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Amazon is increasing its commitment to the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program by expanding its partnership with Columbia, and by initiating new multi-year SURE program commitments with Georgia Tech and the University of Southern California.

Amazon expands SURE program to boost diversity in STEM education

New programs with Georgia Tech and the University of Southern California are established; existing Columbia University program expands.

The lack of diversity in STEM fields and the way it hinders innovation have been well established. But seeing the numbers can still be eye-opening: According to the National Science Board’s State of US Science and Engineering 2022 report, in 2019, women represented 48% of the employed US population, but only “about one-third of the STEM workforce,” and that Blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians or Alaska Natives collectively represented 30% of the employed US population, but just 23% of the total STEM workforce.

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The report also notes that strengthening STEM education efforts in the US is “critical to maintaining the US position as a lead performer” in the science and technology realm.

Last year, in an effort to address these inequities, Columbia Engineering and Amazon announced the creation of the Columbia-Amazon Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program aimed at increasing diversity and inclusiveness in technology fields.

Now, building off the success of that initial program — 74% of surveyed undergraduates in that Columbia-Amazon program said it exceeded or far exceeded expectations — Amazon today announced it is increasing its commitment to the SURE program by expanding its SURE partnership with Columbia, and by initiating new multi-year SURE program commitments with two other top-tier universities, Georgia Tech and the University of Southern California (USC).

“Amazon is excited to expand our commitment to SURE partnerships with top US academic institutions with the goal of enriching the diversity of our national STEM talent pool,” said Prem Natarajan, Alexa AI vice president of natural understanding. “Each year, SURE internship programs will provide more than one hundred undergraduate students from historically underrepresented backgrounds the opportunity to participate in research initiatives at top academic institutions. The students will also have the opportunity to receive guidance and mentorship from university faculty members and from scientists at Amazon.”

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The inaugural 2021 summer instance of the Columbia-Amazon SURE program provided 26 students, primarily from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving institutions, and tribal colleges and universities, opportunities to conduct research in top-tier laboratories at Columbia and engage with professionals at Amazon. This year, the program will expand to 50 students for a 10-week program, as part of Amazon’s multi-year commitment to the initiative. Amazon will also increase the opportunities for these SURE alumni by funding five master’s fellowships for graduate studies.

"Columbia Engineering is excited to expand our successful partnership with Amazon, which creates new university-industry collaboration models with a goal to broadening the pipeline in STEM fields," said Shih-Fu Chang, interim dean of Columbia Engineering. “This generous multi-year support will allow us to explore and validate novel approaches to widening our STEM talent pool over a longer period."

Georgia Tech’s SURE program was founded in 1992 by the university’s Center for Engineering Education and Diversity (CEED). Over the past 30 years, the program has supported more than 500 students, with 75% ultimately attending graduate school to pursue master’s or doctorate degrees. This 10-week summer research program will support underrepresented minority and women students in conducting research within Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering and College of Computing for 2022 and 2023.

“Amazon’s partnership with CEED will enable Georgia Tech to double the number of students from across the nation who participate in SURE,” said Felicia Benton-Johnson, CEED director and assistant dean. “We are grateful to Amazon for its commitment to growing the number of underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.”

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The USC-Amazon SURE Program will provide undergraduate students with the opportunity to spend eight weeks in Los Angeles working on cutting-edge research projects in artificial intelligence, computer science and engineering, and robotics. Amazon will support 30 students in this program. The USC-Amazon SURE program allows undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to develop their research skills under the supervision of Viterbi faculty and current PhD students.

“Amazon is one of the largest employers of USC Viterbi alumni,” said Kelly Goulis, senior associate dean for Student Affairs. “We are honored that they have chosen to collaborate with us on the key goal to ensure that all students have the opportunity to work on leading-edge research, particularly research that is focusing on solving some of the world’s greatest challenges.”

To learn more about each institution’s program, and application deadlines, please visit the links below:

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IN, TS, Hyderabad
Welcome to the Worldwide Returns & ReCommerce team (WWR&R) at Amazon.com. WWR&R is an agile, innovative organization dedicated to ‘making zero happen’ to benefit our customers, our company, and the environment. Our goal is to achieve the three zeroes: zero cost of returns, zero waste, and zero defects. We do this by developing products and driving truly innovative operational excellence to help customers keep what they buy, recover returned and damaged product value, keep thousands of tons of waste from landfills, and create the best customer returns experience in the world. We have an eye to the future – we create long-term value at Amazon by focusing not just on the bottom line, but on the planet. We are building the most sustainable re-use channel we can by driving multiple aspects of the Circular Economy for Amazon – Returns & ReCommerce. Amazon WWR&R is comprised of business, product, operational, program, software engineering and data teams that manage the life of a returned or damaged product from a customer to the warehouse and on to its next best use. Our work is broad and deep: we train machine learning models to automate routing and find signals to optimize re-use; we invent new channels to give products a second life; we develop highly respected product support to help customers love what they buy; we pilot smarter product evaluations; we work from the customer backward to find ways to make the return experience remarkably delightful and easy; and we do it all while scrutinizing our business with laser focus. You will help create everything from customer-facing and vendor-facing websites to the internal software and tools behind the reverse-logistics process. You can develop scalable, high-availability solutions to solve complex and broad business problems. We are a group that has fun at work while driving incredible customer, business, and environmental impact. We are backed by a strong leadership group dedicated to operational excellence that empowers a reasonable work-life balance. As an established, experienced team, we offer the scope and support needed for substantial career growth. Amazon is earth’s most customer-centric company and through WWR&R, the earth is our customer too. Come join us and innovate with the Amazon Worldwide Returns & ReCommerce team!
GB, MLN, Edinburgh
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US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video technologist, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! In Prime Video READI, our mission is to automate infrastructure scaling and operational readiness. We are growing a team specialized in time series modeling, forecasting, and release safety. This team will invent and develop algorithms for forecasting multi-dimensional related time series. The team will develop forecasts on key business dimensions with optimization recommendations related to performance and efficiency opportunities across our global software environment. As a founding member of the core team, you will apply your deep coding, modeling and statistical knowledge to concrete problems that have broad cross-organizational, global, and technology impact. Your work will focus on retrieving, cleansing and preparing large scale datasets, training and evaluating models and deploying them to production where we continuously monitor and evaluate. You will work on large engineering efforts that solve significantly complex problems facing global customers. You will be trusted to operate with complete independence and are often assigned to focus on areas where the business and/or architectural strategy has not yet been defined. You must be equally comfortable digging in to business requirements as you are drilling into design with development teams and developing production ready learning models. You consistently bring strong, data-driven business and technical judgment to decisions. You will work with internal and external stakeholders, cross-functional partners, and end-users around the world at all levels. Our team makes a big impact because nothing is more important to us than delivering for our customers, continually earning their trust, and thinking long term. You are empowered to bring new technologies to your solutions. If you crave a sense of ownership, this is the place to be.
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Advertising operates at the intersection of eCommerce and advertising, and is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. We are defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products to improve both shopper and advertiser experience. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we grow at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities. The Ad Response Prediction team in Sponsored Products organization build advanced deep-learning models, large-scale machine-learning pipelines, and real-time serving infra to match shoppers’ intent to relevant ads on all devices, for all contexts and in all marketplaces. Through precise estimation of shoppers’ interaction with ads and their long-term value, we aim to drive optimal ads allocation and pricing, and help to deliver a relevant, engaging and delightful ads experience to Amazon shoppers. As the business and the complexity of various new initiatives we take continues to grow, we are looking for talented Applied Scientists to join the team. Key job responsibilities As a Applied Scientist II, you will: * Conduct hands-on data analysis, build large-scale machine-learning models and pipelines * Work closely with software engineers on detailed requirements, technical designs and implementation of end-to-end solutions in production * Run regular A/B experiments, gather data, perform statistical analysis, and communicate the impact to senior management * Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving * Provide technical leadership, research new machine learning approaches to drive continued scientific innovation * Be a member of the Amazon-wide Machine Learning Community, participating in internal and external MeetUps, Hackathons and Conferences
US, WA, Seattle
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IN, HR, Gurugram
We're on a journey to build something new a green field project! Come join our team and build new discovery and shopping products that connect customers with their vehicle of choice. We're looking for a talented Senior Applied Scientist to join our team of product managers, designers, and engineers to design, and build innovative automotive-shopping experiences for our customers. This is a great opportunity for an experienced engineer to design and implement the technology for a new Amazon business. We are looking for a Applied Scientist to design, implement and deliver end-to-end solutions. We are seeking passionate, hands-on, experienced and seasoned Senior Applied Scientist who will be deep in code and algorithms; who are technically strong in building scalable computer vision machine learning systems across item understanding, pose estimation, class imbalanced classifiers, identification and segmentation.. You will drive ideas to products using paradigms such as deep learning, semi supervised learning and dynamic learning. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will also help lead and mentor our team of applied scientists and engineers. You will take on complex customer problems, distill customer requirements, and then deliver solutions that either leverage existing academic and industrial research or utilize your own out-of-the-box but pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you will directly contribute to implementation while you lead. A successful candidate has excellent technical depth, scientific vision, project management skills, great communication skills, and a drive to achieve results in a unified team environment. You should enjoy the process of solving real-world problems that, quite frankly, haven’t been solved at scale anywhere before. Along the way, we guarantee you’ll get opportunities to be a bold disruptor, prolific innovator, and a reputed problem solver—someone who truly enables AI and robotics to significantly impact the lives of millions of consumers. Key job responsibilities Architect, design, and implement Machine Learning models for vision systems on robotic platforms Optimize, deploy, and support at scale ML models on the edge. Influence the team's strategy and contribute to long-term vision and roadmap. Work with stakeholders across , science, and operations teams to iterate on design and implementation. Maintain high standards by participating in reviews, designing for fault tolerance and operational excellence, and creating mechanisms for continuous improvement. Prototype and test concepts or features, both through simulation and emulators and with live robotic equipment Work directly with customers and partners to test prototypes and incorporate feedback Mentor other engineer team members. A day in the life - 6+ years of building machine learning models for retail application experience - PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience - Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language - Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning - Demonstrated expertise in computer vision and machine learning techniques.
US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Content Understanding Team, you will lead the end-to-end research and deployment of video and multi-modal models applied to a variety of downstream applications. More specifically, you will: - Work backwards from customer problems to research and design scientific approaches for solving them - Work closely with other scientists, engineers and product managers to expand the depth of our product insights with data, create a variety of experiments to determine the high impact projects to include in planning roadmaps - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals About the team Our Prime Video Content Understanding team builds holistic media representations (e.g. descriptions of scenes, semantic embeddings) and apply them to new customer experiences supply chain problems. Our technology spans the entire Prime Video catalogue globally, and we enable instant recaps, skip intro timing, ad placement, search, and content moderation.
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to re-invent how millions of people consume video content on their TVs, Tablets and Alexa? We are building a free to watch streaming service called Fire TV Channels (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/21/amazon-launches-fire-tv-channels-app-400-fast-channels/). Our goal is to provide customers with a delightful and personalized experience for consuming content across News, Sports, Cooking, Gaming, Entertainment, Lifestyle and more. You will work closely with engineering and product stakeholders to realize our ambitious product vision. You will get to work with Generative AI and other state of the art technologies to help build personalization and recommendation solutions from the ground up. You will be in the driver's seat to present customers with content they will love. Using Amazon’s large-scale computing resources, you will ask research questions about customer behavior, build state-of-the-art models to generate recommendations and run these models to enhance the customer experience. You will participate in the Amazon ML community and mentor Applied Scientists and Software Engineers with a strong interest in and knowledge of ML. Your work will directly benefit customers and you will measure the impact using scientific tools.
US, MA, Boston
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IN, HR, Gurugram
Our customers have immense faith in our ability to deliver packages timely and as expected. A well planned network seamlessly scales to handle millions of package movements a day. It has monitoring mechanisms that detect failures before they even happen (such as predicting network congestion, operations breakdown), and perform proactive corrective actions. When failures do happen, it has inbuilt redundancies to mitigate impact (such as determine other routes or service providers that can handle the extra load), and avoids relying on single points of failure (service provider, node, or arc). Finally, it is cost optimal, so that customers can be passed the benefit from an efficiently set up network. Amazon Shipping is hiring Applied Scientists to help improve our ability to plan and execute package movements. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon Shipping, you will work on multiple challenging machine learning problems spread across a wide spectrum of business problems. You will build ML models to help our transportation cost auditing platforms effectively audit off-manifest (discrepancies between planned and actual shipping cost). You will build models to improve the quality of financial and planning data by accurately predicting ship cost at a package level. Your models will help forecast the packages required to be pick from shipper warehouses to reduce First Mile shipping cost. Using signals from within the transportation network (such as network load, and velocity of movements derived from package scan events) and outside (such as weather signals), you will build models that predict delivery delay for every package. These models will help improve buyer experience by triggering early corrective actions, and generating proactive customer notifications. Your role will require you to demonstrate Think Big and Invent and Simplify, by refining and translating Transportation domain-related business problems into one or more Machine Learning problems. You will use techniques from a wide array of machine learning paradigms, such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. Your model choices will include, but not be limited to, linear/logistic models, tree based models, deep learning models, ensemble models, and Q-learning models. You will use techniques such as LIME and SHAP to make your models interpretable for your customers. You will employ a family of reusable modelling solutions to ensure that your ML solution scales across multiple regions (such as North America, Europe, Asia) and package movement types (such as small parcel movements and truck movements). You will partner with Applied Scientists and Research Scientists from other teams in US and India working on related business domains. Your models are expected to be of production quality, and will be directly used in production services. You will work as part of a diverse data science and engineering team comprising of other Applied Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Business Intelligence Engineers. You will participate in the Amazon ML community by authoring scientific papers and submitting them to Machine Learning conferences. You will mentor Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers having a strong interest in ML. You will also be called upon to provide ML consultation outside your team for other problem statements. If you are excited by this charter, come join us!