We strongly suggest using conda (or miniconda) for package management. We wrote this assignment using a conda environment with python 3.7, but using a later version should work too.
If you follow our AWS tutorial to setup the EC2 instance, you can then use the following commands to setup the hw1's conda environment.
conda create -n cmu16824hw1 python=3.7
conda activate cmu16824hw1
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install opencv-python