GauchoAI

The GauchoAI team is based on the Natural Language Processing Group at UC Santa Barbara.

We study the theoretical foundation and practical algorithms for language, vision, and machine learning technologies. We tackle challenging learning and reasoning problems under uncertainty and pursue answers via studies of machine learning, deep learning, and interdisciplinary data science. Broadly, we are interested in designing scalable inference and learning algorithms to analyze massive datasets with complex structures. In particular, our team concentrates on the areas of deep learning, reinforcement learning, vision-and-language navigation, large multimodal pretraining models, video and language, and robot manipulation.

ucsbgauchoteamimage2022.jpg
Location: Santa Barbara, Calif.
Faculty advisor: William Wang

Jiachen L. — Team leader

Jiachen is a first-year PhD student at UC Santa Barbara advised by William Wang. He received his master's in electrical and computer engineering at University of California San Diego and a bachelor degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology where he was an outstanding undergraduate in terms of academic performance (Top 1%). His current research interests broadly include Deep RL that tackles continuous control, and Multi-modal understanding.

Tsu-Jui (Ray) F.

Tsu-Jui is currently a third-year Ph.D. student at UCSB CS, advised by William Wang. His research interest lies in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Primarily, his work on language grounding and interacting with environments using language. Besides, he is also interested in information extraction and video analysis. His goal is to bridge the gap between vision and language via the AI system.

Yujie L.

Yujie is a first year CS PhD at UC Santa Barbara, advised by Professor William Wang and Professor Miguel Eckstein, at Natural Language Processing Group and Vision and Image Understanding Lab. She obtained her bachelor’s degree from Chu Kochen Honors College, Zhejiang University. Her research interests lie in Vision and Language (language grounding, multi-modal), Computer Vision and Robotics (detection, manipulation; self-supervised, lifelong) and Data Mining (recommendation), with the intersection of Cognition.

Xinyi W.

Xinyi is a second year CS PhD student at UCSB advised by Prof. William Wang. Her research interests are machine learning and natural language processing. More specifically, she is interested in applying causality theories to solve deep learning problems.

Xifeng Y.

Xifeng's research focuses on the development of fundamental concepts and new principles of data mining, design intelligent algorithms and build scalable systems. His current concentrations include: modeling, managing, and mining large-scale, heterogeneous graphs; structural and statistical analysis of texts and their applications; intelligent solutions to cross-domain problems in bioinformatics, business intelligence, computer security, computer systems, and social science.

Eddie Z.

Eddie is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He works in the NLP Group under Professor William Wang. His research focuses on improving efficiency in deep reinforcement learning through causal inference models. He has worked in industry implementing deep learning models for both computer vision and radar.

Wanrong Z.

Wanrong is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Natural Language Processing Group at UCSB, advised by Prof. William Wang. Before joining UCSB, she received her B.S. degree in Computer Science from Peking University.

Xifeng Yan — Faculty advisor

Xifeng Yan is the Narayanamurti Professor of Computer Science at UCSB. Yan's research focuses on the development of fundamental concepts and new principles of data mining, designing intelligent algorithms, and building scalable systems.

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US, WA, Bellevue
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? Have you also wondered what are different ways that the transportation assets can be used to delight the customer even more. If so, the Amazon transportation Services, North America Sort Center Science 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 Applied Scientist with strong scientific thinking, good software and statistics experience, skills to help manage projects and operations, improve metrics, and develop scalable processes and tools. The primary role of an Applied 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 we operate the middle mile network. Ideal 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, machine learning , and the ability to use data and research to make changes. This role requires robust skills in research and implementation of scalable products and models . 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. Key job responsibilities Key job responsibilities - Design and develop advanced mathematical optimization and machine learning solutions in the domains of network design and optimization. - Research, prototype, simulate, and experiment with these models using programming languages such as Java and Python; participate in the production level deployment. - Create, enhance, and maintain technical documentation and science designs. - Present to other Scientists, Product, and Software Engineering teams, as well as Stakeholders. - Lead project plans from a scientific perspective by managing product features, technical risks, milestones and launch plans.
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. As a core product offering within our advertising portfolio, Sponsored Products (SP) helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The SP team's 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. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day! Within Sponsored Products, the Bidding team is responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products around bid controls (dynamic bidding, bid recommendations, etc.) that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon’s Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, 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. You will invent new 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. Key job responsibilities • Lead a new initiative across Sponsored Products Bidding focused on AI/ML based features. • Be the technical leader in AI, Machine Learning; lead efforts within this team and across other teams. • Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous data sets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales, without compromising the shopper experience. • Drive end-to-end AI/Machine Learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, complexity. • Build models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your AI/ML models. • 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. • Research new and innovative AI/ machine learning approaches. A day in the life Why you will love this opportunity: Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon's Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate. Impact and Career Growth: You will invent new 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 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. About the team The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through the latest generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising. The SPB Bidding team within Sponsored Products and Brands is focused on guiding and supporting Millions of advertisers to meet their advertising needs of creating and managing ad campaigns. At this scale, the complexity of diverse advertiser goals, campaign types, and market dynamics creates both a massive technical challenge and a transformative opportunity: even small improvements in bidding systems can have outsized impact on advertiser success and Amazon’s retail ecosystem. Our vision is to build a highly personalized, context-aware bidding system that leverages auction simulations, ML models, and optimization algorithms. This framework, will operate across SPB bidding system and proactively delivering value based on deep understanding of the advertiser. To execute this vision, we collaborate closely with stakeholders across Ad Console, Sales, and Marketing to identify opportunities—from high-level product guidance down to granular recommendations—and deliver them through a tailored, personalized experience. Our work is grounded in state-of-the-art bidding agent architectures, tool integration, reasoning frameworks, and model customization approaches (including tuning and preference optimization), ensuring our systems are both scalable and adaptive.
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are seeking a Applied Scientist to focus on Robot Navigation. In this role, you'll research and develop advanced navigation systems that enable robots to move reliably and safely through complex, dynamic environments. You'll work across a broad spectrum of navigation approaches—from classical methods to learning-based techniques and foundation models—to build robust solutions for autonomous robot navigation. Key job responsibilities - Develop and implement robust navigation systems that enable reliable autonomous operation in complex, dynamic indoor environments with static and dynamic obstacles - Build simulation-based and on-device evaluation frameworks with comprehensive benchmarks and metrics for systematic comparison of navigation methods - Conduct sim-to-real transfer experiments, analyzing performance gaps and developing techniques to ensure reliable real-world navigation performance - Collaborate with world model, manipulation, and other teams to ensure seamless integration of navigation capabilities into the full robot system - Stay current with the latest advances in robot navigation, spatial reasoning, and related fields, and apply relevant findings to improve system performance - Mentor fellow scientists and engineers while maintaining strong individual technical contributions About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products.
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to focus on Robotics Spatial Intelligence and Semantic Understanding. In this role, you'll research and build advanced semantic and world understanding algorithms that enable robots to observe, understand, and reason about complex and dynamic home environments. You'll work across a broad spectrum of 3D perception, contextual understanding, and world modeling approaches to build robust solutions that support autonomous decision making, task planning, navigation, and manipulation. Key job responsibilities - Develop and implement robust World Understanding and Modeling algorithms for a domestic robot. - Build simulation-based and on-robot evaluation frameworks with comprehensive benchmarks and metrics for systematic evaluation of Our Spatial Intelligence stack. - Conduct sim-to-real transfer experiments, analyzing performance gaps and developing techniques to ensure reliable real-world performance. - Collaborate with navigation, manipulation, and other teams to ensure seamless integration of World Understanding capabilities. - Stay current with the latest advances in World Modeling, Spatial Reasoning, and related fields and apply relevant findings to improve system performance About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
GB, London
Come build the future of entertainment with us. Are you interested in shaping the future of movies and television? Do you want to define the next generation of how and what Amazon customers are watching? Prime Video is a premium streaming service that offers customers a vast collection of TV shows and movies — all with the ease of finding what they love to watch in one place. We offer customers thousands of popular movies and TV shows from Originals and Exclusive content to exciting live sports events. We also offer our members the opportunity to subscribe to add-on channels which they can cancel at anytime and to rent or buy new release movies and TV box sets on the Prime Video Store. Prime Video is a fast-paced, growth business — available in over 240 countries and territories worldwide. The team works in a dynamic environment where innovating on behalf of our customers is at the heart of everything we do. If this sounds exciting to you, please read on. Prime Video Commerce's mission is to present the right offer to the right customer at the right time — across subscriptions, channels, and transactional video, in every market and on every device. Our science team replaces static business rules with ML-driven decisions that personalise the entire commerce journey, from discovery through checkout and beyond. We operate at scale across hundreds of millions of customers, and we are expanding into new frontiers — combining the latest advances in agentic and generative AI, behavioural simulation, and causal inference to understand the impact of our decisions before they reach customers. We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join the Prime Video Commerce Insights team in London. You will develop and deploy customer-facing models, understand customer behaviour at scale, and explore emerging techniques that help us make better decisions faster. This is a delivery focused role within a high-visibility multidisciplinary group of engineers and scientists, focused on improving the customer experience for Prime Video. Key job responsibilities - Research, design, and implement machine learning approaches (e.g. reinforcement learning and recommendation systems) that personalise across different customer touch points. - Collaborate with engineers to deploy and integrate successful experiment results into large-scale, complex Amazon production systems with low latency. - Design and execute rigorous experiments to demonstrate the technical efficacy and business value of your methods. - Act as a subject-matter expert and help define the science roadmap and research agenda in line with organisational priorities and production constraints. - Provide machine learning thought leadership to technical and business leaders, thinking strategically about business, product, and technical challenges. - Work with technical product managers to work backwards from what matters to customers and deliver ML-backed solutions. - Share results with the team and wider scientific community through documents that are both statistically rigorous and compellingly relevant. A day in the life You will be a research leader and innovator within the Commerce Insights organisation. You will collaborate with talented engineers and senior leaders to solve problems that are uniquely challenging at Amazon's scale: personalising commerce decisions across multiple business lines, balancing competing objectives, and positively impacting hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. The problems here are technically deep — combining large-scale ML, causal reasoning, and behavioural modelling in a domain where every decision carries real revenue and customer-experience consequences. Your research will ship to production and move metrics that matter. About the team You will join a team of engineers and applied scientists with a proven track record of solving highly complex, ambiguous problems — work that has produced patents and publications at top-tier conferences. The team has direct visibility to senior Prime Video leadership and collaborates broadly across Commerce, Content, and Platform teams to shape how customers discover, subscribe to, and engage with video content. This is a team that operates at the intersection of rigorous research and real-world impact, where your ideas move from whiteboard to production for hundreds of millions of customers.
US, WA, Seattle
AWS is seeking a Data Scientist to join our Consumer Experience team. We're looking for someone who is curious about large-scale data challenges and motivated to apply ML/AI and advanced analytics to solve real customer problems. Reporting to the Science Lead, this role supports the analytical capabilities of AWS by applying emerging technologies, contributing to data science best practices, and partnering with stakeholders to deepen understanding of the AWS customer experience. The ideal candidate has experience working in complex data and analytics environments, with hands-on skills in Machine Learning and advanced analytics techniques — preferably within cloud computing. You should be comfortable building models and equally comfortable explaining what they mean to a non-technical audience. Key job responsibilities - Apply statistical analysis, ML, and complex data mining techniques to deliver insights that shape the AWS customer experience. - Build production-ready analytics solutions that support effective business decisions. - Partner with product, engineering, and design teams to develop and launch data products. - Contribute to the adoption of Gen AI and ML-based approaches across the data science practice, including building proof-of-concept AI-driven customer use cases. - Communicate technical findings clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Bring new ideas — share approaches, tools, and methods that raise the bar for the team.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Are you passionate about applying machine learning and advanced statistical techniques to protect one of the world's largest online marketplaces? Do you want to be at the forefront of developing innovative solutions that improve Amazon's customers experience? Do you thrive in a collaborative environment where diverse perspectives drive breakthrough solutions? If yes, we invite you to join the Amazon Customer Fulfillment & Prime analytics team. We're seeking an exceptional scientist who can revolutionize how we delight our customers. As a key member of our team, you'll develop and deploy machine learning systems that analyze millions of customer interactions daily, ensuring state of art experience for customers across 10 countries. Your work will directly impact the shopping experience for hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities • Ability to work independently across the end-to-end ML lifecycle: feature engineering, modeling, and MLOps to productionize models. • Strong foundation in machine learning and statistical modeling. • Experience deploying ML solutions into a production environment. • Apply machine learning and statistical techniques to create scalable abuse-detection solutions that identify fraudulent customer behavior, rings of accounts, identity change, holistic customer risk, and marketplace manipulation schemes. • Innovate with the latest GenAI technology to build highly automated solutions for efficient customer promotions. • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop comprehensive ML/statistical models that scale to millions of customers across 10+ countries. • Willing to travel to Mexico (MX) and Brazil (BR). • Comfortable working CET hours to maintain overlap with Mexico and Brazil business teams. About the team You'll be working closely with business partners, science and engineering teams to create end-to-end scalable machine learning solutions that address real-world problems. You will build scalable, efficient, and automated processes for large-scale data analyses, model development, model validation, and model implementation. You will also be providing clear and compelling reports for your solutions and contributing to the ongoing innovation and knowledge-sharing that are central to the team's success.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Are you passionate about applying machine learning and advanced statistical techniques to protect one of the world's largest online marketplaces? Do you want to be at the forefront of developing innovative solutions that improve Amazon's customers experience? Do you thrive in a collaborative environment where diverse perspectives drive breakthrough solutions? If yes, we invite you to join the Amazon Customer Fulfillment & Prime analytics team. We're seeking an exceptional scientist who can revolutionize how we delight our customers. As a key member of our team, you'll develop and deploy machine learning systems that analyze millions of customer interactions daily, ensuring state of art experience for customers across 10 countries. Your work will directly impact the shopping experience for hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities • Ability to work independently across the end-to-end ML lifecycle: feature engineering, modeling, and MLOps to productionize models. • Strong foundation in machine learning and statistical modeling. • Experience deploying ML solutions into a production environment. • Apply machine learning and statistical techniques to create scalable abuse-detection solutions that identify fraudulent customer behavior, rings of accounts, identity change, holistic customer risk, and marketplace manipulation schemes. • Innovate with the latest GenAI technology to build highly automated solutions for efficient customer promotions. • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop comprehensive ML/statistical models that scale to millions of customers across 10+ countries. • Willing to travel to Mexico (MX) and Brazil (BR). • Comfortable working CET hours to maintain overlap with Mexico and Brazil business teams. About the team You'll be working closely with business partners, science and engineering teams to create end-to-end scalable machine learning solutions that address real-world problems. You will build scalable, efficient, and automated processes for large-scale data analyses, model development, model validation, and model implementation. You will also be providing clear and compelling reports for your solutions and contributing to the ongoing innovation and knowledge-sharing that are central to the team's success.
US, CA, Santa Monica
MULTIPLE POSITIONS AVAILABLE Employer: AMAZON.COM SERVICES LLC Offered Position: Applied Scientist III Job Location: Santa Monica, California Job Number: AMZ10564053 Position Responsibilities: Participate in the design, development, evaluation, deployment and updating of data-driven models and analytical solutions for machine learning (ML) and/or natural language (NL) applications. Develop and/or apply statistical modeling techniques (e.g. Bayesian models and deep neural networks), optimization methods, and other ML techniques to different applications in business and engineering. Routinely build and deploy ML models on available data, and run and analyze experiments in a production environment. Identify new opportunities for research in order to meet business goals. Research and implement novel ML and statistical approaches to add value to the business. Mentor junior engineers and scientists. 40 hours / week, 8:00am-5:00pm, Salary Range: $167,100/year to $226,100/year. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, visit: https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. Amazon.com is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation.#0000
US, NY, New York
Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses, responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day! Demand Tech Experience (DTx), as an org, owns the Amazon Ads Console — the advertiser-facing workspace for creating and managing campaigns, reviewing performance, and acting on recommendations used by millions of advertisers. Our team, DTx Science, is the centralized science team within DTx, dedicated to improving and protecting the advertiser experience across ad consoles through applied science methodologies. The team drives impact through four core functions: Ad Console Personalization, Recommendation Development, Ad Console Experimentation, and DVA Agent Evaluation and Impact Measurement. We leverage a breadth of state-of-the-art techniques such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, LLMs, long term causal modeling as well as sophisticated A/B testing to develop personalized experiences with directly quantifiable business and advertiser success outcomes. We are looking for an accomplished machine learning expert to lead the Applied Science strategy for our recommendation creation and personalization program. In this role, you will work closely with business leaders, stakeholders and cross-functional teams to drive program success through ML-driven solutions. You will shape the applied science roadmap, promote a culture of data-driven decision-making, and deliver significant business impact for millions of advertisers worldwide and the company using advanced data techniques and applied science methodologies. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist on this team, you will - Serve as the technical leader in Machine Learning, driving collaboration between scientists and engineers, guiding efforts within the team and collaborating with other teams. - Conduct hands-on analysis and modeling of large-scale data to generate insights that boost ads revenue while maintaining a positive advertiser and shopper experience. - Lead end-to-end Machine Learning projects that involve high levels of ambiguity, scale, and complexity. - Build, experiment, optimize, and deploy machine learning models, collaborating with software engineers to bring your models into production. - Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis to validate your models. - Develop scalable and automated processes for large-scale data analysis, model development, validation, and serving. - Explore and research innovative machine learning approaches to push the boundaries of what’s possible. About the team The DTx Science team is the centralized science team within Demand Tech Experience (DTx), dedicated to improving and protecting the advertiser experience across ad consoles through applied science methodologies. The team drives impact through four core functions: Ad Console Personalization, Recommendation Development, Ad Console Experimentation, and DVA Agent Evaluation and Impact Measurement. Improve advertiser experience: Ad Console Personalization and Recommendation Development aim to improve the advertiser ad console experience by providing customized and personalized console experiences for each user and increasing their ad performance with relevant, science-backed onboarding and oppertunty recommendations. Protect advertiser experience: Ad Console Experimentation and DVA Agent Evaluation and Impact Measurement protect the advertiser experience by supporting the organization in making data-driven decisions to launch UX and agentic features that benefit advertisers.