Mike Hicks and Rene Vidal split.jpg
Mike Hicks, left, senior principal scientist, won the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). René Vidal, right, an Amazon Scholar who is the Herschel Seder Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, was awarded the Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award.

Amazon scientists Mike Hicks and René Vidal honored

Hicks wins 2022 ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award for career contributions; Vidal wins IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award.

Two Amazon scientists recently won awards recognizing long-standing contributions to their fields of research.

Mike Hicks, senior principal scientist, won the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), recognizing distinguished service contributions to the programming languages community.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) awarded the Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award to René Vidal, an Amazon Scholar who is the Herschel Seder Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science at Johns Hopkins University.

SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award

The SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award recognizes Hicks’s longtime contributions to the organization. From 2015 to 2018, he served as the SIGPLAN chair, expanding SIGPLAN support for the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop and creating open access to the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages.

Thanks to Hicks’s work, the research papers selected for presentation at major SIGPLAN conferences are free and permanently accessible upon publication.

“Winning this award means a lot to me. Those who have won it before have done so much to grow and strengthen the SIGPLAN community, and I’m honored to have had the chance to do my part and now stand among them,” Hicks said. “As computing continues to expand its influence to more areas of daily life, I am very optimistic that SIGPLAN-aligned computer scientists will have an important and positive impact.

“Many people have helped me in my career, both directly and indirectly, and it feels great to pay that help forward,” Hicks said. “I’m inspired to see the energy and creativity of younger researchers and students, and I’m glad to help them grow their talents. I’m also pleased to see them embrace service and community building, take responsibility for SIGPLAN’s health, and keep the community strong and welcoming.”

Before taking a leave of absence in January 2022 to work full time at Amazon, Hicks was a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland for 20 years. There, he co-directed the Lab for Programming Languages and was the director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center.

Hicks’s research focuses on using programming languages and analyses to improve the security, reliability, and availability of software. He also has begun to explore programming languages for quantum computation.

Related content
Meet Amazon Science’s newest research area.

At Amazon, Hicks works for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Identity organization within its Automated Reasoning Group. The automated reasoning tools that Hicks and the group develop help raise the security bar of critical AWS services and help AWS customers achieve the same assurance for their applications.

Best paper award

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine is a scientific journal that publishes advances in signal processing, a branch of electrical engineering that models and analyzes data. The Best Paper Award honors the author of a paper of “exceptional merit and broad interest” that has appeared in the magazine ten or more years ago.

Vidal’s winning paper “Subspace Clustering: Applications in Motion Segmentation and Face Clustering,” published in 2011, explores the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to subspace clustering in theory and practice.

Related content
The Amazon Scholar and Johns Hopkins University professor was honored for “pioneering contributions to subspace clustering”.

“I am humbled by this recognition,” says Vidal, who was also honored with the Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award earlier this year. “My goal was to explain multiple subspace clustering methods in a way that is accessible to the broader community, to provide insights that relate different methods to each other, as well as a standardized way of comparing them.”

Clustering is an area of machine learning that deals with separating data into multiple groups “without necessarily having supervision about what those groups mean,” Vidal explained.

Clustering is useful for high-dimensional datasets, such as in medical imaging, when it’s difficult to assign tags or labels to massive volumes of features. Subspace clustering finds clusters within these datasets by making assumptions about the structure of the different groups.

Related content

US, WA, Seattle
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to work with large and complicated data sets. Knowledge of econometrics, as well as basic familiarity with Python (or R, Matlab, or equivalent) is necessary, and experience with SQL would be a plus. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis at Internet speed 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. Roughly 85% of previous cohorts have converted to full time scientist employment at Amazon. If you are interested, please send your CV to our mailing list at econ-internship@amazon.com.
US, WA, Bellevue
As an applied scientist, you will use your experience to initiate the design, development, execution and implementation of scientific research projects. Working closely with fellow research scientists and product managers, you will use your experience in modeling, statistics, and simulation to design models of new policies, simulate their performance, and evaluate their benefits and impacts to cost, reliability, and speed of our fulfillment network. Our teams are looking for experience in network and combinatorial optimization, algorithms, data structures, statistics, and/or machine learning. This position requires superior analytical thinking, and ability to apply their technical and statistical knowledge to identify opportunities for real world applications. You should be able to mine and analyze large data, and be able to use necessary programming and statistical analysis software/tools to do so. Amazon has positions available for Research Scientists in multiple locations across the US and Canada.
US, WA, Virtual Contact Center-WA
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to work with large and complicated data sets. Some knowledge of econometrics, as well as basic familiarity with Python is necessary, and experience with SQL and UNIX would be a plus. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis at Internet speed 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. Roughly 85% of previous cohorts have converted to full time scientist employment at Amazon. If you are interested, please send your CV to our mailing list at econ-internship@amazon.com. About the team The Selling Partner Fees team owns the end-to-end fees experience for two million active third party sellers. We own the fee strategy, fee seller experience, fee accuracy and integrity, fee science and analytics, and we provide scalable technology to monetize all services available to third-party sellers. Within the Science team, our goal is to understand the impact of changing fees on Seller (supply) and Customers (demand) behavior (e.g. price changes, advertising strategy changes, introducing new selection etc.) as well as using this information to optimize our fee structure and maximizing our long term profitability.
US, WA, Seattle
This is a unique opportunity to build technology and science that millions of people will use every day. Are you excited about working on large scale Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL)? We are embarking on a multi-year journey to improve the shopping experience for customers globally. Amazon Search team creates customer-focused search solutions and technologies that makes shopping delightful and effortless for our customers. Our goal is to understand what customers are looking for in whatever language happens to be their choice at the moment and help them find what they need in Amazon's vast catalog of billions of products. As Amazon expands to new geographies, we are faced with the unique challenge of maintaining the bar on Search Quality due to the diversity in user preferences, multilingual search and data scarcity in new locales. We are looking for an applied researcher to work on improving search on Amazon using NLP, ML, and DL technology. As an Applied Scientist, you will lead our efforts in query understanding, semantic matching (e.g. is a drone the same as quadcopter?), relevance ranking (what is a "funny halloween costume"?), language identification (did the customer just switch to their mother tongue?), machine translation (猫の餌を注文する). This is a highly visible role with a huge impact on Amazon customers and business. As part of this role, you will develop high precision, high recall, and low latency solutions for search. Your solutions should work for all languages that Amazon supports and will be used in all Amazon locales world-wide. You will develop scalable science and engineering solutions that work successfully in production. You will work with leaders to develop a strategic vision and long term plans to improve search globally. We are growing our collaborative group of engineers and applied scientists by expanding into new areas. This is a position on Global Search Quality team in Seattle Washington. We are moving fast to change the way Amazon search works. Together with a multi-disciplinary team you will work on building solutions with NLP/ML/DL at its core. Along the way, you’ll learn a ton, have fun and make a positive impact on millions of people. Come and join us as we invent new ways to delight Amazon customers.
US, WA, Seattle
This is a unique opportunity to build technology and science that millions of people will use every day. Are you excited about working on large scale Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL)? We are embarking on a multi-year journey to improve the shopping experience for customers globally. Amazon Search team creates customer-focused search solutions and technologies that makes shopping delightful and effortless for our customers. Our goal is to understand what customers are looking for in whatever language happens to be their choice at the moment and help them find what they need in Amazon's vast catalog of billions of products. As Amazon expands to new geographies, we are faced with the unique challenge of maintaining the bar on Search Quality due to the diversity in user preferences, multilingual search and data scarcity in new locales. We are looking for an applied researcher to work on improving search on Amazon using NLP, ML, and DL technology. As an Applied Scientist, you will lead our efforts in query understanding, semantic matching (e.g. is a drone the same as quadcopter?), relevance ranking (what is a "funny halloween costume"?), language identification (did the customer just switch to their mother tongue?), machine translation (猫の餌を注文する). This is a highly visible role with a huge impact on Amazon customers and business. As part of this role, you will develop high precision, high recall, and low latency solutions for search. Your solutions should work for all languages that Amazon supports and will be used in all Amazon locales world-wide. You will develop scalable science and engineering solutions that work successfully in production. You will work with leaders to develop a strategic vision and long term plans to improve search globally. We are growing our collaborative group of engineers and applied scientists by expanding into new areas. This is a position on Global Search Quality team in Seattle Washington. We are moving fast to change the way Amazon search works. Together with a multi-disciplinary team you will work on building solutions with NLP/ML/DL at its core. Along the way, you’ll learn a ton, have fun and make a positive impact on millions of people. Come and join us as we invent new ways to delight Amazon customers.
US, WA, Seattle
The retail pricing science and research group is a team of scientists and economists who design and implement the analytics powering pricing for Amazon’s on-line retail business. The team uses world-class analytics to make sure that the prices for all of Amazon’s goods and services are aligned with Amazon’s corporate goals. We are seeking an experienced high-energy Economist to help envision, design and build the next generation of retail pricing capabilities. You will work at the intersection of economic theory, statistical inference, and machine learning to design new methods and pricing strategies to deliver game changing value to our customers. Roughly 85% of previous intern cohorts have converted to full time scientist employment at Amazon. If you are interested, please send your CV to our mailing list at econ-internship@amazon.com. Key job responsibilities Amazon’s Pricing Science and Research team is seeking an Economist to help envision, design and build the next generation of pricing capabilities behind Amazon’s on-line retail business. As an economist on our team, you will work at the intersection of economic theory, statistical inference, and machine learning to design new methods and pricing strategies with the potential to deliver game changing value to our customers. This is an opportunity for a high-energy individual to work with our unprecedented retail data to bring cutting edge research into real world applications, and communicate the insights we produce to our leadership. This position is perfect for someone who has a deep and broad analytic background and is passionate about using mathematical modeling and statistical analysis to make a real difference. You should be familiar with modern tools for data science and business analysis. We are particularly interested in candidates with research background in applied microeconomics, econometrics, statistical inference and/or finance. A day in the life Discussions with business partners, as well as product managers and tech leaders to understand the business problem. Brainstorming with other scientists and economists to design the right model for the problem in hand. Present the results and new ideas for existing or forward looking problems to leadership. Deep dive into the data. Modeling and creating working prototypes. Analyze the results and review with partners. Partnering with other scientists for research problems. About the team The retail pricing science and research group is a team of scientists and economists who design and implement the analytics powering pricing for Amazon’s on-line retail business. The team uses world-class analytics to make sure that the prices for all of Amazon’s goods and services are aligned with Amazon’s corporate goals.
US, CA, San Francisco
The retail pricing science and research group is a team of scientists and economists who design and implement the analytics powering pricing for Amazon's on-line retail business. The team uses world-class analytics to make sure that the prices for all of Amazon's goods and services are aligned with Amazon's corporate goals. We are seeking an experienced high-energy Economist to help envision, design and build the next generation of retail pricing capabilities. You will work at the intersection of statistical inference, experimentation design, economic theory and machine learning to design new methods and pricing strategies for assessing pricing innovations. Roughly 85% of previous intern cohorts have converted to full time scientist employment at Amazon. If you are interested, please send your CV to our mailing list at econ-internship@amazon.com. Key job responsibilities Amazon's Pricing Science and Research team is seeking an Economist to help envision, design and build the next generation of pricing capabilities behind Amazon's on-line retail business. As an economist on our team, you will will have the opportunity to work with our unprecedented retail data to bring cutting edge research into real world applications, and communicate the insights we produce to our leadership. This position is perfect for someone who has a deep and broad analytic background and is passionate about using mathematical modeling and statistical analysis to make a real difference. You should be familiar with modern tools for data science and business analysis. We are particularly interested in candidates with research background in experimentation design, applied microeconomics, econometrics, statistical inference and/or finance. A day in the life Discussions with business partners, as well as product managers and tech leaders to understand the business problem. Brainstorming with other scientists and economists to design the right model for the problem in hand. Present the results and new ideas for existing or forward looking problems to leadership. Deep dive into the data. Modeling and creating working prototypes. Analyze the results and review with partners. Partnering with other scientists for research problems. About the team The retail pricing science and research group is a team of scientists and economists who design and implement the analytics powering pricing for Amazon's on-line retail business. The team uses world-class analytics to make sure that the prices for all of Amazon's goods and services are aligned with Amazon's corporate goals.
US, WA, Bellevue
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to work with large and complicated data sets. Some knowledge of econometrics, as well as basic familiarity with Python is necessary, and experience with SQL and UNIX would be a plus. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis at Internet speed 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. Roughly 85% of interns from previous cohorts have converted to full time economics employment at Amazon. If you are interested, please send your CV to our mailing list at econ-internship@amazon.com.
US
The Amazon Supply Chain Optimization Technology (SCOT) organization is looking for an Intern in Economics to work on exciting and challenging problems related to Amazon's worldwide inventory planning. SCOT provides unique opportunities to both create and see the direct impact of your work on billions of dollars’ worth of inventory, in one of the world’s most advanced supply chains, and at massive scale. We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to work with large and complicated data sets. We are looking for a PhD candidate with exposure to Program Evaluation/Causal Inference. Knowledge of econometrics and Stata/R/or Python is necessary, and experience with SQL, Hadoop, and Spark would be a plus. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis at Internet speed 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. Roughly 85% of previous cohorts have converted to full time scientist employment at Amazon. If you are interested, please send your CV to our mailing list at econ-internship@amazon.com.
US, WA, Seattle
The Selling Partner Fees team owns the end-to-end fees experience for two million active third party sellers. We own the fee strategy, fee seller experience, fee accuracy and integrity, fee science and analytics, and we provide scalable technology to monetize all services available to third-party sellers. We are looking for an Intern Economist with excellent coding skills to design and develop rigorous models to assess the causal impact of fees on third party sellers’ behavior and business performance. As a Science Intern, you will have access to large datasets with billions of transactions and will translate ambiguous fee related business problems into rigorous scientific models. You will work on real world problems which will help to inform strategic direction and have the opportunity to make an impact for both Amazon and our Selling Partners.