Prime Video call for proposals — Fall 2022

Pushing the boundaries of science and technology

About this CFP:

With the mission to be the world's most loved entertainment service, Prime Video continually strives to delight its customers by offering them the most engaging video-watching experiences. Prime Video works to solve a broad range of cutting-edge technical problems. We welcome proposals related to the following broad research areas in order to accelerate progress in the state of the art of video-watching.

Research Area 1 : Anomaly Detection and Insights

Undisrupted entertainment via large-scale anomaly detection

Overview: Customers should be able to reliably stream content at all times using any device where the application is available. This scope results in a combinatorial explosion of metrics that individually describe the quality of service across different marketplaces, regions, and devices. Monitoring such metrics in real-time is crucial for ensuring that any faults are immediately identified and resolved with minimal user disruption, and we are investing heavily in building robust and scalable anomaly detection tools to meet this requirement.

Research sub-areas: We are looking to fund research in the following sub-areas:

a. Anomaly detection on intermittent time series: Balancing the trade-off between maintaining high precision while also minimizing time-to-detection is a key challenge for time series anomaly detection. This is especially pertinent to the case of intermittent time series, whereby seasonality patterns in the time series may only become observable when data is aggregated over coarser periods of time.

Examples of research questions include:

  • How can representations of time series at different levels of granularity be leveraged for detecting anomalies?
  • For metrics with different levels of sparsity, how can we ensure that optimal time-to-detection is achieved for both smooth and intermittent metrics?
  • How can we ensure that derived anomaly scores remain consistent and interpretable across all time series?

b. Anomaly detection for multivariate time series: Collections of monitorable time series are often closely correlated or even generated from the same underlying process, and would benefit from being jointly modeled. However, this may also introduce additional complexity when individual time series have dimensions that are either missing at random or altogether. Adapting to such data challenges is crucial to enabling robust anomaly detection across groupings of related time series.

Examples of research questions include:

  • Are generative models effective for multivariate time series anomaly detection?
  • How can we apply multivariate forecasting-based anomaly detection when individual multi-dimensional time series have missing or additional dimensions?
  • How can we convert global anomaly scores emitted from a multivariate anomaly detection model to individual scores across specific dimensions?

c. Anomaly detection in time series with cold start
Monitoring capabilities to be enabled without extended warm-up period are important. The robustness of newly-deployed anomaly detection models often relies on having sufficient examples of normal and anomalous data before launch, but how do we handle cases where only few anomaly samples are available (if any at all)? The notion of transfer learning or meta-learning is commonplace in other domains, but has received little attention for time series anomaly detection.

Examples of research questions include:

  • How can we jointly monitor new time series with ramp-up behavior (e.g. sessions on newly-launched devices) alongside related metrics having longer and smoother historical data?
  • How can we determine the decision boundary for anomaly detection in a time series with no previous anomalies?
  • As more labels become available over time, how can we efficiently augment already-existing models without having to retrain them from scratch?

Proposal Requirements: Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template. In addition, to submit a proposal for this CFP, please also include the following information:

  1. Describe current applications of your work (e.g, libraries, codebases and industry code).
  2. What are potential applications of your work?
  3. What assumptions are made by your work (e.g., that affect soundness, precision, and/or scalability)?
  4. If your work involves the development and maintenance of a tool:
    1. What license is your tool released under?
    2. What on-boarding/tutorial material is available?
    3. Is your tool actively maintained (commits within last 3 months)? How many active contributors does your project have?
  5. What data are you planning to work with?

Research Area 2 : Personalization and Discovery

Personalized recommendations and discovery

Overview: The mission of this call for proposal is to improve engagement by providing relevant, personalized and timely recommendations. We guide users to discover content, and to stream stories relevant to their interests -current and emerging- while providing users a personalized experience that is transparent and builds trust in our brand.

Research sub-areas: We are looking to fund research in the following sub-areas:

a. Representation learning for title/user understanding: This topic includes but is not limited to the following research areas: Developing new representation techniques for different entities in RS; Understanding and evaluating existing representations, e.g. probing representations for generalization, compositionality & robustness, adversarial evaluation, analysis of representations; Efficient learning of representations and inference with respect to training and inference time, model size, amount of training data, etc.

b. Reinforcement learning for title recommendation/page composition: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a sequential decision making technique which maximizes the notion of long-term rewards. Framing title/carousel recommendations as building RL agents that maximize user satisfaction will enable us to explore and extend recent RL developments. Under this call for proposals, we are specifically seeking proposals on 1. RL Applications in recommender systems 2. Page composition 2. Real-world challenges and best practices for RL e.g. effective real-world exploration strategies, the role of offline and online metrics for diagnostics and modeling, Real-time inference and scalable ML workflows, hyper-parameter tuning for RL, interpretability, scalability and exploratory data analysis. 3. RL algorithms and evaluation, e.g. data driven, offline, and batch reinforcement learning; off-policy learning and counterfactual evaluation; deep RL and multi-arm Bandits; bandits for non-stationary environments.

c. New deep learning architecture for recommendation: Deep learning based recommendation system architectures make use of multiple simpler approaches in order to remediate the shortcomings of any single approach to extracting, transforming and vectorizing a large corpus of data into a useful recommendation for an end user. The topic will focus on new learning paradigms & architecture for recommendation systems.

d. Trustworthy AI for recommendation: Recommendation systems may lead to undesired counter-effects on users, items, producers, platforms, or even the society at large, such as compromised user trust due to non-transparency, unfair treatment of different consumers, or producers, privacy concerns due to extensive use of user's private data for personalization et al. All of these create an urgent need for Trustworthy Recommender Systems (TRS) so as to mitigate or avoid such adverse impacts and risks. The topic will focus on fairness and bias, explainability, diversity, causal inference, accountability, and privacy across recommendation systems.

Proposal Requirements: Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template.

Research Area 3 : Video Quality Analysis

Eliminating media quality defects

Overview: The ability to accurately detect and characterize media quality defects across both new and existing formats is critical.

Research sub-areas: We are looking to fund research in the following sub-areas:

a. Extended parameter space: While new media formats such as UHD, HDR and Dolby Atmos deliver unparalleled immersive experiences, there is a limited understanding of their interaction within the wider extended parameter space (e.g. resolution, bitrate, content etc) and the impact on media quality. This will be a key driver in the development of novel technologies to identify audio and/or visual quality defects across this space.

b. Context: Signal processing techniques are typically applied on audio, video and/or closed captions to detect media quality defects. Context (e.g. genre, creative intent, metadata), and interactions between these signal modalities, are often ignored. Methodologies which can exploit and disentangle this additional information will likely be more precise, robust and explainable.

c. Defect synthesis: There exists a long tail of media quality defects, and as a consequence obtaining ground truth examples can be prohibitive and expensive. Synthesizing these defects poses a number of challenges including defect modeling, data imbalance and a potential domain gap between synthetic and real data. Additionally it can be difficult to both characterize and have confidence in detecting low-prevalence and/or unseen defects. Addressing these problems is crucial in ensuring that consistent experience is delivered to all users.

Proposal Requirements: Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template, and can be video, audio and/or audiovisual based.

Timeline

Submission period: September 16 to October 26, 2022

Decision letters will be sent out March 2023

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • Unrestricted funds, no more than $50,000 USD on average
  • AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $40,000 USD on average
  • Training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers

Awards are structured as one-year unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.

Eligibility requirements

Please refer to the ARA Program rules on the FAQ page.

Proposal requirements

Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template. In addition, to submit a proposal for this CFP, please also include the following information:

  1. Please list the open-source tools you plan to contribute to.
  2. Please list the AWS ML tools you will use.

Selection criteria

ARA will make the funding decisions based on the potential impact to the research community and quality of the scientific content.

Expectations from recipients

To the extent deemed reasonable, Award recipients should acknowledge the support from ARA. Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.

US, WA, Seattle
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 add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, 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 in the Content Understanding Team, you will lead the end-to-end research and deployment of video and multi-modal models applied to a variety of downstream applications. More specifically, you will: - Work backwards from customer problems to research and design scientific approaches for solving them - Work closely with other scientists, engineers and product managers to expand the depth of our product insights with data, create a variety of experiments to determine the high impact projects to include in planning roadmaps - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals About the team Our Prime Video Content Understanding team builds holistic media representations (e.g. descriptions of scenes, semantic embeddings) and apply them to new customer experiences supply chain problems. Our technology spans the entire Prime Video catalogue globally, and we enable instant recaps, skip intro timing, ad placement, search, and content moderation.
US, WA, Seattle
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 add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, 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 in the Content Understanding Team, you will lead the end-to-end research and deployment of video and multi-modal models applied to a variety of downstream applications. More specifically, you will: - Work backwards from customer problems to research and design scientific approaches for solving them - Work closely with other scientists, engineers and product managers to expand the depth of our product insights with data, create a variety of experiments to determine the high impact projects to include in planning roadmaps - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals About the team Our Prime Video Content Understanding team builds holistic media representations (e.g. descriptions of scenes, semantic embeddings) and apply them to new customer experiences supply chain problems. Our technology spans the entire Prime Video catalogue globally, and we enable instant recaps, skip intro timing, ad placement, search, and content moderation.
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to re-invent how millions of people consume video content on their TVs, Tablets and Alexa? We are building a free to watch streaming service called Fire TV Channels (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/21/amazon-launches-fire-tv-channels-app-400-fast-channels/). Our goal is to provide customers with a delightful and personalized experience for consuming content across News, Sports, Cooking, Gaming, Entertainment, Lifestyle and more. You will work closely with engineering and product stakeholders to realize our ambitious product vision. You will get to work with Generative AI and other state of the art technologies to help build personalization and recommendation solutions from the ground up. You will be in the driver's seat to present customers with content they will love. Using Amazon’s large-scale computing resources, you will ask research questions about customer behavior, build state-of-the-art models to generate recommendations and run these models to enhance the customer experience. You will participate in the Amazon ML community and mentor Applied Scientists and Software Engineers with a strong interest in and knowledge of ML. Your work will directly benefit customers and you will measure the impact using scientific tools.
US, MA, Boston
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 technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal systems. You will support projects that work on technologies including multi-modal model alignment, moderation systems and evaluation. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will support the development of novel 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 speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). You are also expected to publish in top tier conferences. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems. Specifically, we focus on model alignment with an aim to maintain safety while not denting utility, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, HR, Gurugram
We're on a journey to build something new a green field project! Come join our team and build new discovery and shopping products that connect customers with their vehicle of choice. We're looking for a talented Senior Applied Scientist to join our team of product managers, designers, and engineers to design, and build innovative automotive-shopping experiences for our customers. This is a great opportunity for an experienced engineer to design and implement the technology for a new Amazon business. We are looking for a Applied Scientist to design, implement and deliver end-to-end solutions. We are seeking passionate, hands-on, experienced and seasoned Senior Applied Scientist who will be deep in code and algorithms; who are technically strong in building scalable computer vision machine learning systems across item understanding, pose estimation, class imbalanced classifiers, identification and segmentation.. You will drive ideas to products using paradigms such as deep learning, semi supervised learning and dynamic learning. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will also help lead and mentor our team of applied scientists and engineers. You will take on complex customer problems, distill customer requirements, and then deliver solutions that either leverage existing academic and industrial research or utilize your own out-of-the-box but pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you will directly contribute to implementation while you lead. A successful candidate has excellent technical depth, scientific vision, project management skills, great communication skills, and a drive to achieve results in a unified team environment. You should enjoy the process of solving real-world problems that, quite frankly, haven’t been solved at scale anywhere before. Along the way, we guarantee you’ll get opportunities to be a bold disruptor, prolific innovator, and a reputed problem solver—someone who truly enables AI and robotics to significantly impact the lives of millions of consumers. Key job responsibilities Architect, design, and implement Machine Learning models for vision systems on robotic platforms Optimize, deploy, and support at scale ML models on the edge. Influence the team's strategy and contribute to long-term vision and roadmap. Work with stakeholders across , science, and operations teams to iterate on design and implementation. Maintain high standards by participating in reviews, designing for fault tolerance and operational excellence, and creating mechanisms for continuous improvement. Prototype and test concepts or features, both through simulation and emulators and with live robotic equipment Work directly with customers and partners to test prototypes and incorporate feedback Mentor other engineer team members. A day in the life - 6+ years of building machine learning models for retail application experience - PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience - Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language - Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning - Demonstrated expertise in computer vision and machine learning techniques.
IN, HR, Gurugram
Our customers have immense faith in our ability to deliver packages timely and as expected. A well planned network seamlessly scales to handle millions of package movements a day. It has monitoring mechanisms that detect failures before they even happen (such as predicting network congestion, operations breakdown), and perform proactive corrective actions. When failures do happen, it has inbuilt redundancies to mitigate impact (such as determine other routes or service providers that can handle the extra load), and avoids relying on single points of failure (service provider, node, or arc). Finally, it is cost optimal, so that customers can be passed the benefit from an efficiently set up network. Amazon Shipping is hiring Applied Scientists to help improve our ability to plan and execute package movements. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon Shipping, you will work on multiple challenging machine learning problems spread across a wide spectrum of business problems. You will build ML models to help our transportation cost auditing platforms effectively audit off-manifest (discrepancies between planned and actual shipping cost). You will build models to improve the quality of financial and planning data by accurately predicting ship cost at a package level. Your models will help forecast the packages required to be pick from shipper warehouses to reduce First Mile shipping cost. Using signals from within the transportation network (such as network load, and velocity of movements derived from package scan events) and outside (such as weather signals), you will build models that predict delivery delay for every package. These models will help improve buyer experience by triggering early corrective actions, and generating proactive customer notifications. Your role will require you to demonstrate Think Big and Invent and Simplify, by refining and translating Transportation domain-related business problems into one or more Machine Learning problems. You will use techniques from a wide array of machine learning paradigms, such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. Your model choices will include, but not be limited to, linear/logistic models, tree based models, deep learning models, ensemble models, and Q-learning models. You will use techniques such as LIME and SHAP to make your models interpretable for your customers. You will employ a family of reusable modelling solutions to ensure that your ML solution scales across multiple regions (such as North America, Europe, Asia) and package movement types (such as small parcel movements and truck movements). You will partner with Applied Scientists and Research Scientists from other teams in US and India working on related business domains. Your models are expected to be of production quality, and will be directly used in production services. You will work as part of a diverse data science and engineering team comprising of other Applied Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Business Intelligence Engineers. You will participate in the Amazon ML community by authoring scientific papers and submitting them to Machine Learning conferences. You will mentor Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers having a strong interest in ML. You will also be called upon to provide ML consultation outside your team for other problem statements. If you are excited by this charter, come join us!
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to lead the development of novel 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 speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, KA, Bangalore
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 add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, 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 technologist, 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 a highly experienced and seasoned science leader, you will apply state of the art natural language processing and computer vision research to video centric digital media, while also responsible for creating and maintaining the best environment for applied science in order to recruit, retain and develop top talent. You will lead the research direction for a team of deeply talented applied scientists, creating the roadmaps for forward-looking research and communicate them effectively to senior leadership. You will also hire and develop applied scientists - growing the team to meet the evolving needs of our customers.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field or relevant science experience (publications/scientific prototypes) in lieu of Masters - Experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field - 2-7 years experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
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