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David Kosbie in a classroom with students in Rwanda
David Kosbie, an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and co-founder of CMU's Computer Science Academy, went to Rwanda in the summer of 2018 to teach students at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village school computer-science skills.
Credit: David Kosbie

Amazon donation boosts innovative computer science education program

$2 million commitment to Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Academy extends opportunities to students in underserved middle and high schools.

By Douglas Gantenbein
December 08, 2020
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In the summer of 2018, David Kosbie visited a school for orphans and other young people in rural Rwanda. Kosbie — an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) — was there to watch the school work with curriculum from CMU’s Computer Science Academy he helped co-found as a way to reach students who lack access to computer science curriculum.

“The computer-science students would come in early and leave late,” he recalls. “On my last day there, they tried to convince me not to go to the airport to go home.”

What had the students buzzing was the chance to learn advanced computer-science and programming skills — opportunities they’d never had before. That was due to the Computer Science Academy’s online classes and teacher training, which is giving these students a chance to develop 21st century skills.

“It was just so heart-warming,” Kosbie adds. “I’ve sent some of my CMU students to that same school, and for each one it was a life-altering experience. The life stories of these students is mostly tragic, but yet the school (Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village) is one of the most joyous places I have ever been.”

David Kosbie
David Kosbie launched CMU's Computer Science Academy in 2018 with colleague Mark Stehlik.
Credit: CMU

Launched in 2018 by Kosbie and CMU colleague Mark Stehlik, CMU CS Academy is a rigorous online computer-science program that has reached more than 5,600 teachers and mentors and 61,000 students around the world, giving a boost to schools that have limited opportunities to offer students computer science or programming classes. The academy is free to schools that participate, and offers free online and in-person teacher training and support.

Amazon has now announced it will provide $2 million to support CMU CS Academy over the next three years. The donation comes from Amazon Future Engineer, Amazon’s childhood-to-career computer science education program aimed at educating and training students from underserved and underrepresented communities. 

The donation comes at a great time, says Kosbie. CMU CS Academy is growing at a rapid clip. “That $2 million will pretty much cover our current operations for three years,” he says. “It will help us with course production, and course hosting, and professional development for teachers. It also will begin to help us expand our efforts to produce CMU CS Academy in different languages.”

Most importantly, he says, it will allow CMU CS Academy to pursue its twin goals of helping students entering the world of computer science, while creating a bigger, more diverse and equitable pipeline of programmers and computer scientists. “Tech companies just can’t find enough talent,” says Kosbie. “And because of the way equity issues play out in schools, a high percentage of the best and brightest have little hope of getting into this pipeline. Amazon, of course, gets that, and is working to change that with Amazon Future Engineer.”

CMU CS Academy offers a rigorous introduction to computer science. “While we are designed to reach all students at all levels, we're CMU and we have to uphold high standards,” Kosbie says. “This is not just a gentle taste of programming where when you’re finished you know what programming is but can’t program. This is the real deal.”

Although challenging, classes also are designed to be fun, with a strong emphasis on creativity and graphics. In addition, many of the exercises are designed by CMU students — the logic being that, as recent high-schoolers themselves, they have a good sense of what is relevant to CMU CS Academy’s primary audience.

CMU CS Academy currently offers three core curricula: A basic course for middle schools, school camps, or out-of-school programs; a robust introduction to learning programming through graphics and animations for middle and high schools; and a prep course for students preparing to take advanced placement tests or to take computer science courses in college. It also offers teacher training, 24/7 support, and teacher resources.

Because classes often are taught in schools that lack great technical resources — 60 percent of participating US public schools are Title I schools that receive federal funds — they’re designed to run on rudimentary computer equipment and weaker internet connections.

Looking forward, Kosbie says that in addition to underwriting CMU CS Academy operations, Amazon’s donation will help it focus on developing methods for measuring the actual impact of its classes — whether they boost achievement, what career paths graduates take, how college acceptance rates change. “We want to be able to go to prospective donors and scientifically show them that what we’re doing works,” he says. “So far we’re hearing very promising qualitative results, but we want to back that up with sound quantitative results.”

Ultimately, Kosbie sees CMU CS Academy as a vehicle for giving young people a hand they might not otherwise receive. “We’re doing this because we know this is the right thing to do,” he says. “We have been unbelievably blessed by being skilled and experienced in a discipline that is very rewarding personally but also financially. We feel an obligation to share these opportunities with students who might not otherwise have them.

"We look forward to seeing the impact students with varying backgrounds will have on our world after building these fundamental computer science skills.”

More information about the donation is available in this Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science press release. To learn about the different ways you can engage with Amazon's scientific community, visit our Academic Engagements page.

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About the Author
Douglas Gantenbein
Douglas Gantenbein is a contributor to Amazon Science.

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Senior Data Scientist
US
Job summaryWant to help the largest global enterprises derive business value through the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)? Excited by using massive amounts of disparate data to develop ML models? Eager to learn to apply ML to a diverse array of enterprise use cases? Thrilled to be a part of Amazon who has been pioneering and shaping the world’s AI/ML technology for decades?At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are helping large enterprises build ML models on the AWS Cloud. We are applying predictive technology to large volumes of data and against a wide spectrum of problems. AWS Professional Services works together with AWS customers to address their business needs using AI solutions.AWS Professional Services is a unique consulting team. We pride ourselves on being customer obsessed and highly focused on the AI enablement of our customers. If you have experience with AI, including building ML models, we’d like to have you join our team. You will get to work with an innovative company, with great teammates, and have a lot of fun helping our customers. A successful candidate will be a person who enjoys diving deep into data, doing analysis, discovering root causes, and designing long-term solutions.Major responsibilities include:· Assist customers by being able to deliver a ML project from beginning to end, including understanding the business need, aggregating data, exploring data, building & validating predictive models, and deploying completed models with concept-drift monitoring and retraining to deliver business impact to the organization· Use AWS AI services (e.g., Personalize), ML platforms (SageMaker), and frameworks (e.g., MXNet, TensorFlow, PyTorch, SparkML, scikit-learn) to help our customers build ML models· Research and implement novel ML approaches, including hardware optimizations on platforms such as AWS Inferentia· Work with our other Professional Services consultants (Big Data, IoT, HPC) to analyze, extract, normalize, and label relevant data, and with our Professional Services engineers to operationalize customers’ models after they are prototypedInclusive Team CultureHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 85,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.Work/Life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life harmony. Striking a healthy balance between your personal and professional life is crucial to your happiness and success here. We are a customer-obsessed organization—leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. As such, this is a customer facing role in a hybrid delivery model. Project engagements include remote delivery methods and onsite engagement that will include travel to customer locations as needed.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded professional and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.This is a customer-facing role and you will be required to travel to client locations and deliver professional services as needed.
Senior Security Engineer, Data Science
US
Job summaryThe AWS Intelligent and Advanced Computing Technologies (IACT) organization is growing an application development team.Our organization specializes in solving elusive problems. We are a hybrid team of machine learning, quantum computing and high performance computing professionals who directly support AWS customers with custom and off-the-shelf applications.Our team offers the opportunity to engage directly with advanced technologies projects (e.g. computer vision, natural language processing, quantum simulation, and optimization) while supporting AWS customers (e.g. startups, Fortune 500, nonprofit, etc.) across all industries.Key job responsibilitiesYou should be ready to collaborate with customer and design teams to support machine learning application development from a security perspective. This includes analyzing AWS application operation at the API level and ensuring that applications exceed security expectations. You should feel empowered to collaborate through ambiguous customer environments and understand how IACT applications can best solve customer needs.Within AWS, you will work closely with Machine Learning, Quantum Computing, and High Performance Computing teams both within Professional Services and externally. You can expect to work with customer product managers, architects, and executives (e.g. Dir., VP, CxO).About the teamInclusive Team CultureHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 85,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.Work/Life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life harmony. Striking a healthy balance between your personal and professional life is crucial to your happiness and success here. We are a customer-obsessed organization—leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. As such, this is a customer facing role in a hybrid delivery model. Project engagements include remote delivery methods and onsite engagement that will include travel to customer locations as needed.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded professional and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.
Applied Science Manager, Recommendations, Machine Learning, Personalization
US, CA, Irvine
Job summaryAs the Applied Science Manager within Personalization, you will help build a team that leads creation and innovation on the next generation of Recommendation and Personalization technologies on Amazon. Our team owns creating recommendation solutions that understand long-term customer shopping patterns, Spanning Academia, research, and applied machine learning techniques operating at world-class scale, we focus on recommending the right product to the right customer at the right time. You will be surrounded by thought-leaders in the Personalization space who are patent-leaders within Amazon.In Personalization we use state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and A/B testing to run experiments on some of Amazon’s most prominent and valuable pages. We work on a diverse range of products, building real-time, low-latency recommendation and ranking systems as well as building algorithms for understanding customer behavior and generating recommendations content. You will hone your skills in areas such as deep learning and collaborative filtering while building scalable industrial machine learning systems that handle millions of requests a day. You will lead a collaborative team of experienced engineers. You will have a unique opportunity to drive direct, measurable impact to our customers, powering features on Amazon.About the team: Our team has the autonomy to decide where we can have the most impact and get down to experimenting. We love metrics and the fast pace. We analyze data to uncover potential opportunities, generate hypotheses, and test them. We refuse to accept constraints, internal or external, and have a strong bias for action. We imagine, build prototypes, validate ideas, and launch follow-up experiments from the successful ones.About you: You are an entrepreneurial Applied Science Manager with an interest in machine learning, data science, search, or recommendation systems. You love keeping abreast of the latest technology and use it to help you innovate. You have strong leadership qualities, great judgment, clear communication skills, and a track record of delivering great products and hiring/coaching successful teams. You enjoy working hard, having fun, and making history!
Applied Scientist II
US, CA, Cupertino
The Team: Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no lines and no checkout—you just grab and go! Customers simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take what they want from our selection of fresh, delicious meals and grocery essentials, and go!Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by our Just Walk Out Technology, which automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt. Check it out at amazon.com/go. Designed and custom-built by Amazonians, our Just Walk Out Technology uses a variety of technologies including computer vision, sensor fusion, and advanced machine learning. Innovation is part of our DNA! Our goal is to be Earths’ most customer centric company and we are just getting started. We need people who want to join an ambitious program that continues to push the state of the art in computer vision, machine learning, distributed systems and hardware design.The Role: Everyone on the team needs to be entrepreneurial, wear many hats and work in a highly collaborative environment that’s more startup than big company. We’ll need to tackle problems that span a variety of domains: computer vision, image recognition, machine learning, real-time and distributed systems.As a Computer Vision Research Scientist, you will help solve a variety of technical challenges and mentor other engineers. You will tackle challenging, novel situations every day and given the size of this initiative, you’ll have the opportunity to work with multiple technical teams at Amazon in different locations. You should be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity that’s higher than most projects and relish the idea of solving problems that, frankly, haven’t been solved at scale before - anywhere. Along the way, we guarantee that you’ll learn a ton, have fun and make a positive impact on millions of people.
Applied Scientist II, Amazon One
IN, KA, Bangalore
Job summaryThe Team: Amazon One is a fast, convenient, contactless way for people to use their palm to make everyday activities like paying at a store, presenting a loyalty card, entering a location like a stadium, or badging into work more effortless. The service is designed to be highly secure and uses custom-built algorithms and hardware to create a person’s unique palm signature. Designed and custom-built by Amazonians, it uses a variety of technologies including computer vision, sensor fusion, and advanced machine learning. Innovation is part of our DNA! Our goal is to be Earths’ most customer centric company and we are just getting started. We need people who want to join an ambitious program that continues to push the state of the art in computer vision, machine learning, distributed systems and hardware design.The Role: Everyone on the team needs to be entrepreneurial, wear many hats and work in a highly collaborative environment that’s more startup than big company. We’ll need to tackle problems that span a variety of domains: computer vision, image recognition, machine learning, real-time and distributed systems.If you have expertise leading Computer Vision research teams and have a Ph.D, or an Masters and 2+ years of industry experience and have: - the ability to recognize and champion new ideas and novel solutions;· the insight to correctly identify paths worth exploring;· the discipline to fast-fail when data refutes theory;· and the fortitude to continue exploring until your solution is foundCome join us invent the future and change the world.
Research Scientist, Alexa Local Information NLU
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Job summaryAmong the goals of the Alexa AI team is to make Alexa the most knowledgeable and trusted source of local information to enable customers to find places, products, or services around them; ask detailed questions about points of interests; and to provide personalized travel, commute, and navigation experiences - while in the car, on the go, or at home.We are seeking a Data Scientist to be part of the NLU Science team for Alexa Local Information. This is a strategic role to shape and deliver our technical strategy in developing and deploying natural language understanding and machine learning solutions to our hardest customer-facing problems. This role requires collaborating closely with business, engineering and other scientists within Local Information and across the Alexa organization. You will work with a team of Language Engineers and Scientists to launch new customer facing features and improve the current experiences.Key job responsibilities· Apply machine learning and SLU techniques to improve our conversational interfaces and search algorithms· Collaborate with Scientists and Language Engineers in developing coherent and comprehensive meaning representation frameworks· Perform hands-on data analysis and modeling with large data sets to develop insights that increase device usage and customer experience· Run A/B experiments, evaluate the impact of your optimizations and communicate your results to various business stakeholders· Work closely with product managers and software engineers to design experiments and implement end-to-end solutions· Set up and monitor alarms to detect anomalous data patterns and perform root cause analyses to explain and address them· Handle competing requests from a range of data customers· Be a member of the Amazon-wide machine learning community, participating in internal and external Meet-Ups, Hackathons and Conferences· Help attract and recruit technical talent
Economist
US, WA, Seattle
Job summaryAmazon Web Services (AWS) is obsessed with ensuring the success of our customers. We want to nurture many new customers through use of technical support, credits, and training programs. To this end, we need to understand what types of customers respond the most to these different benefits. Can we tell who needs help from the sales force vs. those who are more motivated by sticker price? Do the impacts of credits or sales help vary by customer tenure, or industry? These are the types of questions we'll answer to help drive the growth of AWS.Job Locations:· Seattle, WA· Dallas, TX· Arlington, VA· Boston, MA· Vancouver, CAKey job responsibilitiesBeyond the usual technical skills, ownership, customer obsessions, and deliver results are key for this team. We need people who can understand customer needs, build a prototype, collect feedback from the customer, build some more, lather, rinse and repeat. Our team contains a wide diversity of tech talent and we can get you help when you're blocked. But we do need you to understand your customers' requirements and work backwards.About the teamWe're a team of economists, data and applied scientists, and engineers who work on projects to help make the best use of AWS's thousands of talented sales representatives. We have great data support from our sister teams and have more than tripled our team size by thinking big and delivering. We'd love to chat with you and answer any questions you have!
Applied Scientist, Kuiper Constellation Management
US, WA, Redmond
Job summaryAs an Applied Scientist on the team you will responsible for building out and maintaining the algorithms and software services behind one of the world’s largest satellite constellations. You will be responsible for developing algorithms and applications that provide mission critical information derived from past and predicted satellite orbits to other systems and organizations rapidly, reliably, and at scale.You will be focused on contributing to the design and analysis of software systems responsible across a broad range of areas required for automated management of the Kuiper constellation. You will apply knowledge of mathematical modeling, optimization algorithms, astrodynamics, state estimation, space systems, and software engineering across a wide variety of problems to enable space operations at an unprecedented scale. You will develop features for systems to interface with internal and external teams, predict and plan communication opportunities, manage satellite orbits determination and prediction systems, develop analysis and infrastructure to monitor and support systems performance. Your work will interface with various subsystems within Project Kuiper and Amazon, as well as with external organizations, to enable engineers to safely and efficiently manage the satellite constellation.The ideal candidate will be detail oriented, strong organizational skills, able to work independently, juggle multiple tasks at once, and maintain professionalism under pressure. You should have proven knowledge of mathematical modeling and optimization along with strong software engineering skills. You should be able to independently understand customer requirements, and use data-driven approaches to identify possible solutions, select the best approach, and deliver high-quality applications.Export Control Requirement:Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.About the teamThe Constellation Management & Space Safety team maintains build the software services responsible for maintaining situational awareness for Kuiper satellites and coordinating with internal and external organizations to maintain the nominal operational state. We build automated systems that use satellite telemetry and other related data to predict future orbits, plan maneuvers to avoid high risk conjunctions, and keep satellites in the desired locations. Using knowledge of software engineering and space systems, we provide visibility information that is used to predict and establish communication channels for Kuiper satellites.
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
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