AMAZON Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced on October 25 Thailand’s “Sunday Morning” as the winner of the AWS Hackdays 2018 Grand Finale while the Philippines’s “Team Makati Boyz” placed second. Training the second-fastest smart autonomous vehicle, Team Makati Boyz bested out six teams competing across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) region.
The AWS Hackdays Grand Finale is the culmination of hackathon events held across six countries in Southeast Asia. Winning representative teams from Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand were given 15 hours to train and race 1/16th scale modified cars, known as Robocars, to complete four laps around a constructed track. Team Makati Boyz’s Robocar finished the laps in 1 minute and 17 seconds, making them a runner-up to Sunday Morning’s shortest completion period of 37 seconds.
“AI [artificial intelligence] and ML [machine learning] have the potential to enhance everyday life, and this can be seen through the AWS Hackdays, where developers experiment with different AI and ML frameworks and incorporate these technologies into their applications,” AWS Managing Director for Asean Nick Walton said. “The Thailand and Philippine teams’ ability to train their Robocars to learn to drive and maneuver the track in a short time, harnessing AWS technologies such as Amazon SageMaker, showed firsthand how AI and ML can be used to positively impact everyday applications.”
Banding together for the competition, Team Makati Boyz, composed of four young professionals, gathered from different backgrounds like data science, e-commerce and mobile app development. Leading the group are the head of AWS’s User Group in the Philippines as well as a data scientist that has utilized AWS technology for projects in the past. Sunday Morning, on the other hand, is a team of data scientists from Sunday Ins Co. (easysunday.com), a Thailand-based organization and Southeast Asia’s first full stack Insurtech company that uses the AWS platform and cutting-edge technology to assist its pricing of personalized insurance products.
“While there were challenges, I found AWS Hackdays 2018 to be a rewarding experience. I appreciated how AWS technology levels the playing field for people from different countries, especially with varying degrees of technological infrastructure,” said data scientist member Gonzalo Relova III. “Utilizing my background and experience with machine learning, as well as Ieveraging AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2, is what I believe made training the autonomous vehicle in that short time possible.”
According to Raphael Quisumbing, Team Makati Boyz leader, “Competing in the Asean level was exciting for us.”
“The team had to explore alternatives, as well as the different machine learning platforms AWS provided. After 10 hours of coding and training, we were able to make our own DonkeyCar complete a track, which led us to placing second in the competition. We are thankful and eager to bring our learnings back to the Philippines.”
As runners-up of the AWS Hackdays 2018 Grand Finale, Makati Boyz (Philippines) took home an Amazon Gift Card worth $100 per team member. Sunday Morning earned a trip to Las Vegas to attend “re:Invent 2018,” a learning conference hosted by AWS for the global cloud computing community. The event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to more than 2,000 technical sessions, a partner expo, after-hours events and more.