AWS and Udacity Launch a Scholarship to Participate in the World’s First Autonomous Racing League

IBL News | New York

Udacity announced yesterday the DeepRacer Scholarship Challenge from Amazon Web Services (AWS), a new program that will enable students to expand and test their skills in machine learning by participating in the world’s first autonomous racing league.

The 200 top-performing students in the DeepRacer League will also have the opportunity to earn their way to a full scholarship to Udacity’s Machine Learning Nanodegree program.

A part of the program, students learn to create, train, and fine-tune a Reinforcement Learning model in the AWS DeepRacer 3D racing simulator.

The AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale race car which gives students a hands-on way to get started with Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is an advanced machine learning (ML) technique and is broadly useful when the reward function of the desired outcome is known but the path to achieving it is not and requires a lot of iteration to discover. Applications open on August 1.

The Scholarship program incorporates a brand-new free course, AWS DeepRacer: Driven by Reinforcement Learning.

“There simply aren’t enough people, who are equipped with machine learning skills. That’s why AWS and Udacity share a commitment to train machine learning talent. I’m confident that the DeepRacer Scholarship Challenge from AWS will empower learners to master Reinforcement Learning and land some of the most exciting and in-demand jobs in the field,” said Sebastian Thrun, CEO at Udacity.