Last year marked Amazon’s first re:MARS conference, which drew inspiration from the annual MARS gathering hosted by CEO Jeff Bezos with a focus on machine learning, automation, robotics, and space technology. Among the marquee presenters were Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr., self-driving startup Zoox CEO Aicha Evans, and iRobot founder Colin Angle, and Amazon’s promising an equally star-studded lineup in summer 2020.
The upcoming re:MARS — which will take place once again at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, from June 16-19 — will feature speakers such as Bezos and Jon Favreau, who’s had a hand in such blockbusters as Iron Man and Disney’s The Mandalorian series. The latter might seem like an incongruous choice, but AI played a role in the production of the live-action remake of The Lion King, which Favreau directed. Virtual production supervisor Ben Grossman told TechCrunch that it was used to “instruct” digital animals to act in certain ways.
Other exects and luminaries that’ll be in attendance are Amazon worldwide consumer CEO Jeff Wilke and MIT planetary scientist and astrophysicist Dr. Sara Seager, as well as Caltech professor of planetary science and Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher Dr. Bethany Ehlmann.
Here’s who else to expect:
- Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, professor of media arts and sciences and head of MIT’s personal robots group
- Dr. Kate Darling, MIT media lab research specialist
- Dr. Ayanna Howard, chair of the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing
- Dr. Maja Matarić, University of Southern California professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics
- Dr. Sara Seager, MIT planetary scientist and astrophysicist
- Boyan Slat, CEO and founder of The Ocean Cleanup
- Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research and founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute
- Ben Grossman, mixed reality director and CEO of Magnopus
Amazon says that the first year of re:MARS attracted “thousands” of attendees from over 40 countries, who attended over 100 sessions, workshops, and demos involving a Mars rover, haptic robotic hands, an open-source prosthetic leg, and more. New at re:MARS 2020 is a Developer Day ahead of the conference where ticketholders will be able to sit in on talks by Amazon leaders across five technical tracks spanning Alexa and AWS.
If this year’s re:MARS is anything like last year’s, expect plenty in the way of technical discussions about Amazon’s “continued investment in innovation,” including the practical applications of machine learning underpinning Alexa, AWS services like Amazon Polly and Rekognition, Amazon’s cashierless Go stores, its Prime Air delivery drones, autonomous warehouse machines developed by Amazon Robotics, and more. Notable announcements in 2019 pertained to StyleSnap, which uses AI to let customers shop looks from magazines, social media, and more; a Prime Air drone capable of delivering packages in under 30 minutes; and Alex Conversations, a deep learning-based way to make Alexa skills with multi-turn dialogue that can interconnect with other Alexa skills.
General registration for re:MARS 2020 opens today.