data format.
  • Only 90 records are returned back to the Amazon Redshift cluster as a result of the push-down, instead of ~66.2 million, leading to substantially less join overhead, and about 530 MB less data sent back to your cluster.
  • No adverse change in average parallelism.

Assessing the value of Amazon Redshift vs. Redshift Spectrum

At this point, you might be asking yourself, why would I ever not use Redshift Spectrum? Well, you still get additional value for your money by loading data into Amazon Redshift, and querying in Amazon Redshift vs. querying S3.

In fact, it turns out that the last version of our query runs even faster when executed exclusively in native Amazon Redshift, as shown in the following chart:

Chart comparing Amazon Redshift vs. Redshift Spectrum with pushdown aggregation over 3 months of data

As a general rule, queries that aren’t dominated by I/O and which involve multiple joins are better optimized in native Amazon Redshift. For instance, the performance difference between running the partition key query entirely in Amazon Redshift versus with Redshift Spectrum is twice as large as that that of the pushdown aggregation query, partly because the former case benefits more from better join performance.

Furthermore, the variability in latency in native Amazon Redshift is lower. For use cases where you have tight performance SLAs on queries, you may want to consider using Amazon Redshift exclusively to support those queries.

On the other hand, when you perform large scans, you could benefit from the best of both worlds: higher performance at lower cost. For instance, imagine that you wanted to enable your business analysts to interactively discover insights across a vast amount of historical data. In the example below, the pushdown aggregation query is modified to analyze seven years of data instead of three months:

SELECT c.c_name, c.c_mktsegment, t.prettyMonthYear, uv.totalRevenue
…
WHERE customer <= 3 and visitYearMonth >= 199201
… 
FROM dwdate WHERE d_yearmonthnum >= 199201) as t
…
ORDER BY c.c_name, c.c_mktsegment, uv.visitYearMonth ASC

This query requires scanning and aggregating nearly 1.9 billion records. As shown in the chart below, Redshift Spectrum substantially speeds up this query. A large Amazon Redshift cluster would have to be provisioned to support this use case. With the aid of Redshift Spectrum, you could use an existing small cluster, keep a single copy of your data in S3, and benefit from economical, durable storage while only paying for what you use via the pay per query pricing model.

Chart comparing Amazon Redshift vs. Redshift Spectrum with pushdown aggregation over 7 years of data

Summary

Redshift Spectrum lowers the time to value for deeper insights on customer data queries spanning the data lake and data warehouse. It can enable interactive analysis on datasets in cases that weren’t economically practical or technically feasible before.

There are cases where you can get the best of both worlds from Redshift Spectrum: higher performance at lower cost. However, there are still latency-sensitive use cases where you may want native Amazon Redshift performance. For more best practice tips, see the 10 Best Practices for Amazon Redshift post.

Please visit the Amazon Redshift Spectrum PoC Environment Github page. If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

 

Additional Reading

Learn more about how Amazon Redshift Spectrum extends data warehousing out to exabytes – no loading required.

About the Author

Dylan Tong is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at AWS. He works with customers to help drive their success on the AWS platform through thought leadership and guidance on designing well architected solutions. He has spent most of his career building on his expertise in data management and analytics by working for leaders and innovators in the space.

 

 

Launch – Hello Amazon Macie: Automatically Discover, Classify, and Secure Content at Scale

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launch-amazon-macie-securing-your-s3-buckets/

When Jeff and I heard about this service, we both were curious on the meaning of the name Macie. Of course, Jeff being a great researcher looked up the name Macie and found that the name Macie has two meanings. It has both French and English (UK) based origin, it is typically a girl name, has various meanings. The first meaning of Macie that was found, said that that name meant “weapon”.  The second meaning noted the name was representative of a person that is bold, sporty, and sweet. In a way, these definitions are appropriate, as today I am happy to announce that we are launching  Amazon Macie, a new security service that uses machine learning to help identify and protect sensitive data stored in AWS from breaches, data leaks, and unauthorized access with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) being the initial data store. Therefore, I can imagine that Amazon Macie could be described as a bold, weapon for AWS customers providing a sweet service with a sporty user interface that helps to protects against malicious access of your data at rest. Whew, that was a mouthful, but I unbelievably got all the Macie descriptions out in a single sentence! Nevertheless, I am a thrilled to share with you the power of the new Amazon Macie service.

Amazon Macie is a service powered by machine learning that can automatically discover and classify your data stored in Amazon S3. But Macie doesn’t stop there, once your data has been classified by Macie, it assigns each data item a business value, and then continuously monitors the data in order to detect any suspicious activity based upon access patterns. Key features of the Macie service include:

  • Data Security Automation: analyzes, classifies, and processes data to understand the historical patterns, user authentications to data, data access locations, and times of access.
  • Data Security & Monitoring: actively monitors usage log data for anomaly detected along with automatic resolution of reported issues through CloudWatch Events and Lambda
  • Data Visibility for Proactive Loss prevention: Provides management visibility into details of storage data while providing immediate protection without the need for manual customer input
  • Data Research and Reporting: allows administrative configuration for reporting and alert management requirements

How does Amazon Macie accomplish this you ask? 

Using machine learning algorithms for natural language processing (NLP), Macie can automate the classification of data in your S3 buckets. In addition, Amazon Macie takes advantage of predictive analytics algorithms enabling data access patterns to be dynamically analyzed. Learnings are then used to inform and to alert you on possible suspicious behavior. Macie also runs an engine specifically to detect common sources of personally identifiable information (PII), or sensitive personal information (SP).  Macie takes advantage of AWS CloudTrail and continuously checks Cloudtrail events for PUT requests in S3 buckets and automatically classify new objects in almost real time.

While Macie is a powerful tool to use for security and data protection in the AWS cloud, it also can aid you with governance, compliance requirements, and/or audit standards.  Many of you may already be aware of the EU’s most stringent privacy regulation to date – The General Protection Data Regulation (GDPR), which becomes enforceable on May 25, 2018. As Amazon Macie recognizes personally identifiable information (PII) and provides customers with dashboards and alerts, it will enable customers to comply with GDPR regulations around encryption and pseudonymization of data. When combined with Lambda queries, Macie becomes a powerful tool to help remediate GDPR concerns.

Tour of the Amazon Macie Service

Let’s look a tour of the service and look at Amazon Macie up close and personal.

First, I will log onto the Macie console and start the process of setting up Macie so that I can start to my data classification and protection by clicking the Get Started button.


As you can see, to enable the Amazon Macie service, I must have the appropriate IAM roles created for the service, and additionally I will need to have AWS CloudTrail enabled in my account.

I will create these roles and turn on the AWS CloudTrail service in my account. To make things easier for you to setup Macie, you can take advantage of sample template for CloudFormation provided in the Macie User Guide that will set up required IAM roles and policies for you, you then would only need to setup a trail as noted in the CloudTrail documentation.

If you have multiple AWS accounts, you should note that the account you use to enable the Macie service will be noted as the master account, you can integrate other accounts with the Macie service but they will have the member account designation. Users from member accounts will need to use an IAM role to federate access to the master account in order access the Macie console.

Now that my IAM roles are created and CloudTrail is enabled, I will click the Enable Macie button to start Macie’s data monitoring and protection.


Once Macie is finished starting the service in your account, you will be brought to the service main screen and any existing alerts in your account will be presented to you. Since I have just started the service, I currently have no existing alerts at this time.


Considering we are doing a tour of the Macie service, I will now integrate some of my S3 buckets with Macie. However, you do not have to specify any S3 buckets for Macie to start monitoring since the service already uses the AWS CloudTrail Management API analyze and process information. With this tour of Macie, I have decided to monitor some object level API events in from certain buckets in CloudTrail.

In order to integrate with S3, I will go to the Integrations tab of the Macie console.  Once on the Integrations tab, I will see two options: Accounts and Services. The Account option is used to integrate member accounts with Macie and to set your data retention policy. Since I want to integrate specific S3 buckets with Macie, I’ll click the Services option go to the Services tab.


When I integrate Macie with the S3 service, a trail and a S3 bucket will be created to store logs about S3 data events. To get started, I will use the Select an account drop down to choose an account.  Once my account is selected, the services available for integration are presented. I’ll select the Amazon S3 service by clicking the Add button.

Now I can select the buckets that I want Macie to analyze, selecting the Review and Save button takes me to a screen which I confirm that I desire object level logging by clicking Save button.

4
Next, on our Macie tour, let’s look at how we can customize data classification with Macie.

As we discussed, Macie will automatically monitor and classify your data. Once Macie identifies your data it will classify your data objects by file and content type. Macie will also use a support vector machine (SVM) classifier to classify the content within S3 objects in addition to the metadata of the file. In deep learning/machine learning fields of study, support vector machines are supervised learning models, which have learning algorithms used for classification and regression analysis of data. Macie trained the SVM classifier by using a data of varying content types optimized to support accurate detection of data content even including the source code you may write.

Macie will assign only one content type per data object or file, however, you have the ability to enable or disable content type and file extensions in order to include or exclude them from the Macie service classifying these objects. Once Macie classifies the data, it will assign risk level of the object between 1 and 10 with 10 being the highest risk and 1 being the lowest data risk level.

To customize the classification of our data with Macie, I’ll go to the Settings Tab. I am now presented with the choices available to enable or disable the Macie classifications settings.


For an example during our tour of Macie, I will choose File extension. When presented with the list of file extensions that Macie tracks and uses for classifications.

As a test, I’ll edit the apk file extension for Android application install file, and disable monitoring of this file by selecting No – disabled from the dropdown and clicking the Save button. Of course, later I will turn this back on since I want to keep my entire collection of data files safe including my Android development binaries.


One last thing I want to note about data classification using Macie is that the service provides visibility in how you data object are being classified and highlights data assets that you have stored regarding how critical or important the information for compliance, for your personal data and for your business.

Now that we have explored the data that Macie classifies and monitors, the last stop on our service tour is the Macie dashboard.

 

The Macie Dashboard provides us with a complete picture of all of the data and activity that has been gathered as Macie monitors and classifies our data. The dashboard displays Metrics and Views grouped by categories to provide different visual perspectives of your data. Within these dashboard screens, you also you can go from a metric perspective directly to the Research tab to build and run queries based on the metric. These queries can be used to set up customized alerts for notification of any possible security issues or problems. We won’t have an opportunity to tour the Research or Alerts tab, but you can find out more information about these features in the Macie user guide.

Turning back to the Dashboard, there are so many great resources in the Macie Dashboard that we will not be able to stop at each view, metric, and feature during our tour, so let me give you an overview of all the features of the dashboard that you can take advantage of using.

Dashboard Metrics – monitored data grouped by the following categories:

  • High-risk S3 objects: data objects with risk levels of 8 through 10.
  • Total event occurrences: – total count of all event occurrences since Macie was enabled
  • Total user sessions – 5-minute snapshot of CloudTrail data

Dashboard Views – views to display various points of the monitored data and activity:

  • S3 objects for a selected time range
  • S3 objects
  • S3 objects by personally identifiable information (PII)
  • S3 objects by ACL
  • CloudTrail events and associated users
  • CloudTrail errors and associated users
  • Activity location
  • AWS CLoudTrail events
  • Activity ISPs
  • AWS CloudTrail user identity types

Summary

Well, that concludes our tour of the new and exciting Amazon Macie service. Amazon Macie is a sensational new service that uses the power of machine learning and deep learning to aid you in securing, identifying, and protecting your data stored in Amazon S3. Using natural language processing (NLP) to automate data classification, Amazon Macie enables you to easily get started with high accuracy classification and immediate protection of your data by simply enabling the service.  The interactive dashboards give visibility to the where, what, who, and when of your information allowing you to proactively analyze massive streams of data, data accesses, and API calls in your environment. Learn more about Amazon Macie by visiting the product page or the documentation in the Amazon Macie user guide.

– Tara

Building a Real World Evidence Platform on AWS

Post Syndicated from Aaron Friedman original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/building-a-real-world-evidence-platform-on-aws/

Deriving insights from large datasets is central to nearly every industry, and life sciences is no exception. To combat the rising cost of bringing drugs to market, pharmaceutical companies are looking for ways to optimize their drug development processes. They are turning to big data analytics to better quantify the effect that their drug compounds have on different populations and to look for new clinical indications for existing drugs.

A real world evidence (RWE) platform is loosely defined as an integrated set of services and products that life sciences companies use to securely acquire, store, and analyze large, often disparate datasets to gain insight into the functions of a specific drug or intervention. The petabyte-scale data generated from wearables, medical devices, genomics, clinical imaging, and claims (to name a few) allows pharmaceutical and other life sciences companies to build big data platforms to analyze these datasets. And many of them are doing it on AWS.

At the center of nearly every RWE platform is a data lake that houses different data types. It also stores the related metadata to identify where each piece of data came from, who owned it, etc. Analytics engines integrate the relevant streaming (e.g., wearables), structured (e.g., claims data), and unstructured (e.g., notes in electronic health records) data.

In this post, I highlight common architectural patterns that customers are using to maximize the value of real world evidence on AWS. The architecture presented here can be reproduced in multiple regions, so you can respect local data sovereignty requirements, when applicable, while conducting global studies. This post doesn’t cover all considerations for real world evidence (such as security and authentication), but instead focuses on the areas that are related to your data flow.

A data lake is your source of truth

The ability to integrate disparate data types is critical to maximizing the utility of RWE. Life sciences companies have to be able to store, search, and retrieve data of different types and sizes, including (but not limited to) the following:

  • Streaming data from wearables and medical devices
  • Structured data from genomics and claims data
  • Unstructured data from notes in electronic health records

A common solution to integrate these data types is a data lake. Data lakes allow organizations to store all their data, regardless of data type, in a centralized repository. Because data can be stored as-is, there’s no need to convert it to a predefined schema. And you no longer need to know what questions you want to ask of your data beforehand. You can use data lakes for ad hoc analyses, so you can quickly explore and discover new insights without needing to structure the data first, as you would with a traditional data warehouse. 

Although there are many uses for storing real world evidence data in a data lake, here are a few examples of the processes it can facilitate for pharma and biotech companies:

  • Quickly access all data for a given subject, from clinical images to genomics to claims data.
  • Associate incoming RWE data with existing data in your RWE data lake, such as by subject or study.
  • Select specific windows in longitudinal studies (microbiome, metabolomics, etc.). 

The following diagram shows an architecture of the features within a data lake and several examples of how data enters a data lake:

This architecture, which is entirely serverless and backed by Amazon S3, lets you scale your data lake to easily accommodate any data size for your RWE platform. Additionally, the components presented in this diagram can be secured via IAM controls and service policies. This enables you to secure and protect the sensitive information that often resides within an RWE platform. Amazon S3 is the canonical source for objects in your RWE data lake. You track and search metadata that is associated with these objects in a data catalog built on Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Amazon DynamoDB.

Let’s dive deeper into what this architecture does and how data makes it into the data lake:

  1. Streaming (e.g., wearables), structured, and unstructured data is acquired from myriad devices and sources. Depending on the data size, you might use AWS IoT (streaming), AWS Storage Gateway (mid-size/continual batch), and AWS Snowball (large legacy datasets, such as imaging). AWS IoT writes to Amazon Kinesis Firehose, which transforms the telemetry data in-flight to land both transformed and raw data in Amazon S3.
  2. When data lands in Amazon S3 buckets, an AWS Lambda function is invoked (either by trigger or manually).
  3. This Lambda function writes to a data catalog that is fronted by Amazon API Gateway. The data catalog contains metadata about all the object data in Amazon S3, as well as data that resides in databases, such as Amazon Redshift.
  4. An AWS Lambda function on the other side of API Gateway writes the appropriate metadata about the objects, such as the study that the data was generated from, into Amazon Elasticsearch Service and/or Amazon DynamoDB, which I refer to as the data catalog. 

The data catalog mentioned in steps 3 and 4 is central to your data management. In most analyses, the first step is to build a data manifest of where the data-of-interest lies, which is discussed in later sections.

Normalizing data for real world evidence

As I previously mentioned, data can enter your real world evidence data lake in many different formats. In many cases, you might need to normalize this data into a specific format to ease downstream analysis. For example, you might have to integrate many different electronic health records that are stored in different formats. You also might have to transform genomics data, often represented as a variant call format (VCF) file, into a format that’s easier for big data technologies like Apache Parquet to query. While you can certainly analyze this data in the format in which it entered, it might be better for querying after it’s transformed into a different format, or into a different data store.

In the architecture shown in the following diagram, AWS Step Functions orchestrates the data normalization (extract, transform, load—or ETL) process. Step Functions is a serverless workflow service that ensures that your long-running ETL jobs execute in order and complete successfully. At a high level, you first query the data catalog to get a manifest of the data to be normalized. Normalization occurs on Amazon EC2 instances, and the results are then stored back in Amazon S3 or in databases such as Amazon Redshift for future analysis. Locations of these results data are also logged in the data catalog for future querying.

Here is an example Step Functions state machine for this process:

The following is the accompanying JSON that produces it:

{
  "Comment": "An example for data normalization in RWE",
  "StartAt": "GenerateDataManifest",
  "States": {
    "GenerateDataManifest": {
      "Type": "Task",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:<account-id>::function:GenerateDataManifest",
      "Retry": [ {
        "ErrorEquals": ["States.Timeout"],
        "MaxAttempts": 2
      } ],
      "Next": "SubmitNormalizationJob"
    },
    "SubmitNormalizationJob": {
      "Type": "Task",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:<account-id>::function: SubmitNormalizationJob",
      "Next": "GetNormalizationJobStatus"
    },
    "GetNormalizationJobStatus": {
      "Type": "Task",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:<account-id>:function: GetNormalizationJobStatus",
      "Next": "CheckJobStatus",
      "InputPath": "$",
      "ResultPath": "$.status"
    },
    "CheckJobStatus": {
      "Type": "Choice",
      "Choices": [
        {
          "Variable": "$.status",
          "StringEquals": "FAILED",
          "Next": "JobFailureCleanup"
        },
        {
          "Variable": "$.status",
          "StringEquals": "SUCCEEDED",
          "Next": "JobSuccessCleanup"
        }
      ],
      "Default": "Wait60Seconds"
    },
    "Wait60Seconds": {
      "Type": "Wait",
      "Seconds": 60,
      "Next": "GetNormalizationJobStatus"
    },
    "JobSuccessCleanup": {
      "Type": "Task",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:<account-id>:function:batchJobSuccessCleanup",
      "End": true
    },
    "JobFailureCleanup": {
      "Type": "Task",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:<account-id>:function:batchJobSuccessCleanup",
      "End": true
    }
  }
}

And here is the overall architecture:

Here are the steps in more detail:

  1. Either a user or an application submits a POST request through Amazon API Gateway to process or transform a set of data. This request contains the query parameters that correspond to generating the data manifest. It is passed into an AWS Step Functions state machine, which orchestrates the ETL process.
  2. A Lambda function queries the data catalog and builds a manifest that contains the location of the data of interest.
  3. The manifest is passed to downstream Lambda functions in the state machine that orchestrate the batch workflow to process the data that’s specified in the manifest.
  4. These Lambda functions submit jobs to AWS Batch to execute batch jobs on Amazon EC2.
  5. Amazon EC2 processes the data (e.g., data normalization) and stores results back in Amazon S3 and/or Amazon Redshift.
  6. Results data is then logged in the data catalog, using the process shown in the data acquisition diagram.

Analyzing and visualizing data in real world evidence

Ultimately, the value in real world evidence platforms is the value you derive from the wide variety of data that feeds into it. Big data analytics, such as Spark on EMR, machine learning with the Deep Learning AMIs, and healthcare data warehouses, are all fundamental to maximizing the value of RWE.

Given the wide array of questions you can answer, you want your architecture to be as flexible as possible. Your organization also might use business intelligence (BI) tools. Again, as with the data normalization tier, you can use Step Functions to orchestrate your workflow. You first build the data manifest and then submit each portion of your desired analysis to the relevant data location and compute options, such as Amazon EMR or Amazon Redshift. Your organization’s BI tool of choice, such as Amazon QuickSight or one offered by our AWS Big Data Competency partners, can extract and visualize the results.

Here is the workflow in more detail:

  1. A user initiates a query on a dataset. In the context of RWE, this is largely analyzing a cohort in the context of a specific indication (drug response, etc.).
  2. AWS Step Functions invokes a Lambda function to query the data catalog and build a manifest of data.
  3. The manifest is passed to subsequent Lambda functions, which orchestrate the data analysis through different AWS services.
  4. These analyses can include Amazon EMR for population-scale genomics, Amazon EC2 for HPC and machine learning, and Amazon Redshift for your healthcare data warehouse.
  5. Results from each analysis are staged back in Amazon S3 and logged in the data catalog.
  6. BI tools like Amazon QuickSight or Tableau, or data analysis workbooks like Jupyter can query Amazon S3 to visualize results, such as through Amazon Athena.

A practical example

Imagine that you are at a pharmaceutical company that is developing a drug to address a neurological condition. You have longitudinal data in the form of brain scans and have noticed that the drug compound under development seems to benefit a specific subpopulation of individuals. As a result, you determine to sequence the genomes of all the responders and non-responders to look for specific biomarkers that could indicate response levels. Success would result in a companion diagnostic that you could use alongside your drug to increase its overall efficacy by delivering it only to the responding population.

Let’s briefly look at how this study might play out in the steps of data acquisition, normalization, and analysis described earlier.

Data acquisition

Data from longitudinal brain imaging studies can be moved to AWS using AWS Snowball. Genomics data coming off your genome sequencers would land in Amazon S3 via AWS Storage Gateway and/or AWS Direct Connect. These datasets are stored in your data catalog where you track items such as date generated, anonymized subject ID, etc.

Data processing

Genomes are transformed from raw reads (e.g., FASTQ) to a human readable format (VCF) that identifies variations in a genome. These VCF files are subsequently extracted, transformed, and loaded into a format that is amenable to big data analytics, such as Parquet.

Data analysis

You build a data manifest of your brain scans in Amazon S3. You use the deep learning AMI and P2 instance family to build machine learning models to identify images that represent different stages in your disorder-of-interest. You then run association analyses that combine your genomics data with your brain imaging models and drug response data to identify what genomic variants associate with improved treatment outcomes. You can manage these analyses via Jupyter notebooks, or you can connect with your BI tool of choice to visualize your results.

It will always be day one for RWE

By implementing real world evidence platforms on AWS, you can quickly integrate and interrogate disparate healthcare data to advance human health. By designing your RWE platform to be flexible, you can readily incorporate new big data technologies as they become relevant to your needs. This enables you to innovate and discover at a quicker rate.

To read more about real world evidence on AWS, and how AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner Deloitte has architected their ConvergeHEALTH platform on AWS, check out this guest post on the APN Blog!

Please leave any questions and comments below.

Additional Reading

The healthcare ecosystem has chosen a variety of tools and techniques for working with big data, but one tool that comes up again and again in many of the architectures we design and review is Spark on Amazon EMR. Will spark power the data behind precision medicine?

About the Authors

Dr. Aaron Friedman is a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He works with ISVs and SIs to architect healthcare solutions on AWS, and bring the best possible experience to their customers. His passion is working at the intersection of science, big data, and software. In his spare time, he’s exploring the outdoors, learning a new thing to cook, or spending time with his wife and his dog, Macaroon.

 

 

 

Journey into Deep Learning with AWS

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/journey-into-deep-learning-with-aws/

If you are anything like me, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning are completely fascinating and exciting topics. As AI, ML, and Deep Learning become more widely used, for me it means that the science fiction written by Dr. Issac Asimov, the robotics and medical advancements in Star Wars, and the technologies that enabled Captain Kirk and his Star Trek crew “to boldly go where no man has gone before” can become achievable realities.

 

Most people interested in the aforementioned topics are familiar with the AI and ML solutions enabled by Deep Learning, such as Convolutional Neural Networks for Image and Video Classification, Speech Recognition, Natural Language interfaces, and Recommendation Engines. However, it is not always an easy task setting up the infrastructure, environment, and tools to enable data scientists, machine learning practitioners, research scientists, and deep learning hobbyists/advocates to dive into these technologies. Most developers desire to go quickly from getting started with deep learning to training models and developing solutions using deep learning technologies.

For these reasons, I would like to share some resources that will help to quickly build deep learning solutions whether you are an experienced data scientist or a curious developer wanting to get started.

Deep Learning Resources

The Apache MXNet is Amazon’s deep learning framework of choice. With the power of Apache MXNet framework and NVIDIA GPU computing, you can launch your scalable deep learning projects and solutions easily on the AWS Cloud. As you get started on your MxNet deep learning quest, there are a variety of self-service tutorials and datasets available to you:

  • Launch an AWS Deep Learning AMI: This guide walks you through the steps to launch the AWS Deep Learning AMI with Ubuntu
  • MXNet – Create a computer vision application: This hands-on tutorial uses a pre-built notebook to walk you through using neural networks to build a computer vision application to identify handwritten digits
  • AWS Machine Learning Datasets: AWS hosts datasets for Machine Learning on the AWS Marketplace that you can access for free. These large datasets are available for anyone to analyze the data without requiring the data to be downloaded or stored.
  • Predict and Extract – Learn to use pre-trained models for predictions: This hands-on tutorial will walk you through how to use pre-trained model for predicting and feature extraction using the full Imagenet dataset.

 

AWS Deep Learning AMIs

AWS offers Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for use on Amazon EC2 for quick deployment of an infrastructure needed to start your deep learning journey. The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are pre-configured with popular deep learning frameworks built using Amazon EC2 instances on Amazon Linux, and Ubuntu that can be launched for AI targeted solutions and models. The deep learning frameworks supported and pre-configured on the deep learning AMI are:

  • Apache MXNet
  • TensorFlow
  • Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK)
  • Caffe
  • Caffe2
  • Theano
  • Torch
  • Keras

Additionally, the AWS Deep Learning AMIs install preconfigured libraries for Jupyter notebooks with Python 2.7/3.4, AWS SDK for Python, and other data science related python packages and dependencies. The AMIs also come with NVIDIA CUDA and NVIDIA CUDA Deep Neural Network (cuDNN) libraries preinstalled with all the supported deep learning frameworks and the Intel Math Kernel Library is installed for Apache MXNet framework. You can launch any of the Deep Learning AMIs by visiting the AWS Marketplace using the Try the Deep Learning AMIs link.

Summary

It is a great time to dive into Deep Learning. You can accelerate your work in deep learning by using the AWS Deep Learning AMIs running on the AWS cloud to get your deep learning environment running quickly or get started learning more about Deep Learning on AWS with MXNet using the AWS self-service resources.  Of course, you can learn even more information about Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence on AWS by reviewing the AWS Deep Learning page, the Amazon AI product page, and the AWS AI Blog.

May the Deep Learning Force be with you all.

– Tara

AWS Online Tech Talks – July 2017

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-july-2017/

It’s unbelievable that 2017 has flown by so quickly, yet here we are already in the month of July. A little-known fact about the 7th month of the year is that its name, July, is in honor of the Roman general, Julius Cæsar. The Roman State named the month on his behalf since it the month of his birth. Prior to this designation, the month of July was called Quintilis.

I, also, thought it was interesting to learn that in the month of July, several countries celebrate their Independence Day. These countries are the United States, Bahamas, Kiribati, São Tomé, Príncipe, Liberia, Maldives, Algeria, Cape Verde, Venezuela, Burundi, Rwanda, and Somalia. Seems that the month of July was ripe for freedom and independence for all parts of the world.

Therefore, there is a lot to celebrate in the month of July and you are free to add the celebration of learning to your July festivities with AWS Online Tech Talks. This month’s sessions brings you great technical information about Serverless Compute, Security and Identity, as well as, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence running on Amazon Web Services.

July 2017 – Schedule

Below is the upcoming schedule for the live, online technical sessions scheduled for the month of July. Make sure to register ahead of time so you won’t miss out on these free talks conducted by AWS subject matter experts. All schedule times for the online tech talks are shown in the Pacific Time (PDT) time zone.

 

Webinars featured this month are:

 

Tuesday, July 11

Compute

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Managing WordPress on Amazon Lightsail

Big Data

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Building a Metadata Catalog for your Data Lakes using Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Databases

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Convert and Migrate Your NoSQL Database or Data Warehouse to AWS

 

Wednesday, July 12

IoT

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Essential Capabilities of an IoT Cloud Platform

Storage

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Deep Dive on Amazon S3

Security & Identity

12:00 Noon –12:40 PM: Secure your Web Applications with AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) and AWS Shield

 

Thursday, July 13

Enterprise & Hybrid

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Decouple and Scale Applications Using Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS

Mobile

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Driving User Engagement with Amazon Pinpoint

Security & Identity

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Integrating Security Assessments Into Your DevOps Cycle with Amazon Inspector

 

Tuesday, July 25

Hands On Lab

8:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Hands-on Lab: Windows Workload

Enterprise & Hybrid

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: SAP Solutions on AWS for Large Enterprises and Mission Critical Applications

Serverless

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Security Best Practices for Serverless Applications

 

Wednesday, July 26

Hands On Lab

8:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Hands-on Lab: Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server in AWS

Artificial Intelligence

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Deep Learning for Data Scientists: Using Apache MXNet and R on AWS

 

Thursday, July 27

Big Data

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Embrace Streaming Analytics and Transform Your Business (AWS Webinar featuring Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri)

Compute

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Serverless Orchestration of AWS Step Functions

Artificial Intelligence

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Polly

 

The AWS Online Tech Talks series covers a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. These sessions feature live demonstrations & customer examples led by AWS engineers and Solution Architects. Check out the AWS YouTube channel for more on-demand webinars on AWS technologies.

– Tara

Box Platform on AWS Marketplace – Lambda Blueprints & Sample Code

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/box-platform-on-aws-marketplace-lambda-blueprints-sample-code/

Box is a cloud-based file sharing and content management system, with an API that recently became available in AWS Marketplace (Box Platform – Cloud Content Management APIs). With an array of features for collaboration and an emphasis on security, Box has found a home in many enterprises (see their success stories page for a list).

The Box API allows developers to build content experiences into web and mobile apps. Today I would like to tell you about some AWS Lambda blueprints and templates that will help you to build AWS applications that use this API to simplify user authentication and to add metadata to newly uploaded content. The templates are based on the Box Node Lambda Sample and should be a robust starting point for your own development.

Let’s take a look at the blueprints and then review some handy blog posts written by our friends at Box.

Box Blueprints for Lambda
The blueprints show you how to call the Box APIS and to connect a Box webhook to a Lambda function via Amazon API Gateway. To find them, simply open up the Lambda Console and search for box:

The first blueprint uses security credentials stored in the BOX_CONFIG environment variable. You can set the variable from within the Lambda Console:

The code in this blueprint retrieves and logs the Box User object for the user identified by the credentials.

The second blueprint implements a Box webhook that sits behind an API Gateway endpoint. It accepts requests, validates them, and logs them to Amazon CloudWatch:

Handy Blog Posts
The developer relations team at Box has written some blog posts that show you how to use Box in conjunction with several AWS services:

Manage User Authentication with Box Platform using Amazon Cognito – This post shows you how to use Amazon Cognito to power a login page for your app users. Cognito will handle authentication and user pool management and the code outlined in the blog post will create an App User in Box the first time the user logs in. The code is available as box-node-cognito-lambdas-sample on GitHub.

Add Deep Learning-based Image Recognition to your Box App with Amazon Rekognition – This post shows you how to build an image tagging application that is powered by Amazon Rekognition. Users take and upload photos, which are automatically labeled with metadata that that is stored in Amazon DynamoDB. The code is activated by a webhook when a file is uploaded. You can find the code in the box-node-rekognition-webhook on GitHub.

Thanks to our friends at Box for taking the time to create these helpful developer resources!

— Jeff;

 

 

Amazon Rekognition Update – Celebrity Recognition

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rekognition-update-celebrity-recognition/

We launched Amazon Rekognition at re:Invent (Amazon Rekognition – Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning) and added Image Moderation earlier this year.

Today we are adding celebrity recognition!

Rekognition has been trained to identify hundreds of thousands of people who are famous, noteworthy, or prominent in fields that includes politics, sports, entertainment, business, and media. The list is global, and is updated frequently.

To access this feature, simply call the new RecognizeCelebrities function. In addition to the bounding box and facial landmark feature returned by the existing DetectFaces function, the new function returns information about any celebrities that it recognizes:

"Id": "3Ir0du6", 
"MatchConfidence": 97, 
"Name": "Jeff Bezos", 
"Urls": [ "www.imdb.com/name/nm1757263" ]

The Urls provide additional information about the celebrity. The API currently return links to IMDB content; we may add other sources in the future.

You can use the Celebrity Recognition Demo in the AWS Management Console to experiment with this feature:

If you have an image archive you can now index it by celebrity. You could also use a combination of celebrity recognition and object detection to build all kinds of search tools. If your images are already stored in S3, you can process them in-place.

I’m sure that you will come up with all sorts of interesting uses for this new feature. Leave me a comment and let me know what you build!

— Jeff;

 

AWS Online Tech Talks – June 2017

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-june-2017/

As the sixth month of the year, June is significant in that it is not only my birth month (very special), but it contains the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day with the most daylight hours, and the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the day with the fewest daylight hours. In the United States, June is also the month in which we celebrate our dads with Father’s Day and have month-long celebrations of music, heritage, and the great outdoors.

Therefore, the month of June can be filled with lots of excitement. So why not add even more delight to the month, by enhancing your cloud computing skills. This month’s AWS Online Tech Talks features sessions on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Storage, Big Data, and Compute among other great topics.

June 2017 – Schedule

Noted below are the upcoming scheduled live, online technical sessions being held during the month of June. Make sure to register ahead of time so you won’t miss out on these free talks conducted by AWS subject matter experts. All schedule times for the online tech talks are shown in the Pacific Time (PDT) time zone.

Webinars featured this month are:

Thursday, June 1

Storage

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM: Deep Dive on Amazon Elastic File System

Big Data

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Migrating Big Data Workloads to Amazon EMR

Serverless

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Building AWS Lambda Applications with the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM)

 

Monday, June 5

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Lex

 

Tuesday, June 6

Management Tools

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Automated Compliance and Governance with AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail

 

Wednesday, June 7

Storage

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Backing up Amazon EC2 with Amazon EBS Snapshots

Big Data

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Intro to Amazon Redshift Spectrum: Quickly Query Exabytes of Data in S3

DevOps

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Introduction to AWS CodeStar: Quickly Develop, Build, and Deploy Applications on AWS

 

Thursday, June 8

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Polly

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Rekognition

 

Monday, June 12

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Exploring the Business Use Cases for Amazon Machine Learning

 

Tuesday, June 13

Compute

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: DevOps with Visual Studio, .NET and AWS

IoT

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: Create, with Intel, an IoT Gateway and Establish a Data Pipeline to AWS IoT

Big Data

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Real-Time Log Analytics using Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Elasticsearch Service

 

Wednesday, June 14

Containers

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Batch Processing with Containers on AWS

Security & Identity

12:00 Noon – 12:40 PM: Using Microsoft Active Directory across On-premises and Cloud Workloads

 

Thursday, June 15

Big Data

12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM: Building Big Data Applications with Serverless Architectures

 

Monday, June 19

Artificial Intelligence

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Deep Learning for Data Scientists: Using Apache MxNet and R on AWS

 

Tuesday, June 20

Storage

9:00 AM – 9:40 AM: Cloud Backup & Recovery Options with AWS Partner Solutions

Artificial Intelligence

10:30 AM – 11:10 AM: An Overview of AI on the AWS Platform

 

The AWS Online Tech Talks series covers a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. These sessions feature live demonstrations & customer examples led by AWS engineers and Solution Architects. Check out the AWS YouTube channel for more on-demand webinars on AWS technologies.

– Tara

Join Us at the 10th Annual Hadoop Summit / DataWorks Summit, San Jose (Jun 13-15)

Post Syndicated from mikesefanov original https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/160966148886

yahoohadoop:

image

We’re excited to co-host the 10th Annual Hadoop Summit, the leading conference for the Apache Hadoop community, taking place on June 13 – 15 at the San Jose Convention Center. In the last few years, the Hadoop Summit has expanded to cover all things data beyond just Apache Hadoop – such as data science, cloud and operations, IoT and applications – and has been aptly renamed the DataWorks Summit. The three-day program is bursting at the seams! Here are just a few of the reasons why you cannot miss this must-attend event:

  • Familiarize yourself with the cutting edge in Apache project developments from the committers
  • Learn from your peers and industry experts about innovative and real-world use cases, development and administration tips and tricks, success stories and best practices to leverage all your data – on-premise and in the cloud – to drive predictive analytics, distributed deep-learning and artificial intelligence initiatives
  • Attend one of our more than 170 technical deep dive breakout sessions from nearly 200 speakers across eight tracks
  • Check out our keynotes, meetups, trainings, technical crash courses, birds-of-a-feather sessions, Women in Big Data and more
  • Attend the community showcase where you can network with sponsors and industry experts, including a host of startups and large companies like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP, Dell EMC and Teradata

Similar to previous years, we look forward to continuing Yahoo’s decade-long tradition of thought leadership at this year’s summit. Join us for an in-depth look at Yahoo’s Hadoop culture and for the latest in technologies such as Apache Tez, HBase, Hive, Data Highway Rainbow, Mail Data Warehouse and Distributed Deep Learning at the breakout sessions below. Or, stop by Yahoo kiosk #700 at the community showcase.

Also, as a co-host of the event, Yahoo is pleased to offer a 20% discount for the summit with the code MSPO20. Register here for Hadoop Summit, San Jose, California!

DAY 1. TUESDAY June 13, 2017


12:20 – 1:00 P.M. TensorFlowOnSpark – Scalable TensorFlow Learning On Spark Clusters

Andy Feng – VP Architecture, Big Data and Machine Learning

Lee Yang – Sr. Principal Engineer

In this talk, we will introduce a new framework, TensorFlowOnSpark, for scalable TensorFlow learning, that was open sourced in Q1 2017. This new framework enables easy experimentation for algorithm designs, and supports scalable training & inferencing on Spark clusters. It supports all TensorFlow functionalities including synchronous & asynchronous learning, model & data parallelism, and TensorBoard. It provides architectural flexibility for data ingestion to TensorFlow and network protocols for server-to-server communication. With a few lines of code changes, an existing TensorFlow algorithm can be transformed into a scalable application.

2:10 – 2:50 P.M. Handling Kernel Upgrades at Scale – The Dirty Cow Story

Samy Gawande – Sr. Operations Engineer

Savitha Ravikrishnan – Site Reliability Engineer

Apache Hadoop at Yahoo is a massive platform with 36 different clusters spread across YARN, Apache HBase, and Apache Storm deployments, totaling 60,000 servers made up of 100s of different hardware configurations accumulated over generations, presenting unique operational challenges and a variety of unforeseen corner cases. In this talk, we will share methods, tips and tricks to deal with large scale kernel upgrade on heterogeneous platforms within tight timeframes with 100% uptime and no service or data loss through the Dirty COW use case (privilege escalation vulnerability found in the Linux Kernel in late 2016).

5:00 – 5:40 P.M. Data Highway Rainbow –  Petabyte Scale Event Collection, Transport, and Delivery at Yahoo

Nilam Sharma – Sr. Software Engineer

Huibing Yin – Sr. Software Engineer

This talk presents the architecture and features of Data Highway Rainbow, Yahoo’s hosted multi-tenant infrastructure which offers event collection, transport and aggregated delivery as a service. Data Highway supports collection from multiple data centers & aggregated delivery in primary Yahoo data centers which provide a big data computing cluster. From a delivery perspective, Data Highway supports endpoints/sinks such as HDFS, Storm and Kafka; with Storm & Kafka endpoints tailored towards latency sensitive consumers.


DAY 2. WEDNESDAY June 14, 2017


9:05 – 9:15 A.M. Yahoo General Session – Shaping Data Platform for Lasting Value

Sumeet Singh  – Sr. Director, Products

With a long history of open innovation with Hadoop, Yahoo continues to invest in and expand the platform capabilities by pushing the boundaries of what the platform can accomplish for the entire organization. In the last 11 years (yes, it is that old!), the Hadoop platform has shown no signs of giving up or giving in. In this talk, we explore what makes the shared multi-tenant Hadoop platform so special at Yahoo.

12:20 – 1:00 P.M. CaffeOnSpark Update – Recent Enhancements and Use Cases

Mridul Jain – Sr. Principal Engineer

Jun Shi – Principal Engineer

By combining salient features from deep learning framework Caffe and big-data frameworks Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop, CaffeOnSpark enables distributed deep learning on a cluster of GPU and CPU servers. We released CaffeOnSpark as an open source project in early 2016, and shared its architecture design and basic usage at Hadoop Summit 2016. In this talk, we will update audiences about the recent development of CaffeOnSpark. We will highlight new features and capabilities: unified data layer which multi-label datasets, distributed LSTM training, interleave testing with training, monitoring/profiling framework, and docker deployment.

12:20 – 1:00 P.M. Tez Shuffle Handler – Shuffling at Scale with Apache Hadoop

Jon Eagles – Principal Engineer  

Kuhu Shukla – Software Engineer

In this talk we introduce a new Shuffle Handler for Tez, a YARN Auxiliary Service, that addresses the shortcomings and performance bottlenecks of the legacy MapReduce Shuffle Handler, the default shuffle service in Apache Tez. The Apache Tez Shuffle Handler adds composite fetch which has support for multi-partition fetch to mitigate performance slow down and provides deletion APIs to reduce disk usage for long running Tez sessions. As an emerging technology we will outline future roadmap for the Apache Tez Shuffle Handler and provide performance evaluation results from real world jobs at scale.

2:10 – 2:50 P.M. Achieving HBase Multi-Tenancy with RegionServer Groups and Favored Nodes

Thiruvel Thirumoolan – Principal Engineer

Francis Liu – Sr. Principal Engineer

At Yahoo! HBase has been running as a hosted multi-tenant service since 2013. In a single HBase cluster we have around 30 tenants running various types of workloads (ie batch, near real-time, ad-hoc, etc). We will walk through multi-tenancy features explaining our motivation, how they work as well as our experiences running these multi-tenant clusters. These features will be available in Apache HBase 2.0.

2:10 – 2:50 P.M. Data Driving Yahoo Mail Growth and Evolution with a 50 PB Hadoop Warehouse

Nick Huang – Director, Data Engineering, Yahoo Mail  

Saurabh Dixit – Sr. Principal Engineer, Yahoo Mail

Since 2014, the Yahoo Mail Data Engineering team took on the task of revamping the Mail data warehouse and analytics infrastructure in order to drive the continued growth and evolution of Yahoo Mail. Along the way we have built a 50 PB Hadoop warehouse, and surrounding analytics and machine learning programs that have transformed the way data plays in Yahoo Mail. In this session we will share our experience from this 3 year journey, from the system architecture, analytics systems built, to the learnings from development and drive for adoption.

DAY3. THURSDAY June 15, 2017


2:10 – 2:50 P.M. OracleStore – A Highly Performant RawStore Implementation for Hive Metastore

Chris Drome – Sr. Principal Engineer  

Jin Sun – Principal Engineer

Today, Yahoo uses Hive in many different spaces, from ETL pipelines to adhoc user queries. Increasingly, we are investigating the practicality of applying Hive to real-time queries, such as those generated by interactive BI reporting systems. In order for Hive to succeed in this space, it must be performant in all aspects of query execution, from query compilation to job execution. One such component is the interaction with the underlying database at the core of the Metastore. As an alternative to ObjectStore, we created OracleStore as a proof-of-concept. Freed of the restrictions imposed by DataNucleus, we were able to design a more performant database schema that better met our needs. Then, we implemented OracleStore with specific goals built-in from the start, such as ensuring the deduplication of data. In this talk we will discuss the details behind OracleStore and the gains that were realized with this alternative implementation. These include a reduction of 97%+ in the storage footprint of multiple tables, as well as query performance that is 13x faster than ObjectStore with DirectSQL and 46x faster than ObjectStore without DirectSQL.

3:00 P.M. – 3:40 P.M. Bullet – A Real Time Data Query Engine

Akshai Sarma – Sr. Software Engineer

Michael Natkovich – Director, Engineering

Bullet is an open sourced, lightweight, pluggable querying system for streaming data without a persistence layer implemented on top of Storm. It allows you to filter, project, and aggregate on data in transit. It includes a UI and WS. Instead of running queries on a finite set of data that arrived and was persisted or running a static query defined at the startup of the stream, our queries can be executed against an arbitrary set of data arriving after the query is submitted. In other words, it is a look-forward system. Bullet is a multi-tenant system that scales independently of the data consumed and the number of simultaneous queries. Bullet is pluggable into any streaming data source. It can be configured to read from systems such as Storm, Kafka, Spark, Flume, etc. Bullet leverages Sketches to perform its aggregate operations such as distinct, count distinct, sum, count, min, max, and average.

3:00 P.M. – 3:40 P.M. Yahoo – Moving Beyond Running 100% of Apache Pig Jobs on Apache Tez

Rohini Palaniswamy – Sr. Principal Engineer

Last year at Yahoo, we spent great effort in scaling, stabilizing and making Pig on Tez production ready and by the end of the year retired running Pig jobs on Mapreduce. This talk will detail the performance and resource utilization improvements Yahoo achieved after migrating all Pig jobs to run on Tez. After successful migration and the improved performance we shifted our focus to addressing some of the bottlenecks we identified and new optimization ideas that we came up with to make it go even faster. We will go over the new features and work done in Tez to make that happen like custom YARN ShuffleHandler, reworking DAG scheduling order, serialization changes, etc. We will also cover exciting new features that were added to Pig for performance such as bloom join and byte code generation.

4:10 P.M. – 4:50 P.M. Leveraging Docker for Hadoop Build Automation and Big Data Stack Provisioning

Evans Ye,  Software Engineer

Apache Bigtop as an open source Hadoop distribution, focuses on developing packaging, testing and deployment solutions that help infrastructure engineers to build up their own customized big data platform as easy as possible. However, packages deployed in production require a solid CI testing framework to ensure its quality. Numbers of Hadoop component must be ensured to work perfectly together as well. In this presentation, we’ll talk about how Bigtop deliver its containerized CI framework which can be directly replicated by Bigtop users. The core revolution here are the newly developed Docker Provisioner that leveraged Docker for Hadoop deployment and Docker Sandbox for developer to quickly start a big data stack. The content of this talk includes the containerized CI framework, technical detail of Docker Provisioner and Docker Sandbox, a hierarchy of docker images we designed, and several components we developed such as Bigtop Toolchain to achieve build automation.

Register here for Hadoop Summit, San Jose, California with a 20% discount code MSPO20. 

Questions? Feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] Hope to see you there!

Deep Learning on AWS Batch

Post Syndicated from Chris Barclay original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/deep-learning-on-aws-batch/

Thanks to my colleague Kiuk Chung for this great post on Deep Learning using AWS Batch.

—-

GPU instances naturally pair with deep learning as neural network algorithms can take advantage of their massive parallel processing power. AWS provides GPU instance families, such as g2 and p2, which allow customers to run scalable GPU workloads. You can leverage such scalability efficiently with AWS Batch.

AWS Batch manages the underlying compute resources on-your behalf, allowing you to focus on modeling tasks without the overhead of resource management. Compute environments (that is, clusters) in AWS Batch are pools of instances in your account, which AWS Batch dynamically scales up and down, provisioning and terminating instances with respect to the numbers of jobs. This minimizes idle instances, which in turn optimizes cost.

Moreover, AWS Batch ensures that submitted jobs are scheduled and placed onto the appropriate instance, hence managing the lifecycle of the jobs. With the addition of customer-provided AMIs, AWS Batch users can now take advantage of this elasticity and convenience for jobs that require GPU.

This post illustrates how you can run GPU-based deep learning workloads on AWS Batch. I walk you through an example of training a convolutional neural network (the LeNet architecture), using Apache MXNet to recognize handwritten digits using the MNIST dataset.

Running an MXNet job in AWS Batch

Apache MXNet is a full-featured, flexibly programmable, and highly scalable deep learning framework that supports state-of-the-art deep models, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and long short-term memory networks (LSTMs).

There are three steps to running an AWS Batch job:

  • Create a custom AMI
  • Create AWS Batch entities
  • Submit a training job

Create a custom AMI

Start by creating an AMI that includes the NVIDIA driver and the Amazon ECS agent. In AWS Batch, instances can be launched with the specific AMI of your choice by specifying imageId when you create your compute environment. Because you are running a job that requires GPU, you need an AMI that has the NVIDIA driver installed.

Choose Launch Stack to launch the CloudFormation template in us-east-1 in your account:

As shown below, take note of the AMI value in the Outputs tab of the CloudFormation stack. You use this as the imageId value when creating the compute environment in the next section.

Alternatively, you may follow the AWS Batch documentation to create a GPU-enabled AMI.

Create AWS Batch resources

After you have built the AMI, create the following resources:

A compute environment, is a collection of instances (compute resources) of the same or different instance types. In this case, you create a managed compute environment in which the instances are of type p2.xlarge. For imageId, specify the AMI you built in the previous section.

Then, create a job queue. In AWS Batch, jobs are submitted to a job queue that are associated to an ordered list of compute environments. After a lower order compute environment is filled, jobs spill over to the next compute environment. For this example, you associate a single compute environment to the job queue.

Finally, create a job definition, which is a template for a job specification. For those familiar with Amazon ECS, this is analogous to task definitions. You mount the directory containing the NVIDIA driver on the host to /usr/local/nvidia on the container. You also need to set the privileged flag on the container properties.

The following code creates the aforementioned resources in AWS Batch. For more information, see the AWS Batch User Guide.

git clone https://github.com/awslabs/aws-batch-helpers
cd aws-batch-helpers/gpu-example

python create-batch-entities.py\
 --subnets <subnet1,subnet2,…>\
 --security-groups <sg1,sg2,…>\
 --key-pair \
 --instance-role \
 --image-id \
 --service-role

Submit a training job

Now you submit a job that trains a convolutional neural network model for handwritten digit recognition. Much like Amazon ECS tasks, jobs in AWS Batch are run as commands in a Docker container. To use MXNet as your deep learning library, you need a Docker image containing MXNet. For this example, use mxnet/python:gpu.

The submit-job.py script submits the job, and tails the output from CloudWatch Logs.

# cd aws-batch-helpers/gpu-example
python submit-job.py --wait

You should see an output that looks like the following:

Submitted job [train_imagenet - e1bccebc-76d9-4cd1-885b-667ef93eb1f5] to the job queue [gpu_queue]
Job [train_imagenet - e1bccebc-76d9-4cd1-885b-667ef93eb1f5] is RUNNING.
Output [train_imagenet/e1bccebc-76d9-4cd1-885b-667ef93eb1f5/12030dd3-0734-42bf-a3d1-d99118b401eb]:
 ================================================================================

[2017-04-25T19:02:57.076Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [100]	Speed: 15554.63 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.861077
[2017-04-25T19:02:57.428Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [200]	Speed: 18224.89 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.954688
[2017-04-25T19:02:57.755Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [300]	Speed: 19551.42 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.965313
[2017-04-25T19:02:58.080Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [400]	Speed: 19697.65 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.969531
[2017-04-25T19:02:58.405Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [500]	Speed: 19705.82 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.968281
[2017-04-25T19:02:58.734Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [600]	Speed: 19486.54 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.971719
[2017-04-25T19:02:59.058Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [700]	Speed: 19735.59 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.973281
[2017-04-25T19:02:59.384Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [800]	Speed: 19631.17 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.976562
[2017-04-25T19:02:59.713Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Batch [900]	Speed: 19490.74 samples/sec Train-accuracy=0.979062
[2017-04-25T19:02:59.834Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Train-accuracy=0.976774
[2017-04-25T19:02:59.834Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Time cost=3.190
[2017-04-25T19:02:59.850Z] INFO:root:Saved checkpoint to "/mnt/model/mnist-0001.params"
[2017-04-25T19:03:00.079Z] INFO:root:Epoch[0] Validation-accuracy=0.969148

================================================================================
Job [train_imagenet - e1bccebc-76d9-4cd1-885b-667ef93eb1f5] SUCCEEDED

In reality, you may want to modify the job command to save the trained model artifact to Amazon S3 so that subsequent prediction jobs can generate predictions against the model. For information about how to reference objects in Amazon S3 in your jobs, see the Creating a Simple “Fetch & Run” AWS Batch Job post.

Conclusion

In this post, I walked you through an example of running a GPU-enabled job in AWS Batch, using MXNet as the deep learning library. AWS Batch exposes primitives to allow you to focus on implementing the most efficient algorithm for your workload. It enables you to manage the lifecycle of submitted jobs and dynamically adapt the infrastructure requirements of your jobs within the specified bounds. It’s easy to take advantage of the horizontal scalability of compute instances provided by AWS in a cost-efficient manner.

MXNet, on the other hand, provides a rich set of highly optimized and scalable building blocks to start implementing your own deep learning algorithms. Together, you can not only solve problems requiring large neural network models, but also cut down on iteration time by harnessing the seemingly unlimited compute resources in Amazon EC2.

With AWS Batch managing the resources on your behalf, you can easily implement workloads such as hyper-parameter optimization to fan out tens or even hundreds of searches in parallel to find the best set of model parameters for your problem space. Moreover, because your jobs are run inside Docker containers, you may choose the tools and libraries that best fit your needs, build a Docker image, and submit your jobs using the image of your choice.

We encourage you to try it yourself and let us know what you think!

AWS Enables Consortium Science to Accelerate Discovery

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-enables-consortium-science-to-accelerate-discovery/

My colleague Mia Champion is a scientist (check out her publications), an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and an AWS Certified Developer. The time that she spent doing research on large-data datasets gave her an appreciation for the value of cloud computing in the bioinformatics space, which she summarizes and explains in the guest post below!

— Jeff;

Technological advances in scientific research continue to enable the collection of exponentially growing datasets that are also increasing in the complexity of their content. The global pace of innovation is now also fueled by the recent cloud-computing revolution, which provides researchers with a seemingly boundless scalable and agile infrastructure. Now, researchers can remove the hindrances of having to own and maintain their own sequencers, microscopes, compute clusters, and more. Using the cloud, scientists can easily store, manage, process and share datasets for millions of patient samples with gigabytes and more of data for each individual. As American physicist, John Bardeen once said: “Science is a collaborative effort. The combined results of several people working together is much more effective than could be that of an individual scientist working alone”.

Prioritizing Reproducible Innovation, Democratization, and Data Protection
Today, we have many individual researchers and organizations leveraging secure cloud enabled data sharing on an unprecedented scale and producing innovative, customized analytical solutions using the AWS cloud.  But, can secure data sharing and analytics be done on such a collaborative scale as to revolutionize the way science is done across a domain of interest or even across discipline/s of science? Can building a cloud-enabled consortium of resources remove the analytical variability that leads to diminished reproducibility, which has long plagued the interpretability and impact of research discoveries? The answers to these questions are ‘yes’ and initiatives such as the Neuro Cloud Consortium, The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), and The Sage Bionetworks Synapse platform, which powers many research consortiums including the DREAM challenges, are starting to put into practice model cloud-initiatives that will not only provide impactful discoveries in the areas of neuroscience, infectious disease, and cancer, but are also revolutionizing the way in which scientific research is done.

Bringing Crowd Developed Models, Algorithms, and Functions to the Data
Collaborative projects have traditionally allowed investigators to download datasets such as those used for comparative sequence analysis or for training a deep learning algorithm on medical imaging data. Investigators were then able to develop and execute their analysis using institutional clusters, local workstations, or even laptops:

This method of collaboration is problematic for many reasons. The first concern is data security, since dataset download essentially permits “chain-data-sharing” with any number of recipients. Second, analytics done using compute environments that are not templated at some level introduces the risk of variable analytics that itself is not reproducible by a different investigator, or even the same investigator using a different compute environment. Third, the required data dump, processing, and then re-upload or distribution to the collaborative group is highly inefficient and dependent upon each individual’s networking and compute capabilities. Overall, traditional methods of scientific collaboration have introduced methods in which security is compromised and time to discovery is hampered.

Using the AWS cloud, collaborative researchers can share datasets easily and securely by taking advantage of Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy restrictions for user bucket access as well as S3 bucket policies or Access Control Lists (ACLs). To streamline analysis and ensure data security, many researchers are eliminating the necessity to download datasets entirely by leveraging resources that facilitate moving the analytics to the data source and/or taking advantage of remote API requests to access a shared database or data lake. One way our customers are accomplishing this is to leverage container based Docker technology to provide collaborators with a way to submit algorithms or models for execution on the system hosting the shared datasets:

Docker container images have all of the application’s dependencies bundled together, and therefore provide a high degree of versatility and portability, which is a significant advantage over using other executable-based approaches. In the case of collaborative machine learning projects, each docker container will contain applications, language runtime, packages and libraries, as well as any of the more popular deep learning frameworks commonly used by researchers including: MXNet, Caffe, TensorFlow, and Theano.

A common feature in these frameworks is the ability to leverage a host machine’s Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) for significant acceleration of the matrix and vector operations involved in the machine learning computations. As such, researchers with these objectives can leverage EC2’s new P2 instance types in order to power execution of submitted machine learning models. In addition, GPUs can be mounted directly to containers using the NVIDIA Docker tool and appear at the system level as additional devices. By leveraging Amazon EC2 Container Service and the EC2 Container Registry, collaborators are able to execute analytical solutions submitted to the project repository by their colleagues in a reproducible fashion as well as continue to build on their existing environment.  Researchers can also architect a continuous deployment pipeline to run their docker-enabled workflows.

In conclusion, emerging cloud-enabled consortium initiatives serve as models for the broader research community for how cloud-enabled community science can expedite discoveries in Precision Medicine while also providing a platform where data security and discovery reproducibility is inherent to the project execution.

— Mia D. Champion, Ph.D.

 

Announcing the AWS Chatbot Challenge – Create Conversational, Intelligent Chatbots using Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-the-aws-chatbot-challenge-create-conversational-intelligent-chatbots-using-amazon-lex-and-aws-lambda/

If you have been checking out the launches and announcements from the AWS 2017 San Francisco Summit, you may be aware that the Amazon Lex service is now Generally Available, and you can use the service today. Amazon Lex is a fully managed AI service that enables developers to build conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Lex uses the same deep learning technologies of Amazon Alexa-powered devices like Amazon Echo. With the release of Amazon Lex, developers can build highly engaging lifelike user experiences and natural language interactions within their own applications. Amazon Lex supports Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Twilio SMS enabling you to easily publish your voice or text chatbots using these popular chat services. There is no better time to try out the Amazon Lex service to add the gift of gab to your applications, and now you have a great reason to get started.

May I have a Drumroll please?

I am thrilled to announce the AWS Chatbot Challenge! The AWS Chatbot Challenge is your opportunity to build a unique chatbot that helps solves a problem or adds value for prospective users. The AWS Chatbot Challenge is brought to you by Amazon Web Services in partnership with Slack.

 

The Challenge

Your mission, if you choose to accept it is to build a conversational, natural language chatbot using Amazon Lex and leverage Lex’s integration with AWS Lambda to execute logic or data processing on the backend. Your submission can be a new or existing bot, however, if your bot is an existing one it must have been updated to use Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda within the challenge submission period.

 

You are only limited by your own imagination when building your solution. Therefore, I will share some recommendations to help you to get your creative juices flowing when creating or deploying your bot. Some suggestions that can help you make your chatbot more distinctive are:

  • Deploy your bot to Slack, Facebook Messenger, or Twilio SMS
  • Take advantage of other AWS services when building your bot solution.
  • Incorporate Text-To-speech capabilities using a service like Amazon Polly
  • Utilize other third-party APIs, SDKs, and services
  • Leverage Amazon Lex pre-built enterprise connectors and add services like Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and QuickBooks as data sources.

There are cost effective ways to build your bot using AWS Lambda. Lambda includes a free tier of one million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month. This free, per month usage, is for all customers and does not expire at the end of the 12 month Free Tier Term. Furthermore, new Amazon Lex customers can process up to 10,000 text requests and 5,000 speech requests per month free during the first year. You can find details here.

Remember, the AWS Free Tier includes services with a free tier available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date, as well as additional service offers that do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month term. You can review the details about the AWS Free Tier and related services by going to the AWS Free Tier Details page.

 

Can We Talk – How It Works

The AWS Chatbot Challenge is open to individuals, and teams of individuals, who have reached the age of majority in their eligible area of residence at the time of competition entry. Organizations that employ 50 or fewer people are also eligible to compete as long at the time of entry they are duly organized or incorporated and validly exist in an eligible area. Large organizations-employing more than 50-in eligible areas can participate but will only be eligible for a non-cash recognition prize.

Chatbot Submissions are judged using the following criteria:

  • Customer Value: The problem or painpoint the bot solves and the extent it adds value for users
  • Bot Quality: The unique way the bot solves users’ problems, and the originality, creativity, and differentiation of the bot solution
  • Bot Implementation: Determination of how well the bot was built and executed by the developer. Also, consideration of bot functionality such as if the bot functions as intended and recognizes and responds to most common phrases asked of it

Prizes

The AWS Chatbot Challenge is awarding prizes for your hard work!

First Prize

  • $5,000 USD
  • $2,500 AWS Credits
  • Two (2) tickets to AWS re:Invent
  • 30 minute virtual meeting with the Amazon Lex team
  • Winning submission featured on the AWS AI blog
  • Cool swag

Second Prize

  • $3,000 USD
  • $1,500 AWS Credits
  • One (1) ticket to AWS re:Invent
  • 30 minute virtual meeting with the Amazon Lex team
  • Winning submission featured on the AWS AI blog
  • Cool swag

Third Prize

  • $2,000 USD
  • $1,000 AWS Credits
  • 30 minute virtual meeting with the Amazon Lex team
  • Winning submission featured on the AWS AI blog
  • Cool swag

 

Challenge Timeline

  • Submissions Start: April 19, 2017 at 12:00pm PDT
  • Submissions End: July 18, 2017 at 5:00pm PDT
  • Winners Announced: August 11, 2017 at 9:00am PDT

 

Up to the Challenge – Get Started

Are ready to get started on your chatbot and dive into the challenge? Here is how to get started:

Review the details on the challenge rules and eligibility

  1. Register for the AWS Chatbot Challenge
  2. Join the AWS Chatbot Slack Channel
  3. Create an account on AWS.
  4. Visit the Resources page for links to documentation and resources.
  5. Shoot your demo video that demonstrates your bot in action. Prepare a written summary of your bot and what it does.
  6. Provide a way to access your bot for judging and testing by including a link to your GitHub repo hosting the bot code and all deployment files and testing instructions needed for testing your bot.
  7. Submit your bot on AWSChatbot2017.Devpost.com before July 18, 2017 at 5 pm ET and share access to your bot, its Github repo and its deployment files.

Summary

With Amazon Lex you can build conversation into web and mobile applications, as well as use it to build chatbots that control IoT devices, provide customer support, give transaction updates or perform operations for DevOps workloads (ChatOps). Amazon Lex provides built-in integration with AWS Lambda, AWS Mobile Hub, and Amazon CloudWatch and allows for easy integrate with other AWS services so you can use the AWS platform for to build security, monitoring, user authentication, business logic, and storage into your chatbot or application. You can make additional enhancements to your voice or text chatbot by taking advantage of Amazon Lex’s support of chat services like Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Twilio SMS.

Dive into building chatbots and conversational interfaces with Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda with the AWS Chatbot Challenge for a chance to win some cool prizes. Some recent resources and online tech talks about creating bots with Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda that may help you in your bot building journey are:

If you have questions about the AWS Chatbot Challenge you can email [email protected] or post a question to the Discussion Board.

 

Good Luck and Happy Coding.

– Tara

Amazon Lex – Now Generally Available

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-lex-now-generally-available/

During AWS re:Invent I showed you how you could use Amazon Lex to build conversational voice & text interfaces. At that time we launched Amazon Lex in preview form and invited developers to sign up for access. Powered by the same deep learning technologies that drive Amazon Alexa, Amazon Lex allows you to build web & mobile applications that support engaging, lifelike interactions.

Today I am happy to announce that we are making Amazon Lex generally available, and that you can start using it today! Here are some of the features that we added during the preview:

Slack Integration – You can now create Amazon Lex bots that respond to messages and events sent to a Slack channel. Click on the Channels tab of your bot, select Slack, and fill in the form to get a callback URL for use with Slack:

Follow the tutorial (Integrating an Amazon Lex Bot with Slack) to see how to do this yourself.

Twilio Integration – You can now create Amazon Lex bots that respond to SMS messages sent to a Twilio SMS number. Again, you simply click on Channels, select Twilio, and fill in the form:

To learn more, read Integrating an Amazon Lex Bot with Twilio SMS.

SDK Support – You can now use the AWS SDKs to build iOS, Android, Java, JavaScript, Python, .Net, Ruby, PHP, Go, and C++ bots that span mobile, web, desktop, and IoT platforms and interact using either text or speech. The SDKs also support the build process for bots; you can programmatically add sample utterances, create slots, add slot values, and so forth. You can also manage the entire build, test, and deployment process programmatically.

Voice Input on Test Console – The Amazon Lex test console now supports voice input when used on the Chrome browser. Simply click on the microphone:

Utterance Monitoring – Amazon Lex now records utterances that were not recognized by your bot, otherwise known as missed utterances. You can review the list and add the relevant ones to your bot:

You can also watch the following CloudWatch metrics to get a better sense of how your users are interacting with your bot. Over time, as you add additional utterances and improve your bot in other ways, the metrics should be on the decline.

  • Text Missed Utterances (PostText)
  • Text Missed Utterances (PostContent)
  • Speech Missed Utterances

Easy Association of Slots with Utterances – You can now highlight text in the sample utterances in order to identify slots and add values to slot types:

Improved IAM Support – Amazon Lex permissions are now configured automatically from the console; you can now create bots without having to create your own policies.

Preview Response Cards – You can now view a preview of the response cards in the console:

To learn more, read about Using a Response Card.

Go For It
Pricing is based on the number of text and voice responses processed by your application; see the Amazon Lex Pricing page for more info.

I am really looking forward to seeing some awesome bots in action! Build something cool and let me know what you come up with.

— Jeff;

 

Amazon Polly – Announcing Speech Marks and Whispering

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-polly-speech-marks/

Like me, you may have loved going to the library or bookstore to have your favorite book narrated to you. As a child, I loved listening to books narrated by good storytellers who gave life to their stories by changing the inflection of their voice as needed. The book narration coupled with the visual aids the storytellers used to tell the story, drove my love for reading and exploring new books.

In fact, in order for my parents to ensure that my love of reading extended to classic novels, they bought my sister and I, a small projector device with a tape recorder. This device would narrate the story and synchronize the projection of the visuals from the book by using a chime sound to signal when we should advance to the next screen. While I have unfortunately dated myself with that story, it is great for me to look back and consider how far we have come with speech technologies like Text-to-Speech (TTS). Even with all of these advancements, it is still challenging for developers to add synchronized speech/voice to the animations of characters or graphics in their games, videos, and digital books using TTS. Additionally, it is very rare to successfully use a TTS solution to emulate the pitch, tempo, and level of loudness of the speech in lifelike voices.
With this in mind, I am happy to announce Amazon Polly is launching support for Speech Marks and Whispering.

Amazon Polly is a deep learning service that enables you to turn text into lifelike speech. You can select a voice of your choice by taking advantage of the 47 lifelike voices included in the service and its support for 24 languages. Using Polly, you can send the text you want to convert into speech to the Polly API, and it will return an audio stream that you can play or store it in common audio file formats like MP3.

Speech Marks are metadata, which allows developers to synchronize speech with visual experiences. This feature enables scenarios like lip-syncing by synchronizing speech with facial animations or using the highlighting of written words as they are spoken. The speech marks metadata describes the synthesized speech, and by using it alongside the speech audio stream can determine the beginning and ending of sounds, words, sentences, and SSML tags. With the new Speech Marks, developers can now create lip-syncing avatars, visually highlighted read-along experiences, and integrate speech capabilities into the gaming engines like Amazon Lumberyard to give a voice to the characters.

There are four types of speech marks:

  • Sentence: Specifies a sentence element in the input text
  • Word: Indicates a word element in the input text
  • Viseme: Illustrates the position of the face and mouth corresponding to the sound that is spoken
  • Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML): Describes a <mark> element from the SSML input text.

Whispering is a speech effect similar to pitch, tempo, and loudness, in that it provides developers with yet one more expressive voice feature with which they can now modify the Text-to-Speech output. The whispering feature allows developers to have words from their input text spoken in a whispered voice using <amazon:effect name=”whispered”> SSML element.

Let’s take a quick look at both these new features.

 

Using Speech Marks

I’ll jump into an example of using speech marks with Amazon Polly in the AWS Console. I’ll go first to the Amazon Polly console and press the Get started button.

I’m taken to the Text-To-Speech menu option, and I select the SSML tab under the Text-to-Speech section. I will simply add two sentences that I wish to be spoken in the provided text field and then select a Voice.

I’ll verify the sentences are in the form that I wish them to be spoken by clicking the Listen to Speech button. Since I like what I hear, I will proceed with adding the speech marks metadata. In order to use speech marks, I will select the Change file format link.

When the Change file format dialog box comes up, I will select the File Format option, Speech Marks, and under the Speech Mark Types section, I will choose: Word and Sentence, by checking the checkboxes beside each speech mark type. Now I will click the Change button.


This returns me to the Text-To-Speech section of the console, and I can now click the Download Speech Marks button to see the generated speech marks.

The file downloaded has a .marks extension and contains JSON, and contains information about the start and end of each of my sentences and words. The JSON fields are:

  • Time: timestamp in milliseconds from the beginning of the audio stream
  • Type: type of speech mark (sentence, word, viseme, or ssml)
  • Start: offset in bytes from the start of the object in the input text (not including viseme marks)
  • End: offset in bytes of the object’s end in the input text (not including viseme marks)
  • Value – data that varies based on the type of speech mark, i.e. sentence speech mark contains the entire sentence in the text

 

Using Whispering

As I noted previously, using the Whispering feature allows me to have my input text be spoken in a whispered voice using the SSML amazon:effect element with a name attribute value of whispered. I’ll use my example above and insert SSML elements to have some of my text spoken using a using a whispered voice.

I’ll return to the Amazon Polly console and in the text box change my current text to use the new whispered voice feature for the sentence, “My name is Tara”. To accomplish this I will use the following SSML element: <amazon:effect name=”whispered”>. Therefore, the final sentence with SSML marks I entered into the text box looks as follows:

<speak>Hi!<amazon:effect name="whispered">My name is Tara.</amazon:effect>I am excited to talk about Polly's new features.</speak>

When I click the Listen to speech button, I will hear that the sentence, “My name is Tara” is indeed spoken in a whispered voice.

I want to download my speech output, so I will click the Change file format link. When the Change file format dialog box comes up, I will select the MP3 option under File format section then click the Change button.


Now I have the option to download my file by clicking the Download MP3 button.

You can hear my speech output using the new whispered voice by clicking here.

Summary

The Speech Marks and Whispering features are available in Amazon Polly starting today. To learn more about these and other features visit the Amazon Polly developer guide found here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg

For more information about Amazon Polly, visit the Amazon Polly product page or get started by converting your text to speech in the Amazon Polly console.

You should give your text the gift of voice with Amazon Polly today.

– Tara

Amazon Rekognition Update – Image Moderation

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rekognition-update-image-moderation/

We launched Amazon Rekognition late last year and I told you about it in my post Amazon Rekognition – Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning. As I explained at the time, this service was built by our Computer Vision team over the course of many years and analyzes billions of images daily.

Today we are adding image moderation to Rekognition. If your web site or application allows users to upload profile photos or other imagery, you will love this new Rekognition feature.

Rekognition can now identify images that contain suggestive or explicit content that may not be appropriate for your site. The moderation labels provide detailed sub-categories, allowing you to fine-tune the filters that you use to determine what kinds of images you deem acceptable or objectionable. You can use this feature to improve photo sharing sites, forums, dating apps, content platforms for children, e-commerce platforms and marketplaces, and more.

To access this feature, call the DetectModerationLabels function from your code. The response will include a set of moderation labels drawn from a built-in taxonomy:

"ModerationLabels": [ 
  {
    "Confidence": 83.55088806152344, 
    "Name": "Suggestive",
    "ParentName": ""
   },
   {
    "Confidence": 83.55088806152344, 
    "Name": "Female Swimwear Or Underwear", 
    "ParentName": "Suggestive" 
   }
 ]

You can use the Image Moderation Demo in the AWS Management Console to experiment with this feature:

Image moderation is available now and you can start using it today!

— Jeff;

 

AWS Hot Startups – March 2017

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-hot-startups-march-2017/

As the madness of March rounds up, take a break from all the basketball and check out the cool startups Tina Barr brings you for this month!

-Ana

The arrival of spring brings five new startups this month:

  • Amino Apps – providing social networks for hundreds of thousands of communities.
  • Appboy – empowering brands to strengthen customer relationships.
  • Arterys – revolutionizing the medical imaging industry.
  • Protenus – protecting patient data for healthcare organizations.
  • Syapse – improving targeted cancer care with shared data from across the country.

In case you missed them, check out February’s hot startups here.

Amino Apps (New York, NY)
Amino LogoAmino Apps was founded on the belief that interest-based communities were underdeveloped and outdated, particularly when it came to mobile. CEO Ben Anderson and CTO Yin Wang created the app to give users access to hundreds of thousands of communities, each of them a complete social network dedicated to a single topic. Some of the largest communities have over 1 million members and are built around topics like popular TV shows, video games, sports, and an endless number of hobbies and other interests. Amino hosts communities from around the world and is currently available in six languages with many more on the way.

Navigating the Amino app is easy. Simply download the app (iOS or Android), sign up with a valid email address, choose a profile picture, and start exploring. Users can search for communities and join any that fit their interests. Each community has chatrooms, multimedia content, quizzes, and a seamless commenting system. If a community doesn’t exist yet, users can create it in minutes using the Amino Creator and Manager app (ACM). The largest user-generated communities are turned into their own apps, which gives communities their own piece of real estate on members’ phones, as well as in app stores.

Amino’s vast global network of hundreds of thousands of communities is run on AWS services. Every day users generate, share, and engage with an enormous amount of content across hundreds of mobile applications. By leveraging AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, and Amazon CloudFront, Amino can continue to provide new features to their users while scaling their service capacity to keep up with user growth.

Interested in joining Amino? Check out their jobs page here.

Appboy (New York, NY)
In 2011, Bill Magnuson, Jon Hyman, and Mark Ghermezian saw a unique opportunity to strengthen and humanize relationships between brands and their customers through technology. The trio created Appboy to empower brands to build long-term relationships with their customers and today they are the leading lifecycle engagement platform for marketing, growth, and engagement teams. The team recognized that as rapid mobile growth became undeniable, many brands were becoming frustrated with the lack of compelling and seamless cross-channel experiences offered by existing marketing clouds. Many of today’s top mobile apps and enterprise companies trust Appboy to take their marketing to the next level. Appboy manages user profiles for nearly 700 million monthly active users, and is used to power more than 10 billion personalized messages monthly across a multitude of channels and devices.

Appboy creates a holistic user profile that offers a single view of each customer. That user profile in turn powers contextual cross-channel messaging, lifecycle engagement automation, and robust campaign insights and optimization opportunities. Appboy offers solutions that allow brands to create push notifications, targeted emails, in-app and in-browser messages, news feed cards, and webhooks to enhance the user experience and increase customer engagement. The company prides itself on its interoperability, connecting to a variety of complimentary marketing tools and technologies so brands can build the perfect stack to enable their strategies and experiments in real time.

AWS makes it easy for Appboy to dynamically size all of their service components and automatically scale up and down as needed. They use an array of services including Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch, Auto Scaling groups, and Amazon S3 to help scale capacity and better deal with unpredictable customer loads.

To keep up with the latest marketing trends and tactics, visit the Appboy digital magazine, Relate. Appboy was also recently featured in the #StartupsOnAir video series where they gave insight into their AWS usage.

Arterys (San Francisco, CA)
Getting test results back from a physician can often be a time consuming and tedious process. Clinicians typically employ a variety of techniques to manually measure medical images and then make their assessments. Arterys founders Fabien Beckers, John Axerio-Cilies, Albert Hsiao, and Shreyas Vasanawala realized that much more computation and advanced analytics were needed to harness all of the valuable information in medical images, especially those generated by MRI and CT scanners. Clinicians were often skipping measurements and making assessments based mostly on qualitative data. Their solution was to start a cloud/AI software company focused on accelerating data-driven medicine with advanced software products for post-processing of medical images.

Arterys’ products provide timely, accurate, and consistent quantification of images, improve speed to results, and improve the quality of the information offered to the treating physician. This allows for much better tracking of a patient’s condition, and thus better decisions about their care. Advanced analytics, such as deep learning and distributed cloud computing, are used to process images. The first Arterys product can contour cardiac anatomy as accurately as experts, but takes only 15-20 seconds instead of the 45-60 minutes required to do it manually. Their computing cloud platform is also fully HIPAA compliant.

Arterys relies on a variety of AWS services to process their medical images. Using deep learning and other advanced analytic tools, Arterys is able to render images without latency over a web browser using AWS G2 instances. They use Amazon EC2 extensively for all of their compute needs, including inference and rendering, and Amazon S3 is used to archive images that aren’t needed immediately, as well as manage costs. Arterys also employs Amazon Route 53, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon EC2 Container Service.

Check out this quick video about the technology that Arterys is creating. They were also recently featured in the #StartupsOnAir video series and offered a quick demo of their product.

Protenus (Baltimore, MD)
Protenus LogoProtenus founders Nick Culbertson and Robert Lord were medical students at Johns Hopkins Medical School when they saw first-hand how Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems could be used to improve patient care and share clinical data more efficiently. With increased efficiency came a huge issue – an onslaught of serious security and privacy concerns. Over the past two years, 140 million medical records have been breached, meaning that approximately 1 in 3 Americans have had their health data compromised. Health records contain a repository of sensitive information and a breach of that data can cause major havoc in a patient’s life – namely identity theft, prescription fraud, Medicare/Medicaid fraud, and improper performance of medical procedures. Using their experience and knowledge from former careers in the intelligence community and involvement in a leading hedge fund, Nick and Robert developed the prototype and algorithms that launched Protenus.

Today, Protenus offers a number of solutions that detect breaches and misuse of patient data for healthcare organizations nationwide. Using advanced analytics and AI, Protenus’ health data insights platform understands appropriate vs. inappropriate use of patient data in the EHR. It also protects privacy, aids compliance with HIPAA regulations, and ensures trust for patients and providers alike.

Protenus built and operates its SaaS offering atop Amazon EC2, where Dedicated Hosts and encrypted Amazon EBS volume are used to ensure compliance with HIPAA regulation for the storage of Protected Health Information. They use Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53 for DNS, enabling unique, secure client specific access points to their Protenus instance.

To learn more about threats to patient data, read Hospitals’ Biggest Threat to Patient Data is Hiding in Plain Sight on the Protenus blog. Also be sure to check out their recent video in the #StartupsOnAir series for more insight into their product.

Syapse (Palo Alto, CA)
Syapse provides a comprehensive software solution that enables clinicians to treat patients with precision medicine for targeted cancer therapies — treatments that are designed and chosen using genetic or molecular profiling. Existing hospital IT doesn’t support the robust infrastructure and clinical workflows required to treat patients with precision medicine at scale, but Syapse centralizes and organizes patient data to clinicians at the point of care. Syapse offers a variety of solutions for oncologists that allow them to access the full scope of patient data longitudinally, view recommended treatments or clinical trials for similar patients, and track outcomes over time. These solutions are helping health systems across the country to improve patient outcomes by offering the most innovative care to cancer patients.

Leading health systems such as Stanford Health Care, Providence St. Joseph Health, and Intermountain Healthcare are using Syapse to improve patient outcomes, streamline clinical workflows, and scale their precision medicine programs. A group of experts known as the Molecular Tumor Board (MTB) reviews complex cases and evaluates patient data, documents notes, and disseminates treatment recommendations to the treating physician. Syapse also provides reports that give health system staff insight into their institution’s oncology care, which can be used toward quality improvement, business goals, and understanding variables in the oncology service line.

Syapse uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, and Amazon Elastic Block Store to build a high-performance, scalable, and HIPAA-compliant data platform that enables health systems to make precision medicine part of routine cancer care for patients throughout the country.

Be sure to check out the Syapse blog to learn more and also their recent video on the #StartupsOnAir video series where they discuss their product, HIPAA compliance, and more about how they are using AWS.

Thank you for checking out another month of awesome hot startups!

-Tina Barr