Amazon is holding a public version of its secretive MARS conference
All most of us will see from Jeff Bezos's secretive MARS conference are a few photo shoots of the world's richest man attempting to look as cool as possible around some very cool robotics. This summer, however, Amazon will be spinning the event out into a more public facing conference.
Re:MARS retains the original event's acronymic focus of Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space, bringing them to a larger scale for three days in Vegas. It's a pretty solid looking lineup, though admittedly somewhat self-serving. Per Amazon, already announced speakers include
Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer at Amazon; Andrew Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering; Ken Goldberg, William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, UC Berkeley; Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Kate Darling, Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab.
Beyond those sessions, the event will also feature sessions focusing on a number of Amazon's offerings, including Alexa, AWS, Robotics, Go and Prime Air. Notably, astronauts will have free admission, so you've got about six months to train for space if you don't want to foot the bill.