AWS User Group Cologne - with talks by Diana Cheng and Christian Bonzelet

Hi everyone,

we are so excited to meet you all (again) at the next AWS User Group Cologne meetup in September! It has been quite a while since the last meetup so we can hardly wait for interesting talks and chatting with you folks.

To get a taste of what you can expect we like to share the agenda with you and are happy to introduce our speakers:

18:00 – Get together
18:15 – Intro by Lars
18:30 – Diana Cheng: What’s new in AWS – Summer 2021 Edition
19:00 – Q&A (15 minutes)
19:15 – short break (5 minutes)
19:20 – Christian Bonzelet: My learnings from building recommendation engines with Amazon Personalize
19:50 – Q&A (15 minutes)
20:05 – socializing, chatting within Zoom

Our first speaker is Diana Cheng. She is a Sr. Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. She has 10+ years of experience in software development and consulting. Prior to joining AWS, Diana worked as a team lead, architect, and consultant at a number of enterprise companies in different sectors.

The title of Diana' talk is: "What’s new in AWS – Summer 2021 Edition"
AWS is constantly adding new capabilities so customers can leverage the latest technologies to experiment and innovate more quickly. As it can be a lot to digest and keep up with, in this brief talk, I'll provide an overview of some of the most exciting new services and features impacting compute, database, storage, networking, etc. as well as infrastructure and region expansions announced since late 2020.

Our second speaker is Christian Bonzelet. He is working as an AWS Solution Architect at DFL Digital Sports GmbH. Based in cologne with his beloved wife and two kids. Christian is interested in all things around ️ cloud, ‍tech and AI/ML.

Christian's talk is about his learnings from building recommendation engines with Amazon Personalize:
Personalization is one of our key strategic focus areas in the next years. And I am happy to see the fruits of our first year in a lot of our products for the Bundesliga.

⚽️ Starting with providing recommended articles in the official Bundesliga App to all our fans.
🤝 Followed by introducing recommended media content for our media and license partners within our international product portfolio.
⭐️ And finally a new star is born. The Bundesliga Next app is shipped with a 100% personalized Tik-Tok-like home feed to all our fans.

All three recommendation engines are built upon Amazon Personalize from Amazon Web Services. I want to share some insights about my personal learnings on both technical and organizational level when building AI/ML based recommendation engines using Amazon Personalize.

We will cover some aspects like the difference of a typical software development process compared to a matching learning development process. We will dive deeper into the engine room of Amazon Personalize and explain why KPI definition and A/B testing is key to success.