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Earlier this year, eight scientists were named as 2021 Amazon AI4Science Fellows at Caltech. The program is a result of a collaboration between Caltech and Amazon focused on supporting the AI4Science initiative, and its goal of sharing advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Machine learning

Caltech names eight AI4Science fellows supported by Amazon

Amazon is collaborating with Caltech to support research, education, and outreach programs that help build bridges between AI and other areas of science and engineering.

By Douglas Gantenbein
April 30, 2021
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In January, eight scientists were named as 2021 Amazon AI4Science Fellows at Caltech, the world-renowned science and engineering research institution based in Pasadena, Calif. The Fellows program is a result of a collaboration between Caltech and Amazon around supporting the AI4Science initiative and its goal of sharing the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to benefit all branches of scientific and engineering research.

There’s a huge level of demand among graduate students and post-doctoral scholars across campus to leverage the techniques and advantages afforded by using AI and machine learning in their own research.
Yisong Yue

“Amazon’s gift will have a real impact on our program,” said Yisong Yue, professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and co-founder of the AI4Science initiative. “There’s a huge level of demand among graduate students and post-doctoral scholars across campus to leverage the techniques and advantages afforded by using AI and machine learning in their own research.”

“Caltech is uniquely placed to be a leader in AI4science given its interdisciplinary collaborations and small size,” added Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and co-founder of the AI4Science initiative. “We thank Amazon for supporting this groundbreaking initiative.”

For those students specializing in data sciences, Yue said, “it allows them to be exposed to the datasets and research questions faced by scientists in other fields, as well as in companies such as Amazon, and to push the boundaries of existing AI and machine-learning algorithms to effectively address these questions.”

“At Amazon, we strongly believe that AI should be an integral part of all science, not just computer science,” said Marzia Polito, AWS senior manager of applied science. “We are building products supporting the use of AI in many fields of science and many science-based business applications. We are thrilled to collaborate with Caltech, a world-class institution doing ground-breaking science work, and we are honored to have a chance to contribute to their amazing results. There could be no better evidence toward a future where AI and science thrive together.”

This year’s cohort of Fellows comes from the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, reflecting the broad range of research being explored. The Fellows will apply cutting-edge ML and AI techniques to research areas ranging from neural prosthetics and theoretical chemistry, to the human microbiome.

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Earlier this year, eight scientists were named as 2021 Amazon AI4Science Fellows at Caltech. The program is a result of a collaboration between Caltech and Amazon focused on supporting the AI4Science initiative, and its goal of sharing advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Credit: Glynis Condon

The Amazon AI4Science Fellows and research areas are:

  • Carmen Amo Alonso, a graduate student pursuing her PhD in control and dynamical systems in the lab of John Doyle, Jean-Lou Chameau Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Electrical Engineering, and Bioengineering, is studying the application of AI to large-scale complex systems in areas as diverse as understanding the gut microbiome to designing optimized “smart” grids.
  • Sara Beery, a graduate student pursuing her PhD in computing and mathematical sciences in the lab of Pietro Perona, Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering, is developing approaches to collect global-scale, real-time ecological data for conservation purposes.
  • Charles Guan, a graduate student pursuing his PhD in bioengineering in the lab of Richard Andersen, James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center Leadership Chair, and director of the T&C Brain-Machine Interface Center, is developing decoding algorithms for neural prostheses and studying the neural basis of movement.
  • Kadina Johnston, a graduate student pursuing her PhD in bioengineering in the lab of Nobel-prize winner Frances Arnold, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry and director of the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center, is applying deep learning techniques to the directed evolution approach for enzyme engineering.
  • Nikola Kovachki, a graduate student pursuing his PhD in applied and computational mathematics in the lab of Andrew Stuart, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, is using deep learning techniques for solving partial differential equations, which has applications for climate modeling, understanding turbulent flow of fluids, and a wide range of materials science problems.
  • Zhuoran Qiao, a graduate student pursuing his PhD in chemistry in the lab of professor of chemistry Tom Miller, is developing physics-based machine learning methods for studying problems in complex chemical systems.    
  • Guannan Qu, a post-doctoral scholar working under the supervision of Steven Low, Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences and Electrical Engineering, and Adam Wierman, professor of computing and mathematical sciences and director of Information Science and Technology, is developing multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches that are scalable, distributed, and have provable guarantees such that they will be usable for safety-critical applications.
  • He Sun, a post-doctoral scholar working under the supervision of Katie Bouman, assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering and astronomy and Rosenberg Scholar, is developing new machine learning algorithms that can improve current computational imaging approaches.

The diverse interests of the Fellows reflect a trend in AI and machine learning that emphasizes cross-disciplinary research and is in line with the AI4Science focus.

“Today we need students who are experts in their own fields, but who also can communicate across different fields,” Yue said. “Effective communication requires a mix of fundamentally sound rigorous thinking coupled with a broad perspective on how to apply that approach to wide range of domains, in order to reveal and distill the core technical challenges that underlie the pressing problems facing science and engineering research today.”

The AI4Science Fellows program is one component within a larger collaboration between Amazon and Caltech. In the area of AI4Science, Amazon is also providing funds for Caltech’s Carver Mead New Adventures Fund, AWS credits for research projects across campus, and support for AI4Science events to build community and share research results.

Beyond the AI4Science initiative, Caltech and Amazon are collaborating in a number of other areas. A group of scientists within AWS’s Amazon Rekognition team is a part of Caltech’s Innovation Center, a building near campus that houses Caltech corporate collaborators and startups. In 2019, AWS and Caltech also announced a collaboration around quantum computing, which will include the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, set to open later this year.

“Caltech prides itself as being an incubator for concepts like AI4Science and next-generation technologies like quantum computing,” said Caltech’s Kaushik Bhattacharya, vice provost for Research and Howell N. Tyson, Sr., Professor of Mechanics and Materials Science. “Our small size, our relentless focus on the most challenging scientific questions — along with our close-knit community that is interdisciplinary by design — encourage and enable us to always be pioneering in the application of tools and techniques from other fields to all areas of science and engineering. To help make sure our findings have impacts beyond academia, we greatly value our collaborations with partners like Amazon.”

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Douglas Gantenbein
Douglas Gantenbein is a contributor to Amazon Science.
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Data Scientist, Alexa AI
US, WA, Bellevue
Come join the Alexa team, building the speech and language solutions behind Amazon Echo and other Amazon products and services! You will help us invent the future.As a Data Scientist of the Alexa AI Team, you will research and create models, improve models for natural language processing and speech recognition problems.You will gain hands-on experience with Amazon’s heterogeneous structured data sources; as well as large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in training deep neural networks for natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition on thousands of hours of speech. You will be supporting the solutions of highly visible and impactful business problems in the areas of new product development, automation, self-service solution and quality improvement, to continue to delight Alexa customers and help driving Amazon business performance.The ideal candidate should be passionate about delivering experiences that delight customers and creating solutions that are robust. They will be creating reliable, scalable and high performance products that require exceptional technical expertise, and a sound understanding of the fundamentals of Machine Learning.An ideal candidate should also:· Have demonstrated success in an environment which offers ambiguously defined problems, big challenges, and quick changes.· Be expected to balance detailed execution with speed and possess solid collaborative skills.· Have an ability to work in a fast-paced environment where every day brings new challenges and new opportunities.· Have excellent business and communication skills and be able to work with business owners to develop and define solutions.This position involves regular communication with senior management on project status and risks. Cross-team coordination, project management, and executive presentation skills are essential.
Applied Scientist - AMZ5232
US, MA, Cambridge
MULTIPLE POSITIONS AVAILABLEEntity: Amazon.com Services LLCTitle: Applied ScientistWorksite: Cambridge, MAPosition Responsibilities:Research, plan, and build industry-leading speech and language technology. Work to innovate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Audio Signal Processing technologies to improve customer experience. Develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques. Leverage Amazons heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding.Amazon.com is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation #0000
Senior Applied Scientist
US, NY, New York
Our team produces the long term forecasts for Amazon that support numerous strategic and tactical decisions and systems within Amazon. We are looking for a new Applied Scientist that can help us build the next generation of forecast systems in Topline. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you are an expert in Machine Learning, Deep Learning or High Frequency forecasting who is enthusiastic working with large time-series datasets. You will help us create our next generation line of Topline long horizon forecast engines. You have experience with Deep Learning, but also know time series. You are enthusiastic about modeling but also at investigating strong signals and their interactions.A day in the lifeYou will:1. Explore data: sift through large sets of data to investigate features and signals that might be good predictors2. Build Forecasting and Predictive Models: explore forecasting and predictive methods to help us model and forecast Topline demand3. Improve our overall strategy: you think strategically and see the big-modeling-picture and have a good intuition of which modeling components to build in order to have the largest impact4. You are an excellent coder who writes and organizes code with robustness and keeping an eye for the future5. You are a builder and are passionate about creating our next generation modeling stack.6. You are customer obsessed and work backwards from customer needs.About the hiring groupWe are a team of Data Scientists, Economists, Research and Applied Scientists with expertise in Econometrics, Time Series, Machine Learning and Data Science.Job responsibilities1. Drive model development: explore long horizon forecasting strategies2. Explore data: implement robust feature and signal extraction models and seek signals that support our models and/or insights3. Analyze performance: run backtests and analyze the relative performance of your models4. Write robust scalable code that will be the foundation of our Topline forecasts5. Articulate and deliver insights to the teamAmazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.
Research Scientist III
US, WA, Seattle
Have you ever ordered a product on Amazon and when that box with the smile arrived you wondered how it got to you so fast? Have you wondered where it came from and how much it cost Amazon to deliver it to you? If so, the WW Amazon Logistics, Business Analytics team is for you. We manage the delivery of tens of millions of products every week to Amazon’s customers, achieving on-time delivery in a cost-effective manner.We are looking for an enthusiastic, customer obsessed, Operations Research Scientist with good analytical skills to help manage projects and operations, implement scheduling solutions, improve metrics, and develop scalable processes and tools.The primary role of an Operations Research Scientist within Amazon is to address business challenges through building a compelling case, and using data to influence change across the organization. This individual will be given responsibility on their first day to own those business challenges and the autonomy to think strategically and make data driven decisions. Decisions and tools made in this role will have significant impact to the customer experience, as it will have a major impact on how the final phase of delivery is done at Amazon.Strong candidates will be a high potential, strategic and analytic graduate with a PhD in (Operations Research, Statistics, Engineering, and Supply Chain) ready for challenging opportunities in the core of our world class operations space. Great candidates have a history of operations research, and the ability to use data and research to make changes.This role requires robust program management skills and research science skills in order to act on research outcomes. This individual will need to be able to work with a team, but also be comfortable making decisions independently, in what is often times an ambiguous environment.Responsibilities may include:· Develop input and assumptions based preexisting models to estimate the costs and savings opportunities associated with varying levels of network growth and operations· Creating metrics to measure business performance, identify root causes and trends, and prescribe action plans· Managing multiple projects simultaneously· Working with technology teams and product managers to develop new tools and systems to support the growth of the business· Communicating with and supporting various internal stakeholders and external audiences
Applied Scientist
US, WA, Bellevue
As we strive to be Earth's most customer-centric company, Amazon has reinvented how hundreds of millions of people shop online – providing Customers with the opportunity to find and discover virtually anything they want to buy and providing millions of Sellers with a platform for growing successful businesses. Thousands of Amazon Sellers ship their orders directly from their own warehouse and we are building software to help them offer their items through programs like Seller Fulfilled Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon Onsite, Merchant Fulfilled Same Day Delivery, and Premium. We innovate and design our services and tools with a focus on customer and seller experience, followed by our focus on technology and worldwide scaling.The Seller Fulfillment Services team is looking for an Applied Scientist to be based in Bellevue area. As a key member of SFS, you will provide machine learning expertise that helps accelerate the business. You will build various data and machine learning models that help us innovate different ways to enhance the customer experience. You will need to be entrepreneurial, wear many hats, and work in a highly collaborative environment. We like to move fast, experiment, iterate and then scale quickly, thoughtfully balancing speed and quality.An ideal candidate will be an expert in the areas of machine learning and statistics who will have expertise in applying theoretical models in an applied environment. The candidate will be expected to work on numerous aspects of Machine Learning such as feature engineering, predictive modeling, probabilistic modeling, hyper-parameter tuning, scalable inference methods and latent variable models including transfer learning. Challenges will involve dealing with very large data sets and requirements on throughput.Responsibilities include:· Design, implement, test, deploy, and maintain innovative data and machine learning solutions to accelerate our business.· Create experiments and prototype implementations of new learning algorithms and prediction techniques· Collaborate with scientists, engineers, product managers, and stockholders to design and implement software solutions for science problems· Use machine learning best practices to ensure a high standard of quality for all of the team deliverablesAmazon is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation / Age
Data Scientist III
US, WA, Seattle
How to use the world’s richest collection of e-commerce data to improve payments experience for our customers? Amazon Consumer Payments Global Data Science team seeks a Sr. Data Scientist for building analytical solutions that will address increasingly complex business questions in the North America Credit space.Amazon.com has a culture of data-driven decision-making and demands insights that are timely, accurate, and actionable. This team provides a fast-paced environment where every day brings new challenges and new opportunities.As a Sr. Data Scientist in this team, you will be driving the analytics roadmap and will provide descriptive and predictive solutions to the North America Credit business team through a combination of data mining techniques as well as use statistical and machine learning techniques for segmentation and prediction. You will need to collaborate effectively with internal stakeholders, cross-functional teams to solve problems, create operational efficiencies, and deliver successfully against high organizational standards.Responsibilities· Demonstrate thorough technical knowledge on feature engineering of massive datasets, effective exploratory data analysis, and model building using industry standard regression and classification techniques such as Random Forest, XGBoost package, Keras framework· Understand the business reality behind large sets of data and develop meaningful solutions comprising of analytics as well as marketing management· Work closely with internal stakeholders like the business teams, engineering teams and partner teams and align them with respect to your focus area· Innovate by adapting new modeling techniques and procedures· You should be passionate about working with huge data sets and be someone who loves to bring datasets together to answer business questions. You should have deep expertise in creation and management of datasets· You should have exposure at implementing and operating stable, scalable data flow solutions from production systems into end-user facing applications/reports. These solutions will be fault tolerant, self-healing and adaptive· You will extract huge volumes of data from various sources and message streams and construct complex analyses. You will implement data flow solutions that process data real time on message streams from source systems· You should be detail-oriented and must have an aptitude for solving unstructured problems. You should work in a self-directed environment, own tasks and drive them to completion.· You should have excellent business and communication skills to be able to work with business owners to develop and define key business questions and to build data sets that answer those questions· Your teams will work with distributed machine learning and statistical algorithms upon a large Hadoop cluster to harness enormous volumes of online data at scale to serve our customers
Sr. Research Scientist - Sustainability / Carbon Neutralization
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon’s commitment to The Climate Pledge motivates us to work both inside and outside of our business operations to enact carbon emissions mitigation. Along with the emissions reduction initiatives within our business operations, we have a robust strategy aligned with climate science for tackling climate change outside of our business, beginning with nature-based solutions. For example, in April 2021 Amazon announced its leading role in the LEAF Coalition – an initiative that aims to raise global climate ambition and contribute to halting tropical and subtropical deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. As we continue to develop and innovate, Amazon is seeking an experienced Research Scientist to help us identify, evaluate, and guide research efforts in nature-based solutions as well as emerging areas. The ideal candidate will have a deep understanding of carbon cycles and be able to evaluate projects and initiatives across a wide range of natural and technological climate mitigation measures from a first-principles perspective. They will have expertise in one or more types of climate solutions, but more importantly will understand the broad field of solutions.The successful candidate will be part of the team executing on Amazon’s commitment to The Climate Pledge. They will need to work with others to create a system to evaluate nature-based and technological climate solution projects, and make recommendations to senior leadership. This will require strong writing skills and an ability to translate technical material for a general audience.Key Responsibilities:· Evaluate nature-based and technological climate solution projects using a scientifically rigorous first-principles approach.· Evaluate project and research proposals.· Collaborate with internal and external teams to scope, execute, and evaluate highly technical initiatives related to nature-based and technological climate solution projects.· Translate findings into reports and presentations that can be shared internally and externally.· Respond to time-critical questions from multiple business teams and communicate professionally with senior business leaders.
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