Machine learning

National Science Foundation, in collaboration with Amazon, awards 11 Fairness in AI grant projects

Program supports computational research with goal of creating trustworthy AI systems that can address some of society's grand challenges.

By Staff writer
February 10, 2021
Share

  1. In 2019, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Amazon announced a collaboration to accelerate research on fairness in AI, with each organization committing up to $10 million each in grants over the ensuing three years.

    Last year, NSF announced the first 10 projects to receive grants through the initiative. Thirty-five researchers obtained funds for the projects that addressed four broad research areas:

    1. Ensuring fairness in algorithms and the systems that incorporate them — which begins with the definition and quantification of fairness;
    2. Accountability and transparency in AI algorithms;
    3. Using AI to promote equity in society; and
    4. Ensuring that the benefits of AI are available to everyone.

    This year, NSF has announced the next cohort of 37 researchers focused on 11 projects that cover a range of topics, including:

    1. Theoretical and algoithmic foundations;
    2. Principles for human interaction with AI systems;
    3. Technologies such as natural language understanding and computer vision; and
    4. Applications including hiring decision, education, criminal justice, and human services.

    “We are excited to see NSF select an incredibly talented group of researchers whose research efforts are informed by a multiplicity of perspectives,” said Prem Natarajan, Alexa AI vice president of Natural Understanding. “As AI technologies become more prevalent in our daily lives, AI fairness is an increasingly important area of scientific endeavor. And we are delighted to partner with NSF to accelerate progress in this area by supporting the work of the top research teams in the world.”

    Henry Kautz, NSF
    Henry Kautz, NSF
    Credit: NSF

    “NSF is partnering with Amazon to support this year’s cohort of fairness in AI projects,” said Henry Kautz, director of NSF’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. “Understanding how AI systems can be designed on principles of fairness, transparency and trustworthiness will advance the boundaries of AI applications. And it will help us build a more equitable society in which all citizens can be designers of these technologies as well as benefit from them.”

    More information about this Fairness in AI
    program is available on NSF's website, and via their program update. Below is the list of the 2021 awardees, and an overview of their projects.

  2. Fairness in machine learning with human in the loop

    "This project aims to understand the long-term impact of fair decisions made by automated machine learning algorithms via establishing an analytical, algorithmic, and experimental framework that captures the sequential learning and decision process, the actions and dynamics of the underlying user population, and its welfare."

    • Principal investigator: Yang Liu
    • Co-principal investigators: Mingyan Liu, Parinaz Naghizadeh Ardabili, Ming Yin
    • Organization: University of California Santa Cruz
    • Award amount: $625,000

    Project description

  3. End-to-end fairness for algorithm-in-the-loop decision-making in the public sector

    "The goal of this project is to develop methods and tools that assist public sector organizations with fair and equitable policy interventions. In areas such as housing and criminal justice, critical decisions that impact lives, families, and communities are made by a variety of actors, including city officials, police, and court judges..." 

    • Principal investigator: Daniel Neill
    • Co-principal investigators: Constantine Kontokosta, Ravi Shroff, Edward McFowland
    • Organization: New York University
    • Award amount: $625,000

    Project description

  4. Foundations of fair AI in medicine: ensuring the fair use of patient attributes

    "Currently deployed machine learning models in medicine may exhibit fair use violations that undermine health outcomes. This project mitigates fair use violations at key stages in the deployment of machine learning in medicine: verification, model development, and communication..." 

    • Principal investigator: Flavio Calmon
    • Co-principal investigators: Elena Glassman, Berk Ustun
    • Organization: Harvard University
    • Award amount: $625,000

    Project description

  5. Organizing crowd audits to detect bias in machine learning

    "This project will explore three major research questions. The first is investigating new techniques for recruiting and incentivizing participation from a diverse crowd. The second is developing new and effective forms of guidance for crowd workers for finding instances and generalizing instances of bias. The third is designing new ways of synthesizing findings from the crowd so that development teams can understand and productively act on..."

    • Principal investigator: Jason Hong
    • Co-principal investigators: Motahhare Eslami, 
      Ken Holstein, Adam Perer, Nihar Shah
    • Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University
    • Award amount: $625,000

    Project description

  6. Using machine learning to address structural bias in personnel selection

    "Today, personnel selection practitioners in the United States are primarily guided by two streams of knowledge: 1) the development on the legal front pertaining to employment opportunities, and 2) the accumulation of findings in social, behavioral, and economic sciences that guide the accepted professional practices in personnel selection... This research project focuses on bridging the gap to establish machine learning as the third pillar for the design of personnel selection systems in human resource management..."
     

    • Principal investigator: Nan Zhang
    • Co-principal investigators: Heng Xu, Mo Wang
    • Organization: American University
    • Award amount: $624,485
      Project description
  7. Towards adaptive and interactive post hoc explanations

    "This proposal has three key areas of focus. First, this proposal will develop a novel formal framework for generating adaptive explanations which can be customized to account for subgroups of interest and user profiles. Second, this proposal will facilitate the explanations as an interactive communication process by dynamically incorporating user inputs. Finally, this proposal will improve existing automatic evaluation metrics such as sufficiency and comprehensiveness, and develop novel ones, especially for the understudied global explanations..."

    • Principal investigator: Chenhao Tan
    • Co-principal investigators: Yuxin Chen, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Sameer Singh
    • Organization: University of Chicago
    • Award amount: $375,000

    Project description

  8. Using AI to increase fairness by improving access to justice

    "This project applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) to increase social fairness by improving public access to justice. Although many AI tools are already available to law firms and legal departments, these tools do not typically reach members of the public and legal service practitioners except through expensive commercial paywalls. The research team will develop two tools to make legal sources more understandable: Statutory Term Interpretation Support (STATIS) and Case Argument Summarization (CASUM)..."

    • Principal investigator: Kevin Ashley
    • Co-principal investigators: Diane Litman
    • Organization: University of Pittsburgh
    • Award amount: $375,000

    Project description

  9. Fair AI in public policy - achieving fair societal outcomes in ML applications to education, criminal justice, and health and human services

    "This project advances the potential for Machine Learning (ML) to serve the social good by improving understanding of how to apply ML methods to high-stakes, real-world settings in fair and responsible ways..."

    • Principal investigator: Hoda Heidari
    • Co-principal investigators: Olexandra Chouldechova, Rayid Ghani, Zachary Lipton, Christopher Rodolfa
    • Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University
    • Award amount: $375,000

    Project description

  10. Towards holistic bias mitigation in computer vision systems

    "With the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in life-changing decisions, such as hiring or firing of individuals or the length of jail sentences, there has been an increasing concern about the fairness of these systems. There is a need to guarantee that AI systems are not biased against segments of the population. This project aims to mitigate AI bias in the domain of computer vision, a driving application for much of the recent advances in a popular form of AI known as deep learning..."

    • Principal investigator: Nuno Vasconcelos
    • Organization: University of California San Diego
    • Award amount: $375,000
    • Project description
  11. Measuring and mitigating biases in generic image representation

    "This project will provide a study of societal biases present in current methods and models for computational visual recognition that are widely used as a source of generic visual representations..."

    • Principal investigator: Vicente Ordonez
    • Co-principal investigators: Baishakhi Ray
    • Organization: University of Virginia
    • Award amount: $375,000

    Project description

  12. Quantifying and mitigating disparities in language technologies

    "In this work we ask a simple question: can we measure the extent to which the diversity of language that we use affects the quality of results that we can expect from language technology systems? This will allow for the development and deployment of fair accuracy measures for a variety of tasks regarding language technology, encouraging advances in the state of the art in these technologies to focus on all, not just a select few..."

    • Principal investigator: Graham Neubig
    • Co-principal investigators: Jeffrey Bigham, Yulia Tsvetkov, Geoff Kaufman, Antonios Anastasopoulos
    • Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University
    • Award amount: $375,000

    Project description

Research areas
Tags
Share
About the Author
Staff writer
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Sign up for our monthly newsletter
Subscribe

Work with us

See more jobs
Senior Data Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon’s Automated Inventory Management (AIM) team is looking for passionate, hard-working, and talented individuals to join our fast paced, stimulating environment to invent the future of business ownership with Technology.The AIM team is part of the Supply Chain Optimization Technology (SCOT) Team within the Operations Organization. The charter of the SCOT team is to maximize Amazon’s return on our inventory investment in terms of Free Cash Flow and customer satisfaction. We accomplish this by determining how much inventory Amazon needs of each SKU and what to do if we have too much. This puts the Inventory Planning group at the nexus of operations, logistics, capacity planning, and our retail business teams.As a Senior Data Scientist on the AIM team, you will research and develop long range forecasting models and solve real world problems using the latest machine learning techniques. You will research new modelling techniques that can discover and interpret causal effects in our supply chain systems at scale. You will work closely with senior business leaders, product managers and engineers to build innovative scientific solutions that impact millions of inventory decisions each day.Key responsibilities:· Implement statistical and machine learning methods to forecast system behavior and solve complex business problems· Research new ways to improve predictive and explanatory models· Directly contribute to the design and development of automated prediction systems and ML infrastructure· Build models that can detect supply chain defects and explain variance to the optimal state· Collaborate with other researchers, software developers, and business leaders to define the scientific roadmap for this teamTo help describe some of our challenges, we created a short video about Supply Chain Optimization at Amazon - http://bit.ly/amazon-scotAmazon is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation / Age
Senior Applied Scientist
US, NY, New York
Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. The Global Advertising Partner Development team within Advertising helps suppliers, agencies, marketers, authors, content creators, designers, non-endemic advertisers and developers to scale their use of Amazon Advertising and grow their business by surfacing a diverse selection of products to millions of worldwide Amazon customers. We do this via software tools and marketing/engagement programs that enable developers (internal and external) and partners (agencies and tool providers) to better serve advertiser needs.We are looking for a senior applied scientist capable of using statistical and machine learning techniques to create state-of-the-art solutions for non-trivial, and arguably, unsolved problems. If you are results driven, interested in how to apply advanced machine learning and causal analysis techniques, love to work with advertising, are deeply technical, highly innovative and long for the opportunity to build solutions to challenging problems that directly impact our customers, we want to talk to you.Key responsibilities include:· Partnering with economists, scientists, developers, and senior team members to drive a new science agenda for causal analysis and ML in advertising.· Driving applied science projects end-to-end: from ideation, analysis, prototyping, development, metrics, and monitoring.· Providing technical leadership, researching new approaches to drive continued scientific innovation.· Presenting results, reports, and data insights to both technical and business leadership.· Build machine learning models and utilize data analysis to deliver scalable solutions to business problems.· Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis.· Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving.· Work closely with software engineers on detailed requirements, technical designs and implementation of end-to-end solutions in production· Research new machine learning approaches.Why you love this opportunityAmazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. We are responsible for 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 break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate.Impact and Career GrowthYou will invent new shopper and advertiser experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising; this is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon. Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven fundamentally from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.Team video https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE
Sr. IoT Edge Data Scientist - AWS Professional Services
US
Excited by using massive amounts of data to develop Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models? Want to help the largest global enterprises derive business value through the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Eager to learn from many different enterprise’s use cases of AWS ML and DL? Thrilled to be key part of Amazon, who has been investing in Machine Learning for decades, pioneering and shaping the world’s AI technology?At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are helping large enterprises build ML and DL models on the AWS Cloud. We are applying predictive technology to large volumes of data and against a wide spectrum of problems. Our Professional Services organization works together with our AWS customers to address their business needs using AI.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 or DL 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. It will be a person who likes to have fun, loves to learn, and wants to innovate in the world of AI.Responsibilities:· Understand the customer’s business need and guide them to a solution using our AWS AI Services, AWS AI Platforms, AWS AI Frameworks, and AWS AI EC2 Instances .· Assist customers by being able to deliver a ML / DL project from beginning to end, including understanding the business need, aggregating data, exploring data, building & validating predictive models, and deploying completed models to deliver business impact to the organization.· Use Deep Learning frameworks like MXNet, Caffe 2, Tensorflow, Theano, CNTK, and Keras to help our customers build DL models.· Use SparkML and Amazon Machine Learning (AML) to help our customers build ML models.· Work with our Professional Services Big Data consultants to analyze, extract, normalize, and label relevant data.· Work with our Professional Services DevOps consultants to help our customers operationalize models after they are built.· Assist customers with identifying model drift and retraining models.· Research and implement novel ML and DL approaches, including using FPGA.This is a customer facing role. You will be required to travel to client locations and deliver professional services when needed.
Applied Scientist
US, CA, Palo Alto
The Amazon Search team creates powerful, customer-focused search solutions and technologies. Whenever a customer visits an Amazon site worldwide and types in a query or browses through product categories, Amazon Product Search services go to work. We design, develop, and deploy high performance, fault-tolerant distributed search systems used by millions of Amazon customers every day. Our Search Relevance team works to maximize the quality and effectiveness of the search experience for visitors to Amazon websites worldwide.The Search Relevance team focuses on several technical areas for improving search quality. In this role, you will invent universally applicable signals and algorithms for training machine-learned ranking models. The relevance improvements you make will help millions of customers discover the products they want from a catalog containing millions of products. You will work on problems such as predicting the popularity of new products, developing new ranking features and algorithms that capture unique characteristics, and analyzing the differences in behavior of different categories of customers. The work will span the whole development pipeline, including data analysis, prototyping, A/B testing, and creating production-level components.Joining this team, you’ll experience the benefits of working in a dynamic, entrepreneurial environment, while leveraging the resources of Amazon.com (AMZN), one of the world’s leading Internet companies. We provide a highly customer-centric, team-oriented environment in our offices located in Palo Alto, California.
Applied Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
At Amazon, we are the most customer-centric company on earth. If you'd like to help us build the place to find and buy anything online, this is your chance to make history. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people. We are looking for a dynamic, organized self-starter to join as an Applied Scientist II for Promise Optimization.The Promise Optimization team seeks to identify the optimal delivery option for whatever a customer wants. We believe that finding an optimal promise and living up to it consistently improves our customer experience because we increase customer's confidence and trust in Amazon as the one, best option to get what you want, when you want it.As the applied scientist for Promise Optimization, you will be responsible for building and productionizing machine learning models to answer predictive questions and lead efforts to scale, automate, and productionize statistical models on the impact of delivery speed on customer behavior. You will work with a diverse scientific team including software engineers, economists, and data engineers.Within predictive analytics, you will develop and implement a missed promise prediction model in production software. This model will inform supply chain systems on the risk of late shipments throughout the order lifecycle, unlocking the ability for fulfillment execution risk to be known and addressed from promise through fulfillment. Other predictive questions you may address involve predicting shipment consolidations and customer contacts following missed promises. In each case, you will balance analytical rigor with pragmatism, focusing on delivering value for the business question at hand.As our team’s work on estimating the value of delivery speed is incorporated in production software worldwide, you will work with economists to scale and automate statistical models using big data technologies such as Spark and EMR. Your expertise will be used to instruct researchers on using these same technologies, helping to leverage scarce research headcount. You will be a standard bearer on engineering best practices for production models and serve as a technical liaison to the software engineers whose systems depend on our models.Responsibilities include:· Working with economists, BIEs, DEs, and SDEs to design, test, implement, and support predictive and operations research optimization models in production software environments· Ensuring that production models are robust, scalable, and address business and software engineering requirements· Using big data and AWS technologies to scale, automate, and productionize core statistical models and enable rapid deployment of refreshed models, as well as instructing other researchers on the use of these tools· Recognizing and adopting best practices in analysis, data and model integrity, test design, validation, and documentationAmazon.com is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation
Research Scientist, Device Design Group
US, WA, Seattle
The Amazon Device and Services Design Group (DDG) creates revolutionary products used by millions of customers around the world every day - including Echo, Fire TV, Alexa Communications, and more. Within DDG, the DDG Research team is one of the behind-the-scenes teams that enables Amazon’s Devices’ leaders to make informed decisions based on sound mixed-method research and analytics. We are seeking an exceptional Research Scientist to join our team to help us derive insights that serve our customers. If you are inquisitive, passionate about how research can improve decision making, enjoy weaving data into a telling story, and like your research to have real world impact, we want you on our team.As a successful Research Scientist, you:· Are enthusiastic about collaborating with a cross-functional team of UX designers, researchers (qualitative and quantitative), business partners, design technologists, and developers to provide actionable insights.· Demonstrate excellent statistical skills and are excited about learning new methods.· Are naturally curious about people, especially their motivations, attitudes, and behaviors.· Excel when interacting with business and technical partners whether you are chatting, sending a written message, writing a technical report, or conducting a presentation.· Enjoy working with stakeholders to define their key business needs and deliver on those commitments.· Innovate on behalf of your customers by proactively implementing improvements and taking steps to address challenges that they had not yet identified.· Are drawn to ambiguous, complex problems.· Surface and question both your own and others’ underlying assumptions.· Persuade decision makers at all levels of the organization to take aligned action on research findings – inspire and help them internalize opportunities to delight our customers and differentiate our service.· Define, execute, and invent research methods appropriate to the questions at hand, including but not limited to field research, surveys, lab studies, remote testing, and A-B tests.
Sr. Research Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
At Amazon we strive to be the most innovative and customer centric company on the planet. Come work with us while we are developing our Transportation Technology to deliver the best solutions for our vendors, warehouses and carriers. Help us solve complex problems impacting billions of dollars per year while partnering with world class scientists.Our mission is to build the most efficient and optimal transportation solution on the planet. We aim to leverage cutting edge technologies in big data, machine learning, and optimization techniques, and operate high volume, low latency, and high availability services.You’ll design, model, develop and implement state of the art systems and solutions used by Amazon worldwide and will regularly interact with engineering and business leadership. You will participate in the planning and execution of technology projects and operational excellence initiatives.Tasks/ Responsibilities:· · Partnership with the engineering and operations to drive modeling and design for complex business problems.· · Design and prototype decision support tools (product) to automate standardized processes and optimize trade-offs across the full decision space.· · Contribute to the mid- and long-term strategic planning studies and analysis.· · Lead complex transportation modeling analyses to aid management in making key business decisions and set new policies.· Amazon is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation / Age This critical role requires an aptitude for taking quick initiative, thinking big, and delivering results to drive innovation in transportation modeling and optimization across Amazon’s expanding global network. You will also have the opportunity to work with some of the leading scientists in the areas of meta-heuristics, routing optimization and machine learning.
Senior Data Scientist - AWS Region Services (RBE Labs)
US, VA, Arlington
Amazon Region Services team is looking for a Data Scientist to lead the research and thought leadership to drive our data and insights strategy for Amazon Region Services. We develop sophisticated algorithms that involve learning from large amounts of data. You will be responsible for researching, experimenting and analyzing predictive and optimization models.You will provide to engineers, direction on technology strategy in data management, insights and Machine learning that will form the nucleus of providing data and insights as a service to our customers. You will work on ambiguous and complex business and research science problems with large opportunities.You are an individual with outstanding analytical abilities and comfortable working with cross-functional teams and systems. You must be a self-starter and be able to learn on the go. Excellent written and verbal communication skills are required as you will work very closely with diverse teams.Key Responsibilities:· · Interact with business and software teams to understand their business requirements and operational processes· Frame business problems into scalable solutions· Adapt existing and invent new techniques for solutions· Create and track accuracy and performance metrics· Gather data required for analysis and model building· Prototype models by using high-level modeling languages such as R or in software languages such as Python. A software team will be working with you to transform prototypes into production.· Interview, mentor, and develop scientists and engineers across the organization· Create, enhance, and maintain technical documentationHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and we 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 14 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.We are dedicated to supporting our new team members. Our team has a broad mix of experience levels and Amazon tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship.Our team also puts a high value on work-life balance. Striking a healthy balance between your personal and professional life is crucial to your happiness and success here, which is why we aren’t focused on how many hours you spend at work or online. Instead, we’re happy to offer a flexible schedule so you can have a more productive and well-balanced life—both in and outside of work.This position requires that the candidate selected be a US Citizen.
Speech Scientist, Alexa
US, MA, Cambridge
Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Machine Learning Scientist with a strong machine learning background to help build industry-leading Alexa Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to push the envelope in Deep Learning, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.Our Machine Learning Scientists, work with talented peers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art in spoken language. Your work will directly impact our customers in speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding. Candidates can work in Cambridge MA, Seattle WA or Sunnyvale CA.
Applied Scientist, Alexa AI
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist to help build industry-leading Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to push the envelope in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Audio Signal Processing, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.As a Speech and Language Scientist, you will work with talented peers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art in spoken language understanding. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of novel products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding. You will mentor junior scientists, create and drive new initiatives.We are hiring in all areas of spoken language understanding: ASR, NLU, text-to-speech (TTS), and Dialog Management.
Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon Scout (Autonomous Robotics)
US, WA, Seattle
Are you inspired by building new technologies to benefit customers? Do you dream of being at the forefront of and system technology? Would you enjoy working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, start-up like environment? If you answered yes to any of these then you've got to check out the Amazon Scout team.We’ve been hard at work developing a new, fully-electric delivery system – Amazon Scout – designed to get packages to customers using delivery devices. These devices were created by Amazon, are the size of a small cooler, and roll along sidewalks at a walking pace. We developed Amazon Scout at our research and development lab in Seattle, ensuring the devices can safely and efficiently navigate around pets, pedestrians and anything else in their path.The Amazon Scout team shares a passion for innovation using advanced technologies, a love of solving complex challenges, and a desire to impact customers in a meaningful way. We're looking for individuals who like dealing with ambiguity, solving hard, large scale problems, and working in a startup like environment. To learn more about Amazon Scout, check out our Amazon Day One Blog post here: http://amazon.com/scoutCome build the future with us.Duration: 3 monthsKey Job ResponsibilitiesAs a Science Intern, you will work from concept through to execution. This role will give you the opportunity to build tools and support structures needed to analyze, dive deep to resolve root cause of systems errors and changes, and present findings to business partners to drive improvements.Amazon Scout is currently targeting PhD interns who specialize in Computer Vision, Perception, Deep Learning, Simulation, Navigation, and Localization.
Sr. Research Scientist
US, VA, Arlington
Are you passionate about conducting measurement research and experiments to assess and evaluate talent? Would you like to see your research in products that will drive key talent management behaviors globally to ensure we are raising the bar on our talent? If so, you should consider joining the Global Talent Management (GTM) Science Team!Amazon GTM Science team is an innovative organization that exists to propel Amazon HR toward being the most scientific HR organization on earth. The GTM Science mission is to use Science to assist and measurably improve every talent decision made at Amazon. GTM Science does this by discovering signals in workforce data, infusing intelligence into Amazon’s talent products, and guiding the broader GTM team to pursue high-impact opportunities with tangible returns. This multi-disciplinary approach spans capabilities, including: data engineering, reporting and analytics, research and behavioral sciences, and applied sciences such as economics and machine learning.In this role, you will support measurement efforts for both GTM talent initatives and Amazon Connections (an innovative program that gives Amazonians a confidential and effective way to give feedback on the workplace to help shape the future of the company and improve the employee experience). You will own the research development strategy to evaluate, diagnose, understand, and surface drivers and moderators for key research streams. These include (but are not limited to) attrition, engagement, productivity, diversity, and Amazon culture. You will deep dive and analyze what research should be conducted and to what end, develop hypotheses that can be tested, and support a larger research program to deliver deeper insights that we can surface to leaders on our platform (short term and long).You will use both quantitative and qualitative data as well as conduct research studies to test your hypotheses. You will use a variety of statistical approaches to model and understand behavior. You will develop algorithms and thresholds to surface personalized results to managers/leaders, and partner with machine learning scientists to build these statistical models into production that scales. You will work with an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, economists, ML scientists, UX researchers, engineers, and product managers to inform and build product features to surface deeper people and business insights for our leaders.What you'll do:· Lead a global research strategy to drive more effective decisions and improve the employee experience across all of Amazon· Execute a scalable global content development and research strategy Amazon-wide· Conduct psychometrics analyses to evaluate integrity and practical application of content· Identify research streams to evaluate how to mitigate or remove sources of measurement error· Partner closely and drive effective collaborations across multi-disciplinary research and product teams· Manage full life cycle of large scale research programs (Develop strategy, gather requirements, execute, and evaluate)This person will possess knowledge of different assessment approaches to evaluate performance, a strong psychometrics background, scientific survey methodology, computing various content validity analyses, and experience developing legally defensible talent evaluation programs. In this role you will:
Senior Applied Scientist - Machine Learning
US, NY, New York
Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. Amazon's advertising portfolio helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth.This opportunity is for the Advertising Forecasting Science team, which consists of scientists and engineers based in Palo Alto, California. The team builds forecasting models for advertising campaigns and financial planning, with revenue exceeding tens of billions of dollars. In addition, the forecasting science team makes auction prediction and handles bid optimization for billions of requests per day, impacting the company’s performance directly using advanced Machine Learning algorithms.As a Senior Applied Scientist, and team leader, you will:· Drive applied science (machine learning) projects end-to-end - from ideation, analysis, prototyping, development, metrics, and monitoring.· Conduct deep analyses on massive Ad user and contextual data sets· Propose viable modelling ideas to advance optimization or efficiency, with supporting argument, data, or, preferably, preliminary results.· Invent ways to overcome technical limitations and enable new forms of analyses to drive key technical and business decisions.· Design, develop, and maintain scalable, Machine Learning models with automated training, validation, monitoring and reporting.· Stay familiar with the field and apply state-of-the-art Machine Learning techniques to our domain problems, around forecasting, bidding, allocation, and optimization.· Produce peer-reviewed scientific paper in top journals and conferences.· Present results, reports, and data insights to both technical and business leadership.· Work across teams and lead a group of talented scientists and engineers to solve problems in the domains of forecasting, auction theory, bid optimization, and user clustering.Impact and Career Growth:· You will invent new shopper and advertiser experiences, and accelerate the pace of Machine Learning and Optimization.· Influence customer facing shopping experiences to helping suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising, this role will be powering the engine of one the fastest growing businesses at Amazon.· Define a long-term science vision for our ad marketplace, driven fundamentally from the needs of our customers, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams.· This is a role that combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus and business understanding.· In the immediate term, this role requires (a) addressing principles of allocation function and pricing in ad marketplace auctions, (b) developing efficient algorithms for multi-objective optimization and AI control methods to find operating points for the ad marketplace auctions and to evolve them, and (c) develop science talent around machine learning, Economics and optimization for WW Advertising.Why you love this opportunity:· Amazon is investing heavily in building a world class advertising business and we are responsible for 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.· We are highly motivated, collaborative and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities.Team video ~ https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raEAmazon 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
Senior Applied Scientist
US, TX, Austin
The AWS Applications team builds powerful, intuitive, and market-defining business and productivity applications to help our customers stay ahead of their changing business needs, and remove the burden of undifferentiated heavy lifting that business users go through daily. These applications leverage the power of machine learning and the large ecosystem of AWS services such as SageMaker, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon QuickSight to provide a truly frustration-free, easy-to-use, extensible, and natural customer experience. We are hiring for a new data science team in AWS Applications to focus on solving problems at massive scale. This is a unique green-field chance to join a new team, and has tremendous opportunity for career growth.Joining the AWS Apps team gives you the opportunity to:· Solve challenging problems and help customers modernize their core IT applications· Work for a company that’s a recognized leader in the cloud computing space· Have direct impact on hundreds of thousands of users of AWS Apps services· Be involved in the fast growing big data space – learn from the expertsWhat you will do hereWe’re looking for a seasoned applied scientist with expertise in mathematical optimization to join the team. In this position, you will play a pivotal role in building the brain behind AWS applications. You will be responsible for building models, prototypes, simulations, and state-of-the-art optimization algorithms that can scale across several product lines. You will advise and closely collaborate with product and engineering teams to develop innovative products that disrupt established industries. In this role, you will also work closely with the renowned machine learning and optimization community at Amazon.The successful candidate must have exceptional analytical skills and demonstrated experience developing and implementing machine learning and optimization solutions in organizations. We are looking for a proven ability to execute both strategically and tactically, and someone who is excited to take on new, ambiguous projects that will be industry defining. As a senior science leader on the team, your specific responsibilities will include:· Understand customer problems and define solutions for optimization challenges in new product areas· Develop scalable mathematical models to help customers derive optimal or near-optimal solutions· Prototype and implement new learning algorithms and prediction techniques· Create simulations to test devised solutions· Advise and collaborate with product and engineering teams to design and implement software solutions for machine learning and optimization problems· Help hire, build, and mentor a growing science community in the AWS Applications spaceWhat you will get from us:We are a team that cares about work-life balance, while challenging ourselves to solve problems at AWS scale. You will join a strong team in a fast-paced, start-up environment where agile development is embraced and innovation is encouraged. You will get support and resources from some of the smartest people in the industry to continue your personal and professional growth. You'll be joining a diverse, fun, collaborative team with an inclusive and trusting culture that love working together towards a common goal and making history in launching new strategic services in the industry.
Applied Scientist
US, TX, Austin
The AWS Applications team builds powerful, intuitive, and market-defining business and productivity applications to help our customers stay ahead of their changing business needs, and remove the burden of undifferentiated heavy lifting that business users go through daily. These applications leverage the power of machine learning and the large ecosystem of AWS services such as SageMaker, AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon QuickSight to provide a truly frustration-free, easy-to-use, extensible, and natural customer experience. We are hiring for a new data science team in AWS Applications to focus on solving problems at massive scale. This is a unique green-field chance to join a new team, and has tremendous opportunity for career growth.Joining the AWS Apps team gives you the opportunity to:· Solve challenging problems and help customers modernize their core IT applications· Work for a company that’s a recognized leader in the cloud computing space· Have direct impact on hundreds of thousands of users of AWS Apps services· Be involved in the fast growing big data space – learn from the expertsWhat you will do hereWe are looking for a seasoned applied scientist with expertise in mathematical optimization to join the team. In this position, you will play a pivotal role in building the brain behind AWS applications. You will be responsible for building models, prototypes, simulations, and state-of-the-art optimization algorithms that can scale across several product lines. You will advise and closely collaborate with product and engineering teams to develop innovative products that disrupt established industries. In this role, you will also work closely with the renowned machine learning and optimization community at Amazon.The successful candidate must have exceptional analytical skills and demonstrated experience developing and implementing machine learning and optimization solutions in organizations. We are looking for a proven ability to execute both strategically and tactically, and someone who is excited to take on new, ambiguous projects that will be industry defining. As a senior science leader on the team, your specific responsibilities will include:· Understand customer problems and define solutions for optimization challenges in new product areas· Develop scalable mathematical models to help customers derive optimal or near-optimal solutions· Prototype and implement new learning algorithms and prediction techniques· Create simulations to test devised solutions· Advise and collaborate with product and engineering teams to design and implement software solutions for machine learning and optimization problems· Help hire and build a growing science community in the AWS Applications spaceWhat you will get from us:We are a team that cares about work-life balance, while challenging ourselves to solve problems at AWS scale. You will join a strong team in a fast-paced, start-up environment where agile development is embraced and innovation is encouraged. You will get support and resources from some of the smartest people in the industry to continue your personal and professional growth. You'll be joining a diverse, fun, collaborative team with an inclusive and trusting culture that love working together towards a common goal and making history in launching new strategic services in the industry.
Senior Applied Scientist - Amazon Robotics
US, MA, North Reading
Are you inspired by invention? Is problem solving through teamwork in your DNA? Do you like the idea of seeing how your work impacts the bigger picture? Answer yes to any of these and you’ll fit right in here at Amazon Robotics. We are a smart team of doers that work passionately to apply cutting edge advances in robotics and software to solve real-world challenges that will transform our customers’ experiences in ways we can’t even imagine yet. We invent new improvements every day. We are Amazon Robotics and we will give you the tools and support you need to invent with us in ways that are rewarding, fulfilling and fun.We are looking for world-class scientists and engineers to explore new ideas, invent new approaches, and develop new solutions.If you have expertise in Computer Vision, with extensive industry experience and have:· the ability to think big and conceive of new ideas and novel solutions;· the insight to correctly identify those worth exploring;· the hands-on skills to quickly develop proofs-of-concept;· the rigor to conduct careful experimental evaluations;· the discipline to fast-fail when data refutes theory;· and the fortitude to continue exploring until your solution is foundcome join us to invent the future and change the world.
Sr Audio DSP Engineer
CA, ON, Toronto
Alexa is the name of the Amazon cloud-based voice service that powers the Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show and more. Just ask Alexa for information, music, news, weather, and more. And now you can send a message, make a call, play announcements, or drop in on your closest friends & family via Alexa devices or the Alexa app!It’s still Day One for the Alexa Communications team – we have a lot to innovate and build to make communication through Alexa devices a magical experience. We’re working hard, having fun, and making history; come join us! The Alexa communications team is working to become the most natural way for people to communicate, and the challenge ahead is significant. We're a high energy, fast growth business excited to have the opportunity to define the future of voice-controlled communications, make Alexa even more useful, and delight customers around the world.We are seeking talented Audio DSP Engineers to join our Comms Media teams. These teams provide the mechanisms and services that allow our Customers to connect and communicate with each other around the world. In this role you will have an enormous opportunity to make a large impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of cutting edge products used every day, by people you know.The ideal candidate will be passionate about an opportunity to build elegant systems in the most efficient ways, pushing the limits of current technology and challenging the status quo.Key responsibilities include:· Develop and launch core product features· Influence our overall strategy by helping define product features, drive the system architecture, and spearhead the best practices that enable a quality product· Create world class software and Alexa experiences· Interact with cross-functional engineering teams across the company· Dive into and take ownership of mission critical software puzzles· Participate in and drive design reviews· Contribute significantly to key communications quality of Alexa· Innovate, prototype, and create new technology· Design and architect a highly performant, critical application at large scale· Work in an Agile environment to deliver high quality software
Senior Data Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
Customer Trust & Partner Support (CTPS) is responsible for creating a trustworthy shopping experience across Amazon stores worldwide by protecting customers, brands, selling partners and Amazon from fraud, counterfeit, and abuse as well as empowering, providing world‐class support, and building loyalty with Amazon’s millions of selling partners. We value individual expression, respect different opinions, and work together to create a culture where each of us is able to contribute fully. Our unique backgrounds and perspectives strengthen our ability to achieve Amazon's mission of being Earth's most customer-centric company.Amazon’s Account Integrity team within the Customer Trust and Partner Support organization is looking for a passionate, results-oriented Senior Data Scientist to leverage data to drive delivery of projects with huge strategic impact. This team designs and builds high performance systems using machine learning that identify and prevent fraudulent activity and maintain high trust levels with our customers. Fraud prevention is a real-money game where our data science and analytics teams strive to outsmart those who attempt to defraud Amazon and our customers.As a Senior Data Scientist in the Account Integrity group, you will work directly with ML Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Product Managers to monitor the flavor/trend of fraud worldwide and create appropriate solutions to detect and mitigate fraud in a collaborative environment.Successful candidates will have broad expertise in a variety of data science disciplines, including both supervised and unsupervised learning methods, strong analytical skills, be detail oriented, and have excellent problem solving abilities. He/she should also have a demonstrated ability to think strategically and analytically about business, product, and technical challenges, with the ability to work cross-functionally.Roles and Responsibilities:1. Use statistical and machine learning techniques to create scalable detection systems.2. Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon's historical business data to help automate and optimize key processes.3. Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative models for predictive learning.4. Work closely with software engineering and ML teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations.5. Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation.6. Play the role of tech lead on the data science team, mentor fellow scientists.
Data Scientist
GB, London
Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class Advertising business and the Media Planning Science team (MPSci) sits in one of the most strategic parts of this investment. We own science based products, backed by state of the art machine learning algorithms, that help advertisers design and create the most efficient campaigns. Advertiser success is core to Amazon’s growth and our recommendations help advertisers drive awareness, consideration, and purchase of their products by hundreds of millions of shoppers around the world. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented pace and constantly opening up new opportunities.The MPSci team is looking for a motivated and experienced data scientist to support our goal of leveraging data, science, and engineering to recommend the optimal set of campaign parameters to our advertisers, helping them reach their objectives and achieve the best return on their advertising investment.You will:· Answer critical questions using data: Identify, develop and execute analyses to uncover areas of opportunity that will guide the team’s strategic roadmap.· Build best-in-class datasets: Scope, build and own technical data warehouse processes using a broad range of Amazon's data resources.· Develop ML models: Working alongside applied scientists and engineers, you will gain exposure to best-in-class machine learning methods and will apply your creativity and experience to explore and develop new features and algorithms.· Test and Learn: You will develop methods for measuring the success of our recommendation algorithms and will use the insights obtained to design the next generation of models.You are:· Customer Obsessed: You have a sharp business acumen and are passionate about changing the way our advertisers use data to drive success.· Highly analytical and data-driven: You solve problems in ways that can be backed up with verifiable data. You focus on driving processes, tools, and statistical methods which support rational decision-making.· Comfortable with ambiguity: You are able to successfully solve difficult and/or loosely structured problems and are able to refine requirements from stakeholders into a functional design that solves the problem.· A fast learner: You are excited at the prospect of learning new techniques and can rapidly assimilate information and apply it in practise.
Economist
US, WA, Seattle
Are you excited about powering Amazon’s physical stores’ expansion through economic models? Do you thrive in a fast-moving, innovative environment that values data-driven decision making and sound scientific practices? We are looking for PhD Economists to build the next level of economic models that will help Amazon physical stores grow and succeed.Our team is responsible for building the core intelligence, insights, and algorithms that support the real estate acquisition strategies for Amazon physical stores. We are tackling cutting-edge, complex problems such as predicting the optimal location for new Amazon stores by bringing together numerous data assets from disparate sources inside and outside of Amazon, and using best-in-class modelling solutions to extract the most information out of them.You will have a proven track-record of delivering measurable benefit to business through strategic analysis, model building, and/or development of new software. You will be comfortable handling complex economic problems and making the right modeling tradeoffs by applying strong economic reasoning. You will be able to break down complex information and insights into clear and concise language and be comfortable presenting your findings to audiences with a broad range of backgrounds.Amazon is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation.
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Sign up for our newsletter
Subscribe
Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2021 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates
Follow Us