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
6 min read
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
Sr Applied Scientist, Sponsored Products and Brands Ads Response Prediction
US, CA, Palo Alto
The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through industry leading 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. Amazon Ads Response Prediction team is your choice, if you want to join a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. We are seeking an experienced and motivated Machine Learning Applied Scientist who loves to innovate at the intersection of customer experience, deep learning, and high-scale machine-learning systems. Amazon Advertising operates at the intersection of eCommerce and advertising, and is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. We are defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products to improve both shopper and advertiser experience. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we grow at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities. We are looking for a talented Machine Learning Applied Scientist for our Amazon Ads Response Prediction team to grow the business. We are providing advanced real-time machine learning services to connect shoppers with right ads on all platforms and surfaces worldwide. Through the deep understanding of both shoppers and products, we help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their customers, and helps Amazon continuously innovate on behalf of all customers. Key job responsibilities As a Machine Learning Applied Scientist, you will: * Conduct deep data analysis to derive insights to the business, and identify gaps and new opportunities * Develop scalable and effective machine-learning models and optimization strategies to solve business problems * Run regular A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis * Work closely with software engineers to deliver end-to-end solutions into production * Improve the scalability, efficiency and automation of large-scale data analytics, model training, deployment and serving * Conduct research on new machine-learning modeling to optimize all aspects of Sponsored Products and Brands business About the team We are pioneers in applying advanced machine learning and generative AI algorithms in Sponsored Products and Brands business. We empower every customer with a customized discovery experiences from back-end optimization (such as customized response prediction models) to front-end CX innovation (such as widgets), to help shoppers feel understood and shop efficiently on and off Amazon.
Applied Science Manager, Sponsored Products and Brands
US, WA, Seattle
The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through industry leading 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. Key job responsibilities We are looking for an Applied Science Manager to lead the Insights & Prompt Generation vertical within the Conversational Discovery Experiences (CAX) team in Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB). This team owns prompt generation, quality, personalization, and coverage for Sponsored Prompts, a new conversational ad format powered by large language models (LLMs) that helps shoppers discover products across Amazon.com. As an Applied Science Manager, you will lead a team of applied scientists and engineers to build and scale the prompt generation pipeline, develop new prompt themes and quality frameworks, and drive coverage expansion across all surfaces. You will own the science roadmap for prompt generation and personalization. You will define the metrics that measure prompt effectiveness and drive experimentation to improve CTR, helpfulness, and advertiser outcomes. This role requires strong technical depth in NLP, LLMs, and information retrieval, combined with the ability to manage and grow a science team, set research direction, and influence product strategy. You will work across organizational boundaries with engineering, product, and business teams to translate science investments into measurable business impact.
Control System Test Engineer, Amazon Center for Quantum Computing
US, CA, Pasadena
The Amazon Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena, CA, is looking to hire an Applied Scientist specializing in Testing of Control Systems hardware. Working alongside other scientists and engineers, you will validate hardware and software systems performing the control and readout functions for Amazon quantum processors. Working effectively within a cross-functional team environment is critical. The ideal candidate will have an established background in test engineering applicable to large mixed-signal systems. Diverse Experiences Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship and Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Key job responsibilities Our scientists and engineers collaborate across diverse teams and projects to offer state of the art, cost effective solutions for the control of Amazon quantum processor systems. You’ll bring a passion for innovation and collaboration to: Develop automated test scripts for mid-volume electronics manufacturing, utilizing high-speed test equipment such as Gsps oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and network analyzers. Design and implement test plans for high-speed, mixed-signal PCAs and instrument assemblies, covering analog/digital interfaces, ADCs/DACs, FPGAs, and power distribution systems. Develop test requirements and coverage matrices with hardware and software stakeholders, including optimization of test coverage vs test time. Analyze test data to identify failure root causes and trends, implement corrective actions, and drive design-for-testability (DFT) enhancements. Drive continuous test improvement to improve test accuracy, improve final product reliability, and adapt to new measurement requirements.
Economist I, Stores Economics and Science
US, WA, Seattle
This role will contribute to developing the Economics and Science products and services in the Fee domain, with specialization in supply chain systems and fees. Through the lens of economics, you will develop causal links for how Amazon, Sellers and Customers interact. You will be a key and senior scientist, advising Amazon leaders how to price our services. You will work on developing frameworks and scalable, repeatable models supporting optimal pricing and policy in the two-sided marketplace that is central to Amazon's business. The pricing for Amazon services is complex. You will partner with science and technology teams across Amazon including Advertising, Supply Chain, Operations, Prime, Consumer Pricing, and Finance. We are looking for an experienced Economist to improve our understanding of seller Economics, enhance our ability to estimate the causal impact of fees, and work with partner teams to design pricing policy changes. In this role, you will provide guidance to scientists to develop econometric models to influence our fee pricing worldwide. You will lead the development of causal models to help isolate the impact of fee and policy changes from other business actions, using experiments when possible, or observational data when not. Key job responsibilities The ideal candidate will have extensive Economics knowledge, demonstrated strength in practical and policy relevant structural econometrics, strong collaboration skills, proven ability to lead highly ambiguous and large projects, and a drive to deliver results. They will work closely with Economists, Data / Applied Scientists, Strategy Analysts, Data Engineers, and Product leads to integrate economic insights into policy and systems production. Familiarity with systems and services that constitute seller supply chains is a plus but not required. About the team The Stores Economics and Sciences team is a central science team that supports Amazon's Retail and Supply Chain leadership. We tackle some of Amazon's most challenging economics and machine learning problems, where our mandate is to impact the business on massive scale.
Senior Data Scientist, Amazon Stores Finance Science, Amazon Stores Finance Science
US, WA, Seattle
WW Amazon Stores Finance Science (ASFS) works to leverage science and economics to drive improved financial results, foster data backed decisions, and embed science within Finance. ASFS is focused on developing products that empower controllership, improve business decisions and financial planning by understanding financial drivers, and innovate science capabilities for efficiency and scale. We are looking for a data scientist to lead high visibility initiatives for forecasting Amazon Stores' financials. You will develop new science-based forecasting methodologies and build scalable models to improve financial decision making and planning for senior leadership up to VP and SVP level. You will build new ML and statistical models from the ground up that aim to transform financial planning for Amazon Stores. We prize creative problem solvers with the ability to draw on an expansive methodological toolkit to transform financial decision-making with science. The ideal candidate combines data-science acumen with strong business judgment. You have versatile modeling skills and are comfortable owning and extracting insights from data. You are excited to learn from and alongside seasoned scientists, engineers, and business leaders. You are an excellent communicator and effectively translate technical findings into business action. Key job responsibilities Demonstrating thorough technical knowledge, effective exploratory data analysis, and model building using industry standard ML models Working with technical and non-technical stakeholders across every step of science project life cycle Collaborating with finance, product, data engineering, and software engineering teams to create production implementations for large-scale ML models Innovating by adapting new modeling techniques and procedures Presenting research results to our internal research community
Applied Scientist, AWS Applied AI Solutions Core Services
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions Core Services organization, we're advancing the frontier of geospatial intelligence and AI-powered spatial reasoning. Our vision is to be the trusted foundation for transforming every business with Amazon AI teammates. Our mission is to deliver turnkey, enterprise-grade foundational AI capabilities that create delightful AI powered solutions. We're building sophisticated AI systems that enable intelligent agents to understand and operate effectively in the physical world through advanced geospatial optimization. Key job responsibilities - Develop geospatial optimization models that generalize across diverse customer use cases in logistics, transportation, and spatial planning - Scope optimization projects with multiple customers in mind, abstracting away complex science problems to create scalable solutions - Discover, evaluate, and adapt existing optimization models and geospatial tools for customer deployment - Develop semantic enrichment methods to integrate heterogeneous data sources including open geospatial data, multimodal sensor data, images, videos, satellite imagery, and documents - Research novel approaches combining AI agents with geospatial optimization to solve complex spatial problems - Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate science components into production systems - Conduct rigorous experimentation and establish evaluation frameworks to measure solution performance A day in the life A day in the life As an Applied Scientist, you'll develop optimization algorithms and AI-powered geospatial solutions while maintaining a clear path to customer impact. You'll investigate novel approaches to spatial optimization, develop methods for semantic data enrichment, and validate ideas through rigorous experimentation with real customer data. You'll collaborate with other scientists and engineers to transform research insights into scalable solutions, work directly with enterprise customers to understand requirements, and help shape the future direction. Leveraging and advancing generative AI technology will be a big part of your charter. About the team Our Applied AI Solutions Core Services Science team is tackling fundamental challenges in geospatial optimization and AI-powered spatial reasoning. We're investigating novel approaches to how AI systems can solve complex logistics and transportation problems, reason about spatial relationships, and integrate diverse data sources to create enterprise-grade geospatial intelligence. Working at the intersection of optimization, large language models, and geospatial data science, we're developing practical techniques that advance the state-of-the-art in geospatial AI.
Intern - Economics, Return And Recommerce Economics Intelligence
US, WA, Bellevue
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to apply their causal inference and/or structural econometrics skillsets to solve real world problems. The intern will work in the area of Economics Intelligence in Amazon Returns and Recommerce Technology and Innovation and develop new, data-driven solutions to support the most critical components of this rapidly scaling team. Our PhD Economist Internship Program offers hands-on experience in applied economics, supported by mentorship, structured feedback, and professional development. Interns work on real business and research problems, building skills that prepare them for full-time economist roles at Amazon and beyond. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis collaborating with economists, scientists, and product managers. These skills will translate well into writing applied chapters in your dissertation and provide you with work experience that may help you with placement. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. About the team The WWRR Economics Intelligence (RREI) team brings together Economists, Data Scientists, and Business Intelligence Engineers experts to delivers economic solutions focused on forecasting, causality, attribution, customer behavior for returns, recommerce, and sustainability domains.
Senior Applied Scientist, AWS Central Economics and Science
US, CA, San Francisco
AWS is one of Amazon’s largest and fastest growing businesses, serving millions of customers in more than 190 countries. We use cloud computing to reshape the way global enterprises use information technology. We are looking for entrepreneurial, analytical, creative, flexible leaders to help us redefine the information technology industry. If you want to join a fast-paced, innovative team that is making history, this is the place for you. AWS Central Economics & Science (ACES) drives best practices for objectively applying economics and science in decision making across AWS. The team collaborates with AWS science and business teams to identify, frame, and analyze complex and ambiguous problems of the highest priority. Through data-driven insights and modeling, ACES supports strategic decision-making across the AWS global organization, including sales operations and business performance optimization. The ACES Sales Channels team is hiring an Applied Scientist (Senior or below) to advance our mission of providing rigorous, causal-inference-driven recommendations for AWS sales optimization. This role will focus on building ML systems with a causal modeling foundation, designing seller incentive mechanisms, and developing intervention strategies across the entire sales motion. Key job responsibilities • Causal ML System Development: Build and deploy machine learning models that emphasize causal inference, ensuring recommendations are grounded in valid interventions • Incentive Design: Define and model incentives that drive desirable behaviors across AWS sales channels, partner programs, and reseller ecosystems • Stakeholder Collaboration: Work with business stakeholders to understand requirements, validate approaches, and ensure practical applicability of scientific solutions • Scientific Rigor: Promote findings at internal conferences and contribute to the team's reputation for methodological excellence A day in the life The ACES Sales Channels team works on understanding and optimizing AWS's sales channels, both direct (generalist and specialist sellers) and indirect (partners and Marketplace). Our work falls into three core areas: developing rigorous causal measurement and modeling frameworks using cutting-edge economics and statistical methods; designing programs and incentives to improve customer and business outcomes; and building ML-based recommendation systems for sellers, partners, and other AWS stakeholders. About the team Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Hybrid Work We value innovation and recognize this sometimes requires uninterrupted time to focus on a build. We also value in-person collaboration and time spent face-to-face. Our team affords employees options to work in the office every day or in a flexible, hybrid work model near one of our U.S. Amazon offices.
Principal Applied Scientist , Personalized Autonomy and Proactive Intelligence (PAPI)
US, WA, Bellevue
The Principal Applied Scientist will own the science mission for building next-generation proactive and autonomous agentic experiences across Alexa AI's Personalization, Autonomy and Proactive Intelligence organization. You will technically lead a team of applied scientists to harness state-of-the-art technologies in machine learning, natural language processing, LLM training and application, and agentic AI systems to advance the scientific frontiers of autonomous intelligence and proactive user assistance. The right candidate will be an inventor at heart, provide deep scientific leadership, establish compelling technical direction and vision, and drive ambitious research initiatives that push the boundaries of what's possible with AI agents. You will need to be adept at identifying promising research directions in agentic AI, developing novel autonomous agent solutions, and translating advanced AI research into production-ready agentic systems. You will need to be adept at influencing and collaborating with partner teams, launching AI-powered autonomous agents into production, and building team mechanisms that will foster innovation and execution in the rapidly evolving field of agentic AI. This role represents a unique opportunity to tackle fundamental challenges in how Alexa proactively understands user needs, autonomously takes actions on behalf of users, and delivers intelligent assistance through state-of-the-art agentic AI technologies. As a science leader in Alexa AI, you will shape the technical strategy for making Alexa a truly proactive and autonomous agent that anticipates user needs, takes intelligent actions, and provides seamless assistance without explicit prompting. Your team will be at the forefront of solving complex problems in agentic reasoning, multi-step task planning, autonomous decision-making, proactive intelligence, and context-aware action execution that will fundamentally transform how users interact with Alexa as an intelligent agent. The successful candidate will bring deep technical expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, and agentic AI systems, along with the leadership ability to guide talented scientists in pursuing ambitious research that advances the state of the art in autonomous agents, proactive intelligence, and AI-driven personalization. Experience with multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, goal-oriented dialogue systems, and production-scale agentic architectures is highly valued. You will lead the development of breakthrough capabilities that enable Alexa to: 1) proactively anticipate user needs through advanced predictive modeling and contextual understanding; 2) autonomously execute complex multi-step tasks with minimal user intervention; 3) reason and plan intelligently across diverse user goals and environmental contexts; 4) learn and adapt continuously from user interactions to improve agentic behaviors; 5) coordinate actions seamlessly across multiple domains and services as a unified intelligent agent. This is a unique opportunity to define the future of conversational AI agents and build technology that will impact hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities Technical Leadership - Lead complex research and development projects - Partner closely with the T&C Product and Engineering leaders on the technical strategy and roadmap - Evaluate emerging technologies and methodologies - Make high-level architectural decisions Technical leadership and mentoring: - Mentor and develop technical talent - Set team project goals and metrics - Help with resource allocation and project prioritization from technical side Research & Development - Drive innovation in applied science areas - Translate research into practical business solutions - Author technical papers and patents - Collaborate with academic and industry partners About the team PAPI (Personalization Autonomy and Proactive Intelligence) aims to accelerate personalized and intuitive experiences across Amazon's customer touchpoints through automated, scalable, self-serve AI systems. We leverage customer, device, and ambient signals to deliver conversational, visual, and proactive experiences that delight customers, increase engagement, reduce defects, and enable natural interactions across Amazon touch points including Alexa, FireTV, and Mobile etc. Our systems offer personalized suggestions, comprehend customer inputs, learn from interactions, and propose appropriate actions to serve millions of customers globally.
Senior Applied Scientist, New Initiatives
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon has co-founded and signed The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net zero carbon by 2040. As a team, we leverage GenAI, sensors, smart home devices, cloud services, material science, and Alexa to build products that have a meaningful impact for customers and the climate. In alignment with this bold corporate goal, the Amazon Devices & Services organization is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist to help build revolutionary products with potential for major societal impact. Great candidates for this position will have expertise in the areas of agentic AI applications, deep learning, time series analysis, LLMs, and multimodal systems. This includes experience designing autonomous AI agents that can reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks, building tool-augmented LLM systems with access to external APIs and data sources, implementing multi-agent orchestration, and developing RAG architectures that combine LLMs with domain-specific knowledge bases. You will strive for simplicity and creativity, demonstrating high judgment backed by statistical proof. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist on the Energy Science team, you'll design and deploy agentic AI systems that autonomously analyze data, plan solutions, and execute recommendations. You'll build multi-agent architectures where specialized AI agents coordinate to solve complex optimization problems, and develop tool-augmented LLM applications that integrate with external data sources and APIs to deliver context-aware insights. Your work involves creating multimodal AI systems that synthesize diverse data streams, while implementing RAG pipelines that ground large language models in domain-specific knowledge bases. You'll apply advanced machine learning and deep learning techniques to time series analysis, forecasting, and pattern recognition. Beyond technical innovation, you'll drive end-to-end product development from research through production deployment, collaborating with cross-functional teams to translate AI capabilities into customer experiences. You'll establish rigorous experimentation frameworks to validate model performance and measure business impact, building AI-driven products with potential for major societal impact.
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 newsletter

Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

Social