(gentle music)
- Welcome to This is My Architecture.
We are at re:Invent.
My name is Gerardo
and I'm joined today by Rob from Formula 1.
Welcome, Rob.
- Thank you.
- So Rob, tell us,
what are you doing at Formula 1 these days?
- I'm consulting for Formula 1.
I've got a strange title of technical consultant
and I'm trying to help Formula 1.
You know, we've got a mission in Formula 1
to try to help the sport,
make the sport more entertaining, more en engaging,
more immersive for the fan.
So I'm bringing, I spent 25 years in the teams
and I'm trying to bring some of that experience
to the live broadcast,
to the way that we convey Formula 1 to the fans.
- To make this sport more engaging for your fans,
is that, right?
- Yeah, we're trying to use,
as engineers in Formula 1,
our lifeblood is data analytics.
It's data, it's using data, it's using classical algorithms,
it's using machine learning and in order to do that,
we use that to make the car go faster,
we use that to find performance.
What we wanna use that is I wanna bring some of that
to the fan base so that when they're watching it,
they understand those key moments of the race.
- So today you're telling us about the pit strategy battle.
Is that right? - That's right.
- Can you explain for the viewers
that are not familiar with racing, what is that?
- So the pit strategy battle was something that we did
in our partnership with AWS
to make these Formula 1 insights.
And essentially what it is,
the race strategy of a Formula 1 race
really frames the whole race.
It's the most important part of the race,
apart, you know, even can be more important
than the wheel-to-wheel action that you see on the track
and one of the key parts of that is something
that we call the undercut.
So when you've got two cars going around
the track together and they're about ready to make that,
you know, a pit stop,
if the car behind put pulls into the pits,
he's kind of pulled the key advantage there
because he's gonna put some new tires on
and then he's gonna get a lap on new tires
while the guy in front who stayed out,
he stays out on the old tires.
- And you're sharing those insights
with viewers in the broadcast.
- And we're trying to share that insight
to try to tell the viewers about, you know,
what's gonna happen, whether or not the guy behind
is gonna get in front, what the probability is,
so we're pulling all of the data that we've got
and we're pushing it through machine learn models
and trying to give that insight to the viewer.
- This is really good.
Can you walk us through what's under the hood?
- Okay, so what's under the hood is,
so this is the car, this is the car going around the track.
So you've got the car and the car telemetry
and time and transponder and that comes back up
to our data center in Biggin Hill here.
That's stored there
and then we take it via the API gateway
across the machine learning part here.
So the API, we use the API to extract the data
in lots and lots of different areas.
And then from the API gateway,
we essentially process that data
using Lambda function so we're now completely,
you know, this is AWS that we see over here
so this is Formula 1, Biggin Hill Data Center
and then this has now gone into all the work
that AWS is doing.
So we process the data.
We essentially synchronize it
and we make sure that the timing data matches,
the timestamp on the timing data matches the car data.
That then gets stored across here in DynamoDB
and there's kind of a two-way thing here.
And then again down here,
we've got this into the app data into S3.
This essentially now, is we're getting into the crux
which is the most important part is AWS SageMaker
because that's the bit that's doing everything,
so this is-
- What are you doing with SageMaker?
- So we're training and we're deploying.
So we use SageMaker and we've built two,
we've built two machine learning algorithms models.
One is the on-track model
and the other one is the pit-lane model.
And then eventually, essentially from S3 and from here,
we take the situation,
we take the real-time data,
and then we check that against the train data
and we come up with the stats.
So we're able to then use the SageMaker at that point
to tell us whether or not the car's gonna be in front
or behind what the probability is.
- That's really good.
So you basically, you're training and experimenting
with a lot of models,
and when you're happy with the accuracy of a model,
then you deploy it and that's what you use
for the livestream, is that right?
- That's right, yeah.
So once we're happy that SageMaker
is given us an accurate answer or as accurate as you can be,
because obviously it's a sport,
there's so many different parameters,
we can only give to a certain accuracy
what we think's gonna happen, but up to now, actually,
I've gotta say it's been very, very accurate.
This is the most, you know,
this has been absolute revolution for Formula 1.
Then we push it across here to the broadcast center.
So this is the track, this is UK,
this is now our virtual cloud space,
and this is now back to the track at the broadcast center,
and then eventually from the track,
it gets pushed up here to the broadcast feed
and it gets put on the television.
- And then your viewers can enjoy those insights.
- Yes, exactly.
- This is amazing.
Can you tell us about the benefits
that the Formula 1 fans are getting
on the back of this implementation?
- Well, look, just this one insight
that we're trying to give them,
we're educating Formula 1 fans about what we call
the off-the-ball action,
so you've got the cars going around on the track,
which is the international feed,
or if you watch it on the television,
whoever the broadcaster is,
you see the cars going around the track,
but there's so many more interesting insights
and data points that are going on away from that action
and this is what we're trying to tell them here,
so this is a perfect example.
You've got two cars, which can be two, three kilometers
away from each other on the truck,
but we're trying to distill that
and show what it's gonna be like in 30 seconds time.
- This is amazing, Rob.
So I love how Formula 1 has been at the cutting edge
of technology for car performance,
but now you're also bringing that to improve
the engagement with your users.
Thank you very much for sharing this architecture with us.
- Thank you.
Thank you for watching.
This is My Architecture.
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