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From Muthoni Ngatia's (top left) journey to becoming an economist, to the impressive collaboration that helped create Echo Show 10, to the award-winning work of the Middle Mile team, these stories are the ones readers gravitated to most often (so far).
Glynis Condon

The top stories of the first half of 2021

These 12 stories are the ones that really resonated with the Amazon Science audience in the first six months of this year.

By Staff writer
July 05, 2021
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If these stories intrigue you, be sure to see the latest papers published by Amazon scientists, take a look at the deep dives into science on our blog, and visit our conferences and events section to learn where Amazon researchers will be presenting.

The 12 most popular stories of 2021 (so far)

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The science behind an Amazon Echo feature that helped save a puppy
How acoustic event detection helps Alexa Guard understand what might warrant an alert — and what just might be a microwave beeping.
The alert that helped save the day
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Credit: AboutAmazon.com
Amazon's Middle Mile team helps packages make the journey to your doorstep
The Middle Mile team manages complexity and scale in making routing decisions across the company’s expansive transportation network.
Find out how they do it
A grid of 12 women scientists who were asked what three steps we can take as a society to forge a more gender-equal science community
Credit: Glynis Condon
How to forge a more gender-equal science community
International Women's Day was March 8 with the theme: #ChooseToChallenge. We spoke to scientists at Amazon to get their perspective.
See what these scientists had to say
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The intersection of design and science
How a team of designers, scientists, developers, and engineers worked together to create a truly unique device in Echo Show 10.
Learn more about the collaboration
Muthonia Ngatia
Courtesy of Muthoni Ngatia
How Muthoni Ngatia’s childhood in Kenya led her to a career in economics
The Amazon economist says lessons from her mother taught her a lot about how the world works, and why economics plays such a vital role.
Read her story

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Credit: F4D Studio
Amazon’s robot arms break ground in safety and technology
While these systems look like other robot arms, they embed advanced technologies that will shape Amazon's robot fleet for years to come.
Watch the robots in action

Tingting Sha Irene Song Ahmed El Saadany Amazon Science.jpg
How three science PhDs found different career paths at Amazon
Their doctoral degrees help these product managers bridge the gap between business and science.
Read their stories

Abdigani Diriye is seen giving a talk in front of a map of the African continent
Credit: Bret Hartman / TED
Abdigani Diriye named among top young African economic leaders
The Amazon research manager was included on a list of individuals 40 and younger who are projected to play a leading role in Africa’s economic future.
Find out why he was honored

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Alexa: The science must go on
“Despite the challenges of the pandemic, the Alexa team has shown incredible adaptability and grit, delivering scientific results that are already making a difference for our customers and will have long-lasting effects,” Rohit Prasad.
Read the post by Alexa's head scientist
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Credit: Todd Cheney
Graceful AI
Amazon vice president Stefano Soatto writes about the work his team is doing to making AI more "graceful", including publishing papers on backward-compatible updates to ML models and more.
Learn about the work being done
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Credit: Gregory Trott/AP
How AWS scientists help create the NFL’s Next Gen Stats
In its collaboration with the NFL, AWS contributes cloud computing technology, machine learning services, business intelligence services — and, sometimes, the expertise of its scientists.
Learn how science plays a role
A picture of Aleksander Kubica
Credit: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
The quantum gambit
How an Amazon quantum computing scientist won the first-ever quantum chess tournament.
Learn more about his unusual strategy

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Sr Principal Scientist, Search, Search Science
US, CA, Palo Alto
Amazon is the 4th most popular site in the US. Our product search engine, one of the most heavily used services in the world, indexes billions of products and serves hundreds of millions of customers world-wide. We are working on a new initiative to transform our search engine into a shopping engine that assists customers with their shopping missions. We look at all aspects of search CX, query understanding, Ranking, Indexing and ask how we can make big step improvements by applying advanced Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques. We’re seeking a thought leader to direct science initiatives for the Search Relevance and Ranking at Amazon. This person will also be a deep learning practitioner/thinker and guide the research in these three areas. They’ll also have the ability to drive cutting edge, product oriented research and should have a notable publication record. This intellectual thought leader will help enhance the science in addition to developing the thinking of our team. This leader will direct and shape the science philosophy, planning and strategy for the team, as we explore multi-modal, multi lingual search through the use of deep learning . We’re seeking an individual that can enhance the science thinking of our team: The org is made of 60+ applied scientists, (2 Principal scientists and 5 Senior ASMs). This person will lead and shape the science philosophy, planning and strategy for the team, as we push into Deep Learning to solve problems like cold start, discovery and personalization in the Search domain. Joining this team, you’ll experience the benefits of working in a dynamic, entrepreneurial environment, while leveraging the resources of Amazon [Earth's most customer-centric internet company]. We provide a highly customer-centric, team-oriented environment in our offices located in Palo Alto, California.
Applied Science Manager, Japan Retail Science
JP, 13, Tokyo
Our mission is to help every vendor drive the most significant impact selling on Amazon. Our team invent, test and launch some of the most innovative services, technology, processes for our global vendors. Our new AVS Professional Services (ProServe) team will go deep with our largest and most sophisticated vendor customers, combining elite client-service skills with cutting edge applied science techniques, backed up by Amazon’s 20+ years of experience in Japan. We start from the customer’s problem and work backwards to apply distinctive results that “only Amazon” can deliver. Amazon is looking for a talented and passionate Applied Science Manager to manage our growing team of Applied Scientists and Business Intelligence Engineers to build world class statistical and machine learning models to be delivered directly to our largest vendors, and working closely with the vendors' senior leaders. The Applied Science Manager will set the strategy for the services to invent, collaborating with the AVS business consultants team to determine customer needs and translating them to a science and development roadmap, and finally coordinating its execution through the team. In this position, you will be part of a larger team touching all areas of science-based development in the vendor domain, not limited to Japan-only products, but collaborating with worldwide science and business leaders. Our current projects touch on the areas of causal inference, reinforcement learning, representation learning, anomaly detection, NLP and forecasting. As the AVS ProServe Applied Science Manager, you will be empowered to expand your scope of influence, and use ProServe as an incubator for products that can be expanded to all Amazon vendors, worldwide. We place strong emphasis on talent growth. As the Applied Science Manager, you will be expected in actively growing future Amazon science leaders, and providing mentoring inside and outside of your team. Key job responsibilities The Applied Science Manager is accountable for: (1) Creating a vision, a strategy, and a roadmap tackling the most challenging business questions from our leading vendors, assess quantitatively their feasibility and entitlement, and scale their scope beyond the ProServe team. (2) Coordinate execution of the roadmap, through direct reports, consisting of scientists and business intelligence engineers. (3) Grow and manage a technical team, actively mentoring, developing, and promoting team members. (4) Work closely with other science managers, program/product managers, and business leadership worldwide to scope new areas of growth, creating new partnerships, and proposing new business initiatives. (5) Act as a technical supervisor, able to assess scientific direction, technical design documents, and steer development efforts to maximize project delivery.
Applied Scientist, Sponsored Ads
US, NY, New York
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! The Supply team (within Sponsored Products) is looking for an Applied Scientist to join a fast-growing team with the mandate of creating new ad experiences that elevate the shopping experience for hundreds of millions customers worldwide. The Applied Scientist will take end-to-end ownership of driving new product/feature innovation by applying advanced statistical and machine learning models. The role will handle petabytes of unstructured data (images, text, videos) to extract insights into what metadata can be useful for us to highlight to simplify purchase decisions, and propose new experiences that increase shopper engagement. Why you love this opportunity Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team is responsible for defining and delivering 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 highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist on this team you will: Build machine learning models and perform data analysis to deliver scalable solutions to business problems. Perform hands-on analysis and modeling with very large data sets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales without compromising shopper experience. Work closely with software engineers on detailed requirements, technical designs and implementation of end-to-end solutions in production. Design and run A/B experiments that affect hundreds of millions of customers, evaluate the impact of your optimizations and communicate your results to various business stakeholders. Work with scientists and economists to model the interaction between organic sales and sponsored content and to further evolve Amazon's marketplace. Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving. Research new predictive learning approaches for the sponsored products business. Write production code to bring models into production. A day in the life 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.
Principal Applied Scientist, Search Science and AI
US, CA, Palo Alto
The Amazon Search team creates powerful, customer-focused search solutions and technologies. Whenever a customer visits an Amazon site worldwide and types in a query or browses through product categories, Amazon Search services go to work. We design, develop, and deploy high performance, fault-tolerant distributed search systems used by millions of Amazon customers every day. We are seeking a Principal Scientist with deep expertise in Search. Your responsibility will be to advance the state-of-the-art for search science that leads to world-class products that impact Amazon's customers. Key job responsibilities You will be responsible for defining key research directions, adopting or inventing new machine learning techniques, conducting rigorous experiments, publishing results, and ensuring that research is translated into practice. You will develop long-term strategies, persuade teams to adopt those strategies, propose goals and deliver on them. You will also participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship and leadership development. You will be technically fearless and with a passion for building scalable science and engineering solutions. You will serve as a key scientific resource in full-cycle development (conception, design, implementation, testing to documentation, delivery, and maintenance). About the team This is a position on Core Ranking and Experimentation team in Palo Alto, CA. The team works on a variety of topics in search ranking and relevance, such as multi-objective optimization, personalization, and fast online experimentation. We work closely with teams in various parts of the stack to ensure that our science is translated to customer facing products.
Applied Scientist
US, WA, Bellevue
Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientists with a strong machine learning background to help build industry-leading Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to provide a delightful experience to Amazon’s customers by pushing the envelope in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation (MT), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision (CV). As part of our AI team in Amazon AWS, you will work alongside internationally recognized experts to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state-of-the-art in human language technology. Your work will directly impact millions of our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will gain hands on experience with Amazon’s heterogeneous speech, text, and structured data sources, and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding. We are hiring in all areas of human language technology: ASR, MT, NLU, text-to-speech (TTS), and Dialog Management, in addition to Computer Vision.
Applied Science Manager, ATT
IN, KA, Bangalore
Amazon is investing heavily in building a world class advertising business and we are responsible for defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products. The ATT team, based in Bangalore, is responsible for ensuring that ads are compliant to world-wide advertising policies and are of high quality, leading to higher conversion for the advertisers and providing a great experience for the shoppers. Machine learning, particularly multi-modal data understanding, is fundamental to the way we drive our business, meet our goals and satisfy our customers. ATT team invests in researching and developing state of art models that analyze various type of ad assets – text, audio, images and videos - to ensure compliance to advertising policies. We also help advertisers create more successful ads by creating ML models to assist ad generation as well as to provide data-driven interpretable insights. Key job responsibilities Major responsibilities · Deliver key goals to enhance advertiser experience and protect shopper trust by innovative use of computer vision, NLP and statistical techniques · Drive core business analytics and data science explorations to inform key business decisions and algorithm roadmap · Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation · Hire and develop top talent in machine learning and data science and accelerate the pace of innovation in the group · Work proactively with engineering teams and product managers to evangelize new algorithms and drive the implementation of large-scale complex ML models in production
Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Search
US, WA, Seattle
We are seeking a talented applied researcher to join the Search team responsible for developing reinforcement learning systems for Amazon's shopping experience and delivering it to millions of customers. We believe that shopping on Amazon should be simple, delightful, and full of "wow" moments for everyone.
Intern - Economics, Weblab
US, NY, New York
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. About the team Amazon's Weblab team enables experimentation at massive scale to help Amazon build better products for customers. A/B testing is in Amazon's DNA and we're at the core of how Amazon innovates on behalf of customers.
Applied Science Manager, Sponsored Products Detail Page Allocation and Pricing
US, WA, Seattle
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. 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! As an Applied Science Manager in Machine Learning, you will: Directly manage and lead a cross-functional team of Applied Scientists, Data Scientists, Economists, and Business Intelligence Engineers. Develop and manage a research agenda that balances short term deliverables with measurable business impact as well as long term investments. Lead marketplace design and development based on economic theory and data analysis. Provide technical and scientific guidance to team members. Rapidly design, prototype and test many possible hypotheses in a high-ambiguity environment, making use of both quantitative and business judgment Advance the team's engineering craftsmanship and drive continued scientific innovation as a thought leader and practitioner. Develop science and engineering roadmaps, run annual planning, and foster cross-team collaboration to execute complex projects. Perform hands-on data analysis, build machine-learning models, run regular A/B tests, and communicate the impact to senior management. Collaborate with business and software teams across Amazon Ads. Stay up to date with recent scientific publications relevant to the team. Hire and develop top talent, provide technical and career development guidance to scientists and engineers within and across the organization. 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. Team video ~ https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE
Sr. Applied Scientist, Search Science and AI
US, CA, Palo Alto
The Amazon Search team creates powerful, customer-focused search and advertising solutions and technologies. Whenever a customer visits an Amazon site worldwide and types in a query or browses through product categories, Amazon Search services go to work. We design, develop, and deploy high performance, fault-tolerant distributed search systems used by millions of Amazon customers every day. Our Search Relevance team works to maximize the quality and effectiveness of the search experience for visitors to Amazon websites worldwide. Amazon’s large scale brings with it unique problems to solve in designing, testing, and deploying relevance models. We are seeking a strong applied Scientist to join the Experimentation Infrastructure and Methods team. This team’s charter is to innovate and evaluate ranking at Amazon Search. In practice, we aim to create infrastructure and metrics, enable new experimental methods, and do proof-of-concept experiments, that enable Search Relevance teams to introduce new features faster, reduce the cost of experimentation, and deliver faster against Search goals. Key job responsibilities You will build search ranking systems and evaluation framework that extend to Amazon scale -- thousands of product types, billions of queries, and hundreds of millions of customers spread around the world. As a Senior Applied Scientist you will find the next set of big improvements to ranking evaluation, get your hands dirty by building models to help understand complexities of customer behavior, and mentor junior engineers and scientists. In addition to typical topics in ranking, we are particularly interested in evaluation, feature selection, explainability. A day in the life Our primary focus is improving search ranking systems. On a day-to-day this means building ML models, analyzing data from your recent A/B tests, and guiding teams on best practices. You will also find yourself in meetings with business and tech leaders at Amazon communicating your next big initiative. About the team We are a team consisting of software engineers and applied scientists. Our interests and activities span machine learning for better ranking, experimentation, statistics for better decision making, and infrastructure to make it all happen efficiently at scale.
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