Plenty of food and booze...served on a Kiva, the robots made by Kiva Robotics, the company Amazon bought for $775 million. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was spotted drinking single malt whiskey with some of the attendees.
The name of the event was MARS, short for Machine learning, home Automation, Robotics and Space exploration. The invitation card said, "Many great humans are attending (not to mention some extraordinary robots)."
There were tons of talks and demos of robots. About 130 people were invited, according to one of the attendees.
This one's called the NABiROS (Non-Anthropomorphic Bipedal Robotic System), built by the robotics team at UCLA. Other demos were done by HyQ quadruped robot and the MIT Cheetah robot.
And lots of presentations. Guest speakers included: Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, August CEO Yves Behar, and Toyota Research Institute CEO Michael Cyrus.
There were also fireside chats. Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code," and Ron Howard, the film director who produced "Apollo 13" and "A Beautiful Mind" were there too.
At one point, Bezos showed up on-stage wearing a robotics suit that's supposed to make you feel old. Sort of the opposite of an Iron Man suit. The person in the blue suit is Bezos.
Lots of geeky stuff were discussed.
“Seeing old roboticist friends and meeting new cool machine intelligence and space people @ MARS conference sponsored by @amazon,” tweeted Helen Greiner, the co-founder of iRobot and CEO of CyPhy Works.
This isn't the first invitation-only event held by Amazon, according to Bloomberg. They also do an event called Campfire for authors once a year in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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