Wednesday, 1 May 2019

AWS Innovation Day

I had the good fortune yesterday to be invited to the Amazon Web Services Innovation Day for the second year running. This is held at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre in the middle of Sydney, whose auditorium seats no less than 6,000 people. It was full yesterday - swarming with people, all of whom received name tags and a program. The catering for such a large number of people must have been a logistics nightmare even for Amazon. Participants received lunch, coffee and other drinks, invitations to attend voluntary workshops on various themes, and admission to a huge display of latest technologies provided by mainly leading Australian companies and organisations.

The content of the numerous presentations was also top class and welcomed by both me and my travelling companion from Armidale, Alun Davies. Here's our selfie taken when seated in the main auditorium.


And this is the kind of view of proceedings we experienced. Given that most of the audience were a long way from the stage and exceptionally high up, the antics of the presenters were filmed and displayed in real time on large screens - aided by special effects. look how small the guy in the stage is in the second photo ... and how large his image is on the screens to both sides.



Talking of going boldly, one of the key presenters, Alan Joyce, head of Qantas. He talked about the large array of innovations made by the airline over many years and the culture that spawned them. By the way, Qantas is the world's oldest and safest airline and will celebrate its centenary in 2020 - next year.


Here's Alan being interviewed on stage about his company's achievements.


Several presentation dealt with science topics, including a lovely talk by a senior NASA official about the American space program.


Here are some of the astronomical issues under investigation and a picture of the 2020 Mars rover. We didn't get to see the real thing though.



Both mid-morning, during the coffee break, and lunch we had the opportunity to roam around the technological displays in the massive exhibition hall.


The displays were grouped around common themes. The first two pictures show exhibits concerned with the future of entertainment and retailing, with the second focusing on the latter.




Another focused on the future of cities. This is a general view over the exhibition space.


After lunch, delegates retired to several themed sections, and the one I and Alun attended focused on how to develop an agile and future oriented workforce based on high quality leadership and joint participation by all manner of interests, social groups, ethnicities, women and so on.


All told it was an excellent, but exhausting, day. We flew down on the 7.10 am flight to Sydney and arrived back in town on the evening flight, which arrived at 8.10 pm.

I'd recommend such an experience to everyone.

AS

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