Dubai, UAE: Capillary Technologies, one of Asia’s leading consumer engagement and commerce product companies, announced today that it has achieved the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Retail Competency status.

AWS Retail Competency Partners have demonstrated success in offering end-to-end solutions across Customer Engagement, Supply Chain and Distribution, Physical, Digital, and Virtual Store, Advanced Retail Data Science, Core Retail Business Applications, and Consulting Practices for Retail on AWS.

AWS Retail Competency Partners undergo rigorous validation by AWS to ensure alignment to AWS best practices for building secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient cloud infrastructure for industry applications to give customers an increased confidence when making decisions.

Achieving the AWS Retail Competency differentiates Capillary Technologies as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that delivers highly specialized technical proficiency for Retail. To receive the AWS Competency designation, APN Partners must possess deep AWS expertise and deliver solutions seamlessly on AWS

Capillary Technologies, has completed 10 years with AWS and has grown 50% year over year since then. The company was launched on AWS and over the years has invested in R&D by building AI-powered Omnichannel Customer Engagement and enterprise-ready eCommerce solutions for connected experience.

Talking about the AWS Retail Competency, Capillary Technologies’ Chief Technology Officer, Pravanjan Choudhury, said, “Capillary has driven growth through two primary strategies; continuous innovation and geographical expansion. AWS has been a pillar of support in achieving these results. Their constant updates and presence across the globe have helped our customers to implement our solutions globally easier and faster. Today, Capillary Technologies can stand out as an innovative company and offer innovative solutions to our clients such as integration of behavioral events on CRM, Offline clickstreams with data from offline retail stores, and more, and we are happy to share this success with AWS.”

“Many retailers are reinventing their operations and brand experience with new innovations in the cloud,” said Tom Litchford, Head of Retail Business Development, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are delighted to welcome Capillary Technologies to the AWS Retail Competency Program. Their solutions for retail operations, powered and vetted by AWS, can help our customers to accelerate their transformation, modernization, and customer engagement efforts.”

In their journey to become a SaaS leader, Capillary Technologies believes the vast capabilities of AWS have pushed them to explore deeper and come up with innovative products. Some of the key benefits that they have been able to power through AWS in the last few years are:

• Simplifies expansion to global markets: AWS’s global presence has allowed Capillary to offer our solutions in 30 countries in a short span of 10 years.
• Scaling while controlling costs: During peak shopping seasons or campaign periods, the traffic can be up to 50 times higher than usual fo retailers. Capillary has leveraged AWS solutions to stay resilient to this demand and be scale-ready for some of the largest retailers. The company has formed an AI/ML innovation lab dedicated to adding more AI capabilities to its products to enhance ROIs for their customers. Capillary has maintained an availability rate up to 99.97 percent despite a soaring customer base.
• Boosting Innovation: Capillary has also used Amazon Rekognition to drive an effective customer engagement solution powered by smart IoT sensors deployed in the stores. The technology captures information about visitors such as how much time they spend in a store or if they are a returning customer with products – VisitorMetrix and VisitorSense. Capillary is also experimenting with Amazon SageMaker to simplify the development and deployment of ML algorithms across its product portfolio. Leveraging the power of AWS has also reduced time to market for new products.

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify Consulting and Technology APN Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

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SEATTLE: Several dozen activists chanted and held banners on July 15 outside Amazon’s Seattle headquarters calling on the company to stop providing technology to US government immigration authorities, in one of several pressure campaigns focused on the commerce giant during its Prime Day summer sale. 

Jennifer Lee of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington pointed to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s requests to perform face surveillance searches on images in state driver’s license databases in Washington and other states. She said that Amazon has pitched the agency on its facial recognition technology, Rekognition. 

“If Amazon continues to collaborate with ICE, it will fuel deportation efforts, which terrorise immigrant communities throughout the country, resulting in countless errors, deportations without due process and increased racial profiling,” Lee said at a rally in front of the Amazon Spheres. 

“Our faces should not be weaponised to surveil and oppress immigrant communities,” she added to cheers from a few dozen protesters from groups including La Resistencia, MiJente Seattle and Puget Sound Sage. The activists also delivered a petition to Amazon they said was supported by more than 270,000 people.

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) spokesperson reiterated an earlier statement that “companies and government organisations need to use existing and new technology responsibly and lawfully”. The company recently joined its cloud computing rivals Microsoft and Google in calling for national regulation of facial recognition technology. 

“There is clearly a need for more clarity from governments on what is acceptable use of (artificial intelligence) and ramifications for its misuse, and we’ve provided a proposed legislative framework for this,” the spokesperson said.

Amazon says it does not discuss specific customers without their consent. 

In Minnesota, meanwhile, workers at a fulfilment centre carried out a planned strike, believed to be the first at an Amazon facility in the US. Amazon workers affiliated with the UNI Global Union also planned Prime Day protest actions in Germany, the UK, Spain and Poland.

Amazon is focused on executing its sales event, with some workers around the Seattle headquarters wearing “Prime Day” T-shirts. Unlike last year, there were no reported technical glitches slowing down sales as of Monday evening. 

It remains to be seen what if any impact the protests and strike actions, as well as growing competition, may have on demand from shoppers during the sale, which continues through Tuesday. Amazon provides its Prime Day discounts to reward its most avid customers – those who pay US$119 (RM489) for an annual shipping and media subscription – and to attract more subscribers.

Lee and three other activists, trailed by television cameras, carried a box they said contained a petition signed by more than 270,000 people across the street to Amazon’s newly opened re: Invent building. They asked to meet with Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS – who has also been under pressure on this issue from employees internally – and waited for a time outside a security checkpoint as Amazon employees came and went. 

Activists in eight other US cities planned similar efforts to deliver the petition to Amazon facilities and Jeff Bezos’ New York City home. Last week, protesters disrupted an AWS conference with calls on the company to cut ties to ICE.

The activists in Seattle ultimately decided to leave the petition printouts at the building’s main reception desk, returning to the crowd in front of the Spheres. – The Seattle Times/Tribune News Service.

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Gentlemen, start your web engines. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, better known as NASCAR, has inked a deal establishing Amazon Web Services as its preferred partner for machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing, according to a recent statement.

In the works is a new AWS-powered video series on NASCAR.com called This Moment in NASCAR History that will showcase the greatest historical moments in NASCAR racing with viewers. The league also plans to migrate its 18-petabyte video archive to AWS, leveraging Amazon Rekognition for metadata tagging capabilities to cut down on thousands of hours of manual search time annually.

NASCAR also reveals plans to use Amazon SageMaker to train deep learning models using historical footage as well as Amazon Transcribe for automatic speech recognition to caption and time stamp archived videos. The partnership is yet another sign of Amazon’s dominance in the SaaS in cloud computingmarket.

“Speed and efficiency are key in racing and business which is why we chose AWS—the cloud with unmatched performance, the most comprehensive set of services, and the fastest pace of innovation—to accelerate our migration to the cloud.”

“Speed and efficiency are key in racing and business which is why we chose AWS—the cloud with unmatched performance, the most comprehensive set of services, and the fastest pace of innovation—to accelerate our migration to the cloud,” said Craig Neeb, Executive Vice President of Innovation and Development, NASCAR.

“Amazon’s 20 years of machine learning experience, along with our broad analytics and machine learning capabilities, make us the best choice for organizations who want to use machine learning to gain insights into their data and establish new levels of engagement with their customers,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “NASCAR is utilizing cloud technology to enhance the way people experience the sport and deliver even more impactful content to fans.”

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The chief of Amazon Web Services defended his company’s use of facial recognitiontechnology but said he believes it should be subject to government regulation.

Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon’s cloud computing services, speaking Monday at the Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, acknowledged that concerns about technologies like its controversial Rekognition program are valid but maintained the technologies still have value.

“Just because technology could be misused doesn’t mean we should ban it and condemn it,” Jassy said, comparing it to how a knife could be used in a “surreptitious” manner. “All that said, I actually understand why people are worried about it. I think the government should regulate it.”

Amazon’s facial recognition software, dubbed Rekognition, has come under repeated criticism from privacy advocates in the past year. While facial recognition technology is commonly used for everyday tasks such as unlocking phones and tagging friends on social media, advances in artificial intelligence and the proliferation of cameras have made it increasingly easy to watch and track what individuals are doing.

Last year, the ACLU revealed that Amazon was selling its facial recognition technology, Rekognition, to law enforcement agencies in the US, including the Orlando Police Department. An ACLU test of Rekognition in July found that the system mistakenly confused 28 congressmen with known criminals.

Concerns about Rekognition also came up during public hearings before the New York City Council on Amazon’s failed proposal to build a new campus in the city, with council members repeatedly chastising the company for marketing Rekognition to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Both Google and Microsoft have publicly said they won’t sell their facial recognition tech to law enforcement, instead asking for new laws to guide their use.

“There are lots of ways to get an investigation wrong,” Jassy said. “Just because you could get it wrong doesn’t mean you should use it.”

Jassy said there’s strong backing within the company to continue support for government agencies and it intends to do so.

“Any government department that’s following the law, we will serve,” he said.

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NASCAR has selected AWS as its preferred cloud computing provider for machine learning and artificial intelligence processes.

AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaStore are also being used to support NASCAR Drive, an app for subscribers that puts fans in the driver’s seat using in-car cameras, live audio and live leader boards. NASCAR Digital uses these tools to package, process and store the video for delivery via Amazon CloudFront.

NASCAR is using AWS for cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence services, including Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon SageMaker.

It is migrating its 18-petabyte video archive to AWS, and will use Amazon Rekognition—which adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications—to automatically tag specific video frames with metadata, such as driver, car, race, lap, time, and sponsors. NASCAR expects to save thousands of hours of manual search time each year.

NASCAR also plans to use machine learning service Amazon SageMaker to enhance metadata and video analytics.

Amazon Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service, will be used to caption and time stamp every word of speech within archived videos so that video producers can locate source footage via text searches.

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The bureau for years ignored concerns about the accuracy and transparency of its facial recognition efforts, and the House Oversight Committee isn’t happy about it.

Lawmakers on Tuesday grilled federal law enforcement officials on the integrity and legality of the government’s facial recognition programs, and criticized the nearly nonexistent oversight Congress has over those programs.

During a hearing, members of the House Oversight Committee questioned witnesses on the steps being taken to ensure the facial recognition tools used by their agencies aren’t infringing on individuals’ privacy and civil liberties. By and large, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seemed unsatisfied with their answers.

And while the committee criticized law enforcement’s facial recognition efforts en masse, much of their attention focused on the FBI’s use of the tech.

Lawmakers criticized Kimberly Del Greco, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division, over the bureau’s failure to correct multiple flaws in the way it evaluates its primary facial recognition tool. In 2016, the Government Accountability Office issued six recommendations to ensure the tech, known as the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System, meets federal privacy and accuracy standards. As of Tuesday, auditors said the bureau had only put one of the fixes in place.

Gretta Goodwin, director of GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice office, found the FBI never published key privacy documents related to the NGI-IPS. The bureau also failed to test the accuracy of both its own facial recognition system and the software provided by its various partners, which include the State and Defense departments, and some 21 state governments.

According to Goodwin, the NGI-IPS database contains some 36 million criminal mugshots but combined with the other image databases provided by its partners, the FBI can run facial recognition software against some 640 million total photos.

The FBI disagrees with GAO’s assessment of its privacy disclosure requirements, Del Greco said, and has since conducted accuracy tests of its own system with the help of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Goodwin said GAO has yet to see the results of the test.

“It will be important that [the Justice Department] takes steps to ensure the transparency of the systems so that the public is kept informed about how personal information is being used and protected, that the implementation of the technology protects individuals privacy and that the technology and systems used are accurate and are being used appropriately,” Goodwin said.

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