DeepRacer Women’s League: AWS announces winners of ML for women initiative

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are innovative technologies that are unlocking opportunities and helping solve some of our most difficult challenges. But to date in India, women are underrepresented among those people who are exploring and learning what these technologies can do.

To encourage greater participation, AWS announced DeepRacer Women’s League.

This competition sees individuals use ML to program a model race car, and then navigate a miniature track as quickly as possible. Thousands of developers around the world have taken part in DeepRacer League competitions, with many going on to compete in the Championship Cup held at the annual worldwide customer event, AWS re:Invent.

The AWS DeepRacer Women’s League India 2021 competition was open to women students over 18 years of age who are enrolled with an academic institution in India. More than 17,000 women students showed interest in participating with students progressing through their Regional Community Races, to qualify for the National Community Race.

The 15 best performers of the National Community Race then competed in the Grand Finale, using a highly complex track with many tight turns. The contest took place on April 21, and streamed live on twitch.tv.

Top spot on the leader board was claimed by Helen Thomas, a Ph.D. student from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, with a lap time of just 33:33 seconds. First runner-up was Surbhi Agrawal, a Bachelor of Technology student from the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, with the second runner-up going to Kashish Bansal, a Bachelor of Technology student from the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore.

Participants in the DeepRacer Women’s League train their cars using a form of ML known as reinforcement learning. The car learns to navigate its way around the track using trial and error, and whenever it navigates a section of the track in an optimal way it is ‘rewarded’. Over time the car learns to navigate the entire track as quickly as possible.

This form of ML has multiple applications in the real world, such as Amazon Alexa, Netflix recommendation engines, or intelligent gaming.

K. VijayRaghavan, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, said: “The significance of upskilling and getting trained to keep up with unprecedented technological advancements irrespective of the stage of one’s career and area of work, cannot be emphasized enough. AI-enabled technologies can provide innovative solutions for issues in sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, education, energy, and more. The efforts of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to facilitate industry engagements is supporting capacity-building initiatives for emerging technologies. The AWS DeepRacer competition is a culmination of a women’s league to foster community learning to make headway towards the early adoption of AI-enabled technologies. This will positively impact our efforts to create a more inclusive R&D ecosystem for new and emerging technologies.”