This post is co-authored with Jennifer Bergstrom, ParsonsX Senior Technical Director.
Parsons Corporation (NYSE:PSN) is a leading disruptive technology company in the critical infrastructure, national defense, space, intelligence and security markets providing solutions around the world to help make the world safer, healthier and more connected. Parsons provides services and capabilities in cybersecurity, missile defense, space ground station technology, transportation, environmental remediation, and water/wastewater treatment, to name a few.
Parsons is a community of builders and invests heavily in employee training and development programs. With programs like ParsonsX, Parsons’ digital transformation initiative, and ‘The Guild’, an employee-focused community, Parsons strives to be an employer of choice and engages its employees in year-round professional development programs to Create a workforce of the future.
In this post, we show you how Parsons is building its next-generation workforce using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) with AWS DeepRacer in a fun and collaborative way.
As Parsons’ footprint moves to the cloud, its leadership recognized the need for culture change and a critical requirement to educate its engineering workforce on the new cloud operating model, tools and technologies. . Parsons is seeing industry trends that make it imperative to embed AI and ML capabilities into an organization’s strategic and tactical decision-making processes. To better serve client needs, Parsons must upskill his workforce across the board in AI/ML tools and how to scale them in an enterprise organization. Parsons is on a mission to make AI/ML a business foundation across the enterprise.
Parsons chose AWS DeepRacer because it’s a fun, interactive, and exciting challenge that appealed to a broader range of employees and didn’t require a significant level of experience to compete. Parsons found that AWS has many dedicated AWS DeepRacer experts in the field who would help plan, configure, and execute a series of AI/ML challenges and events. Parsons realized that the success of this event would be driven by efficient mechanisms and processes that the AWS DeepRacer community has in place.
Parsons’ goal was to upskill his employees in a fun and competitive way, with virtual peer-group leagues and an in-person event for top runners. The education initiative in partnership with AWS consisted of four phases.
First, Parsons hosted a live virtual workshop with AWS experts in the DeepRacer and AI/ML community. The workshop covered the basics of reinforcement learning, reward functions, hyperparameter tuning, and accessing the AWS DeepRacer console to train and submit a model.
In the next phase, they hosted a virtual community league race for all participating Parsons employees. The models were optimized, submitted and competed, with the winners being announced at the end of the race. Participants in the virtual leagues were comprised of individual contributors and front-line managers from various job roles at Parsons, including civil engineers, bridge engineers, software and systems engineers, data analysts, project managers, and program managers. Joining them as league participants were business unit presidents, senior vice presidents, vice presidents, senior managers, and directors.
In the third phase, an in-person league was held in Maryland. The top four entrants from the virtual leagues saw their models uploaded and competed in physical AWS DeepRacer cars on a track built on site. The top four competitors in this event included a Market CTO, a Project Signaling Engineer, a Project Engineer, and a Trainee Engineer.
In the fourth and final phase of the event, each of the four competitors provided a technical walkthrough of the techniques used to develop, train, and test their models. Through AWS DeepRacer, Parsons not only showcased the impact this event was able to have globally across all divisions, but also that they were able to create a memorable experience for the participants.
More than 500 employees from various Parsons business units and service organizations around the world registered just after an AWS DeepRacer challenge announcement was posted internally. The AWS DeepRacer workshop generated unprecedented interest with more than 470 Parsons employees joining the initial workshop. The virtual workshop generated significant participation: 245 active users developed more than 1,500 models and spent more than 500 hours training these models in the AWS DeepRacer console. The virtual league was a resounding success, with the participation of 185 runners from all over the country and the submission of 1415 models to the competition!
The AWS DeepRacer Virtual League at Parsons provided a fun and welcoming environment with many iterations, learning, and experimentation. Parsons’ Market CTO John Statuli, who was one of the top four contenders in the race, said, “It was a lot of fun participating in the AWS DeepRacer event. I haven’t done any programming in a long time, but the combination of the AWS DeepRacer Virtual Workshop and the AWS DeepRacer Program gave me an easy way to get involved and compete for first place.”
In the final race held in Maryland, Parsons broadcast a company-wide virtual event that showcased stiff competition among its top four competitors from three different business units. Top leaders from Parsons joined the event, including CTO Rico Lorenzo, D&I CTO Ryan Gabrielle, Connected Communities President Peter Torrellas, CDO Tim LaChapelle and ParsonsX Senior Director Jennifer Bergstrom. At the event, Parsons hosted a webinar with over 100 attendees and a winners tour of their models.
With such an overwhelming response from employees around the world and an interest in learning AI/ML, Parsons is now planning several additional events to continue to grow their employees’ knowledge base. To continue improving and educating his workforce, Parsons intends to host more AWS DeepRacer events and workshops focused on object avoidance, an Amazon SageMaker Deep Dive workshop, and an AWS DeepRacer head-to-head race. Parsons continues to engage with AWS on AI/ML services to create world-class solutions in the critical infrastructure, national defense, space, and cybersecurity fields.
Whether your organization is new to machine learning or ready to build existing skills, AWS DeepRacer can help you get there. For more information, visit Getting started with AWS DeepRacer.
About the authors
Jen Bergstrom is a member of Parsons and a senior technical director. He is passionate about innovative technology solutions and strategies and enjoys designing well-designed cloud solutions for programs across all Parsons domains. When she’s not driving innovation at Parsons, she loves exploring the world with her husband and daughters and mentoring a variety of people transitioning into the tech industry. You can locate it at LinkedIn.
Deval Parikh He is a Senior Enterprise Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. She is passionate about helping companies reinvent their cloud businesses by providing strategic architectural guidance and prototyping as an AWS expert. She is also an active board member of the Women in AWS affinity group, where she oversees university programs to educate students about technology and careers in the cloud. She is also an avid hiker and oil on canvas painter. You can see many of her paintings at www.devalparikh.com. You can locate it at LinkedIn.
