Social
Machine learning

2019 Amazon Research Awards recipients announcement

Earlier this year, Amazon notified grant applicants who were recipients of the 2019 Amazon Research Awards.

By Amazon Research Awards team
June 17, 2020
Share

Earlier this spring, Amazon notified grant applicants that they were recipients of the 2019 Amazon Research Awards, a grant program that provides up to $80,000 in cash and $20,000 in AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating topics across 11 focus areas. Today, we’re publicly announcing the 51 award recipients who represent 39 universities in 10 countries. The 2019 awards averaged $72,000 in cash awards and $15,000 in AWS Promotional Credits in support of each research project. Each grant is intended to support the work of one to two graduate students or postdoctoral students for one year, under the supervision of a faculty member.

2019 Amazon Research Award recipients ARA.png

The 11 focus areas of this year’s research awards are computer vision; fairness in artificial intelligence; knowledge management and data quality; machine learning algorithms and theory; natural-language processing; online advertising; operations research and optimization; personalization; robotics; search and information retrieval; and security, privacy, and abuse prevention.

Recipients can use more than 150 Amazon public data sets. Amazon encourages the publication of research results, researcher presentations at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.

Each project is assigned an Amazon research contact who is available for consultation and supports the project’s progress.

“The Amazon Research Awards help fund outstanding, innovative research proposals across machine learning, robotics, operations research, and more, while helping strengthen connections between Amazon research teams, academic researchers, and their affiliated institutions,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon Machine Learning. “The breadth and depth of the research this year’s recipients will pursue is impressive and will lead to critical innovations for our customers and meaningful scientific advancements in each of the 11 focus areas.”

Grant proposals for 2020, which will be the program’s sixth year, will be accepted starting this fall. Please check back for more information this summer or send an email to be added to the 2020 Call For Proposal distribution list. Below is the list of 2019 award recipients, presented in alphabetical order.

Recipient

University

Research title

Pulkit Agrawal

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Continual Reinforcement Learning

James Allan

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Explanation of Product Facets for Conversational Search

Chris Amato

Northeastern University

Scalable and Robust Multi-Robot Coordination through High-Level Macro-Actions

Ashis G. Banerjee

University of Washington

Sparse, Deep and Persistent Visual Features Based 3D Object Detection and 6D Pose Estimation in Indoor Environments

Sven Behnke

University of Bonn

Learning Structured Scene Modeling and Physics-Based Prediction for Manipulation

François-Xavier Briol

University College London & the Alan Turing Institute

Transfer Learning for Numerical Integration in Expensive Machine Learning Systems

Flavio du Pin Calmon

Harvard University

Building the Foundations of Fair Machine Learning: From Information Theory to Federated Algorithms

Luca Carlone

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Metric-Semantic SLAM for Long-Term Multi-Robot Deployment

Shayok Chakraborty

Florida State University

Deep Active Learning with Relative Label Feedback

Kai-Wei Chang

University of California Los Angeles

Learning Robust Contextual Language Encoders at Scale

Margarita Chli

ETH Zurich

Semantic-Aware Cloud-Aided Aerial Navigation for Drone Delivery

Jeff Dalton

University of Glasgow

Knowledge-Grounded Conversational Product Information Seeking

N. Lance Downing

Stanford University

DeepStroke: Improving Stroke Diagnosis with Deep Learning on NIH Stroke Scale Assessments

Luciana Ferrer

Computer Science Institute (ICC), UBA-CONICET

Representation Learning for Sound Understanding

Alexander Gammerman

Royal Holloway, University of London

Conformal Martingales for Change-Point Detection

Graeme Gange

Monash University

Robust Prioritised Planning for Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Itai Gurvich

Cornell University

Dynamic Resource Allocation to Heterogeneous Requests: Near Optimal, Computationally Light Policies

Kris Hauser

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Robotic Packing of Novel and Non-Rigid Objects with Visuotactile Modeling

Daqing He

University of Pittsburgh

Transferable, Controllable, Applicable Keyphrase Generation

Jason Hong

Carnegie Mellon University

Designing Alternative Representations of Confusion Matrices to Evaluate Public Perceptions of Fairness in Machine Learning

Wendy Ju

Cornell Tech

Enabling Machines to Recognize and Repair Errors in Interaction

Sertac Karaman

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Learning New Environments with a Tour: Depth and Pose Estimation through Informative Control Actions

Ioannis Karamouzas

Clemson University

Learning Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation from Human Crowd Data

Aryeh Kontorovich

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Advanced Proximity-Based Learning Toolkit for SageMaker

Oliver Kroemer

Carnegie Mellon University

Robust Manipulation Strategies for Delta-Robot Arrays

Beibei Li

Carnegie Mellon University

AI Agent for Targeted Promotion

Changliu Liu

Carnegie Mellon University

Hierarchical Motion Planning for Efficient and Provably Safe Human-Robot Interactions

Anirudha Majumdar

Princeton University

Force-Closure Nets: Manipulating Objects with Provable Guarantees on Generalization

Karthik Narasimhan

Princeton University

Towards Deeper, Broader and Human-Like Conversational Agents

Joseph P. Near

University of Vermont

Provable Fairness for Deep Learning via Automatic Differentiation

Priyadarshini Panda

Yale University

Adversarial Robustness with Efficiency-Driven Optimization of Deep Neural Networks

Guilherme Augsto Silva Pereira

West Virginia University

Parallel and Cloud Computing for Long-Term Robotics

Carlo Pinciroli

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

An Immersive Interface for Multi-User Supervision of Multi-Robot Operations

Ingmar Posner

University of Oxford

Compositional Deep Generative Models for Real-World Robot Perception and Manipulation

Amanda Prorok

University of Cambridge

Learning Explicit Communication for Multi-Robot Path Planning

Sebastian Risi

IT University of Copenhagen

Continually Learning Machines for Industrial Automation

Alessandro Rizzo

Politecnico di Torino

From Shortest to Safest Path Navigation: An AI-Powered Framework for Risk-Aware Autonomous Navigation of UASes

Nicolas Rojas

Imperial College London

Mechanical intelligence for in-hand manipulation

Daniela Rus

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Series Elastic Magnetically Geared Robotic Actuators

Sanjay Sarma

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Multi-modal Sensing for Material ID in Robotic Applications

Alex Schwing

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Seeing the Unseen: Temporal Amodal Instance Level Video Object Segmentation

Roland Siegwart

ETH Zürich

Aerial Manipulation with an Omnidirectional Flying Platform

Niko Suenderhauf

Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

Learning Robotic Navigation and Interaction from Object-based Semantic Maps

Chenhao Tan

University of Colorado at Boulder

Actively Soliciting Human Explanations to Correct Biases in NLP Models

Jian Tang

HEC Montreal: Mila-Quebec AI Institute

Deep Active Learning for Graph Neural Networks

Marynel Vázquez

Yale University

Improving Social Robot Navigation via Group Interaction Awareness

Soroush Vosoughi

Dartmouth College

Protecting Online Anonymity Through Linguistic Style Transfer

Richard M. Voyles

Purdue University

Framework for One-Shot Learning of Contact-Intensive Tasks Through Coaching

May Dongmei Wang

Georgia Institute of Technology

Learning to Unlearn Biases in Recommendation Models

James Wang

The Pennsylvania State University

Advancing Automated Recognition of Emotion in the Wild

Xinyu Xing

The Pennsylvania State University

Fine-grained Malware Classification using Coarse-grained Labels
Research areas
Tags
About the Author
Amazon Research Awards team

Related content

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Senior Applied Scientist, Delivery Foundation Model
US, WA, Bellevue
Join the next science and engineering revolution at Amazon's Delivery Foundation Model team, where you'll work alongside world-class scientists and engineers to pioneer the next frontier of logistics through advanced AI and foundation models. We are seeking an exceptional Senior Applied Scientist to help develop innovative foundation models that enable delivery of billions of packages worldwide. In this role, you'll combine highly technical work with scientific leadership, ensuring the team delivers robust solutions for dynamic real-world environments. Your team will leverage Amazon's vast data and computational resources to tackle ambitious problems across a diverse set of Amazon delivery use cases. Key job responsibilities - Design and implement novel deep learning architectures combining a multitude of modalities, including image, video, and geospatial data. - Solve computational problems to train foundation models on vast amounts of Amazon data and infer at Amazon scale, taking advantage of latest developments in hardware and deep learning libraries. - As a foundation model developer, collaborate with multiple science and engineering teams to help build adaptations that power use cases across Amazon Last Mile deliveries, improving experience and safety of a delivery driver, an Amazon customer, and improving efficiency of Amazon delivery network. - Guide technical direction for specific research initiatives, ensuring robust performance in production environments. - Mentor fellow scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions. A day in the life As a member of the Delivery Foundation Model team, you’ll spend your day on the following: - Develop and implement novel foundation model architectures, working hands-on with data and our extensive training and evaluation infrastructure - Guide and support fellow scientists in solving complex technical challenges, from trajectory planning to efficient multi-task learning - Guide and support fellow engineers in building scalable and reusable infra to support model training, evaluation, and inference - Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems- Drive technical discussions within the team and and key stakeholders - Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas - Mentor team members while maintaining significant hands-on contribution to technical solutions About the team The Delivery Foundation Model team combines ambitious research vision with real-world impact. Our foundation models provide generative reasoning capabilities required to meet the demands of Amazon's global Last Mile delivery network. We leverage Amazon's unparalleled computational infrastructure and extensive datasets to deploy state-of-the-art foundation models to improve the safety, quality, and efficiency of Amazon deliveries. Our work spans the full spectrum of foundation model development, from multimodal training using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated modeling strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We build everything end to end, from data preparation to model training and evaluation to inference, along with all the tooling needed to understand and analyze model performance. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in logistics, working with world-class scientists and engineers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
Applied Scientist II, Regulatory Intelligence Safety & Compliance
US, CA, San Diego
We are seeking an exceptional Applied Scientist to join a team of experts in the field of machine learning, and work together to tackle challenging problems across diverse compliance domains. We leverage and train state-of-the-art multi-modal and large-language-models (LLMs) to detect illegal and unsafe products across the Amazon catalog. We work on machine learning problems for multi-modal classification, intent detection, information retrieval, anomaly and fraud detection, and generative AI. This is an exciting and challenging position to deliver scientific innovations into production systems at Amazon-scale to make immediate, meaningful customer impacts while also pursuing ambitious, long-term research. You will work in a highly collaborative environment where you can analyze and process large amounts of image, text and tabular data. You will work on hard science problems that have not been solved before, conduct rapid prototyping to validate your hypothesis, and deploy your algorithmic ideas at scale. There will be something new to learn every day as we work in an environment with rapidly evolving regulations and adversarial actors looking to outwit your best ideas. Key job responsibilities • Design and evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms and approaches in multi-modal classification, large language models (LLMs), intent detection, information retrieval, anomaly and fraud detection, and generative AI • Translate product and CX requirements into measurable science problems and metrics. • Collaborate with product and tech partners and customers to validate hypothesis, drive adoption, and increase business impact • Key author in writing high quality scientific papers in internal and external peer-reviewed conferences. A day in the life - Understanding customer problems, project timelines, and team/project mechanisms - Proposing science formulations and brainstorming ideas with team to solve business problems - Writing code, and running experiments with re-usable science libraries - Reviewing labels and audit results with investigators and operations associates - Sharing science results with science, product and tech partners and customers - Writing science papers for submission to peer-review venues, and reviewing science papers from other scientists in the team. - Contributing to team retrospectives for continuous improvements - Driving science research collaborations and attending study groups with scientists across Amazon About the team We are a team of applied scientists building AI/ML solutions to make Amazon Earth’s most trusted shopping destination for safe and compliant products.
Engineering Manager, Internal Tools, AGI Autonomy
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon has launched a new research lab in San Francisco to develop foundational capabilities for useful AI agents. We’re enabling practical AI to make our customers more productive, empowered, and fulfilled. In particular, our work combines large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) to solve reasoning, planning, and world modeling in both virtual and physical environments. Our research builds on that of Amazon’s broader AGI organization, which recently introduced Amazon Nova, a new generation of state-of-the-art foundation models (FMs). Key job responsibilities You will contribute directly to AI agent development in an engineering management role: leading a software development team focused on our internal platform for acquiring agentic experience at large scale. You will help set direction, align the team’s goals with the broader lab, mentor team members, recruit great people, and stay technically involved. You will be hired as a Member of Technical Staff. About the team Our lab is a small, talent-dense team with the resources and scale of Amazon. We’re entering an exciting new era where agents can redefine what AI makes possible. We’d love for you to join our lab and build it from the ground up!
Sr Mgr, Applied Science, AWS Supply Chain
US, WA, Seattle
The AWS Supply Chain organization is looking for a Sr. Manager of Applied Science to lead science and data teams working on innovative AI-powered supply chain solutions. As part of the AWS Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon’s unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers’ businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon’s real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. Are you excited about developing state-of-the-art GenAI/Agentic AI based solutions for enterprise applications? As a Sr. Manager of Applied Scientist at AWS Supply Chain, you will bring AI advancements to customer facing enterprise applications. In this role, you will drive the technical vision and strategy for your team while fostering a culture of innovation and scientific excellence. You will be leading a fast-paced, cross-disciplinary team of researchers who are leaders in the field. You will take on challenging problems, distill real requirements, and then deliver solutions that either leverage existing academic and industrial research, or utilize your own out-of-the-box pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you may even need to deliver these to production in customer facing products. Key job responsibilities Building and mentoring teams of Applied Scientists, ML Engineers, and Data Scientists. Setting technical direction and research strategy aligned with business goals. Driving innovation in Supply Chains systems using AI/ML models and AI Agents. Collaborating with cross-functional teams to translate research into production. Managing project portfolios and resource allocation.
Applied Scientist, Creators
US, NY, New York
Are you a passionate Applied Scientist (AS) ready to shape the future of digital content creation? At Amazon, we're building Earth's most desired destination for creators to monetize their unique skills, inspire the next generation of customers, and help brands expand their reach. We build innovative products and experiences that drive growth for creators across Amazon's ecosystem. Our team owns the entire Creator product suite, ensuring a cohesive experience, optimizing compensation structures, and launching features that help creators achieve both monetary and non-monetary goals. Key job responsibilities As an AS on our team, you will: - Handle challenging problems that directly impact millions of creators and customers - Independently collect and analyze data - Develop and deliver scalable predictive models, using any necessary programming, machine learning, and statistical analysis software - Collaborate with other scientists, engineers, product managers, and business teams to creatively solve problems, measure and estimate risks, and constructively critique peer research - Consult with engineering teams to design data and modeling pipelines which successfully interface with new and existing software - Participate in design and implementation across teams to contribute to initiatives and develop optimal solutions that benefit the creators organization The successful candidate is a self-starter, comfortable with a dynamic, fast-paced environment, and able to think big while paying careful attention to detail. You have deep knowledge of an area/multiple areas of science, with a track record of applying this knowledge to deliver science solutions in a business setting and a demonstrated ability to operate at scale. You excel in a culture of invention and collaboration.
Applied Scientist II (Machine Learning), ITA - Automated Performance Evaluation
GB, MLN, Edinburgh
Do you want a role with deep meaning and the ability to make a major impact? As part of Intelligent Talent Acquisition (ITA), you'll have the opportunity to reinvent the hiring process and deliver unprecedented scale, sophistication, and accuracy for Amazon Talent Acquisition operations. ITA is an industry-leading people science and technology organization made up of scientists, engineers, analysts, product professionals and more, all with the shared goal of connecting the right people to the right jobs in a way that is fair and precise. Last year we delivered over 6 million online candidate assessments, and helped Amazon deliver billions of packages around the world by making it possible to hire hundreds of thousands of workers in the right quantity, at the right location and at exactly the right time. You’ll work on state-of-the-art research, advanced software tools, new AI systems, and machine learning algorithms, leveraging Amazon's in-house tech stack to bring innovative solutions to life. Join ITA in using technologies to transform the hiring landscape and make a meaningful difference in people's lives. Together, we can solve the world's toughest hiring problems. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, you will own the design and development of end-to-end systems. You’ll have the opportunity to write technical white papers, create technical roadmaps and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will have the opportunity to design new algorithms, models, or other technical solutions whilst experiencing Amazon’s customer focused culture. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. About the team The Automated Performance Evaluation (APE) team is a hybrid team of Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers who develop, deploy and own end-to-end machine learning services for use in the HR and Recruiting functions at Amazon.
Applied Scientist, Prime Video - Generative AI
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video subscriptions such as Apple TV+, HBO Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist at Prime Video, you will have end-to-end ownership of the product, related research and experimentation, applying advanced machine learning techniques in computer vision (CV), Generative AI, multimedia understanding and so on. You’ll work on diverse projects that enhance Prime Video’s content localization, image/video understanding, and content personalization, driving impactful innovations for our global audience. Other responsibilities include: - Research and develop generative models for controllable synthesis across images, video, vector graphics, and multimedia - Innovate in advanced diffusion and flow-based methods (e.g., inverse flow matching, parameter efficient training, guided sampling, test-time adaptation) to improve efficiency, controllability, and scalability. - Advance visual grounding, depth and 3D estimation, segmentation, and matting for integration into pre-visualization, compositing, VFX, and post-production pipelines. - Design multimodal GenAI workflows including visual-language model tooling, structured prompt orchestration, agentic pipelines. A day in the life Prime Video is pioneering the use of Generative AI to empower the next generation of creatives. Our mission is to make world-class media creation accessible, scalable, and efficient. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to advance the state of the art in Generative AI and to deliver these innovations as production-ready systems at Amazon scale. Your work will give creators unprecedented freedom and control while driving new efficiencies across Prime Video’s global content and marketing pipelines. This is a newly formed team within Prime Video Science!
Research Scientist, SSG Science
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Devices is an inventive research and development company that designs and engineer high-profile devices like the Kindle family of products, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, Health Wellness, Amazon Echo & Astro products. This is an exciting opportunity to join Amazon in developing state-of-the-art techniques that bring Gen AI on edge for our consumer products. We are looking for exceptional early career research scientists to join our Applied Science team and help develop the next generation of edge models, and optimize them while doing co-designed with custom ML HW based on a revolutionary architecture. Work hard. Have Fun. Make History. Key job responsibilities Key Job Responsibilities: • Understand and contribute to model compression techniques (quantization, pruning, distillation, etc.) while developing theoretical understanding of Information Theory and Deep Learning fundamentals • Work with senior researchers to optimize Gen AI models for edge platforms using Amazon's Neural Edge Engine • Study and apply first principles of Information Theory, Scientific Computing, and Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics to model optimization problems • Assist in research projects involving custom Gen AI model development, aiming to improve SOTA under mentorship • Co-author research papers for top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, MLSys) and present at internal research meetings • Collaborate with compiler engineers, Applied Scientists, and Hardware Architects while learning about production ML systems • Participate in reading groups and research discussions to build expertise in efficient AI and edge computing
Applied Scientist, Artificial General Intelligence
US, NY, New York
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist to work on pre-training methodologies for Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) models. You will interact closely with our customers and with the academic and research communities. Key job responsibilities Join us to work as an integral part of a team that has experience with GenAI models in this space. We work on these areas: - Scaling laws - Hardware-informed efficient model architecture, low-precision training - Optimization methods, learning objectives, curriculum design - Deep learning theories on efficient hyperparameter search and self-supervised learning - Learning objectives and reinforcement learning methods - Distributed training methods and solutions - AI-assisted research About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in GenAI with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
Applied Scientist, Artificial General Intelligence
US, CA, Sunnyvale
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to support the development of algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of GenAI technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in LLMs. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in GenAI with LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
See more jobs
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter

Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2025 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

Social