Social
amazon research awards recipients logo.jpg
Amazon today publicly announced 74 recipients from the Amazon Research Awards Fall 2021 call for proposals. The recipients, who represent 51 universities in 17 countries, have access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets, and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools.

75 Amazon Research Awards recipients announced

The awardees represent 52 universities in 17 countries. Recipients have access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets, and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools.

By Amazon Research Awards team
July 18, 2022
8 min read
Share

The Amazon Research Awards is a program that provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating research topics across a number of disciplines.

Today, we’re publicly announcing 75 award recipients who represent 52 universities in 17 countries. Each award 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.

Top row, left to right: Aws Albarghouthi, Nada Amin, Clark Barrett, Ivan Beschastnikh, William Bowman, Yinzhi Cao, Trevor Carlson, Marsha Chechik; second row, left to right: Cas Cremers, Derek Dreyer, Marcelo Frias, Sicun Gao, Roberto Giacobazzi, Ronghui Gu, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, Steve Ko; third row, left to right: James Noble, Rohan Padhye, Pavithra Prabhakar, Francesco Ranzato, Talia Ringer, Camilo Rocha, Andrei Sabelfeld, Ilya Sergey; and bottom row, left to right: Michele Sevegnani, Fu Song, Zhendong Su, Daniel Varro, Yakir Vizel, Thomas Wies, Anton Wijs, and Meng Xu.
Top row, left to right: Aws Albarghouthi, Nada Amin, Clark Barrett, Ivan Beschastnikh, William Bowman, Yinzhi Cao, Trevor Carlson, Marsha Chechik; second row, left to right: Cas Cremers, Derek Dreyer, Marcelo Frias, Sicun Gao, Roberto Giacobazzi, Ronghui Gu, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, Steve Ko; third row, left to right: James Noble, Rohan Padhye, Pavithra Prabhakar, Francesco Ranzato, Talia Ringer, Camilo Rocha, Andrei Sabelfeld, Ilya Sergey; and bottom row, left to right: Michele Sevegnani, Fu Song, Zhendong Su, Daniel Varro, Yakir Vizel, Thomas Wies, Anton Wijs, and Meng Xu are among the recipients from the Amazon Research Awards Fall 2021 call for proposals under the Automated Reasoning CFP.

This announcement includes awards funded under seven call for proposals during the Fall 2021 cycle: AI for Information Security, Amazon Device Security and Privacy, Amazon Payments, AWS Automated Reasoning, Data for Social Sustainability, Prime Video, and Robotics. Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content, their creativity, and their potential to impact both the research community and society more generally. Theoretical advances, creative new ideas, and practical applications were all considered.

Top row, left to right: Nora Ayanian, Nicola Bezzo, Luca Carlone, Venanzio Cichella, Jia Deng, Nima Fazeli, Maani Ghaffari-Jadidi; second row, left to right: Grace Gu, Leonidas Guibas, Felix Heide, Ralph Hollis, Robert Katzschmann, Sven Koenig, George Konidaris; third row, left to right: Sergey Levine, Jennifer Lewis, Maja Matarić, Jan Peters, Lerrel Pinto, Robert Platt, Nancy Pollard; and bottom row, left to right: Alessandro Rizzo, Oren Salzman, Roland Siegwart, Pratap Tokekar, James Wang, Shenlong Wang, and Yuke Zhu.
Top row, left to right: Nora Ayanian, Nicola Bezzo, Luca Carlone, Venanzio Cichella, Jia Deng, Nima Fazeli, Maani Ghaffari-Jadidi; second row, left to right: Grace Gu, Leonidas Guibas, Felix Heide, Ralph Hollis, Robert Katzschmann, Sven Koenig, George Konidaris; third row, left to right: Sergey Levine, Jennifer Lewis, Maja Matarić, Jan Peters, Lerrel Pinto, Robert Platt, Nancy Pollard; and bottom row, left to right: Alessandro Rizzo, Oren Salzman, Roland Siegwart, Pratap Tokekar, James Wang, Shenlong Wang, and Yuke Zhu are among the recipients from the Amazon Research Awards Fall 2021 call for proposals under the Robotics CFP.

Recipients have access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools through their AWS Promotional Credits. Recipients also are assigned an Amazon research contact who offers consultation and advice, along with opportunities to participate in Amazon events and training sessions.

Additionally, Amazon encourages the publication of research results, presentations of research at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.

Top row, left to right:NAMES; second row, left to right:NAMES are among the recipients from the Amazon Research Awards Winter 2022 call for proposals under the Alexa: Fairness in AI CFP.
Top row, left to right:NAMES; second row, left to right:NAMES are among the recipients from the Amazon Research Awards Winter 2022 call for proposals under the Alexa: Fairness in AI CFP.

"Research in automated reasoning is deeply intertwined with a broad range of other research areas, touching machine learning, hardware and software engineering, robotics, and life sciences," said Daniel Kroening, an Automated Reasoning Group senior principal scientist. "The 2021 Amazon Research Awards reflect this breadth, and the interdisciplinary nature of research that is necessary to take computing one step closer to that magic spark that drives human reasoning."

ARA funds proposals up to four times a year in a variety of research areas. Applicants are encouraged to visit the ARA call for proposals page for more information or send an email to be notified of future open calls.

The table below lists, in alphabetical order, Fall 2021 cycle call-for-proposal recipients.

Recipient

University

Research title

Aws Albarghouthi

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Teaching SMT Solvers Probability Theory

Nada Amin

Harvard University

Extensible Models and Proofs

Nora Ayanian

Brown University

Large-Scale Labeled Multi-Agent Pathfinding for Warehouses

Clark Barrett

Stanford University

HydraScale: Solving SMT Queries in the Serverless Cloud

Ivan Beschastnikh

University of British Columbia

Compiling Distributed System Models into Implementations

Nicola Bezzo

University of Virginia

Towards Safe and Agile Robot Navigation in Occluding and Dynamic Environments

William Bowman

University of British Columbia

Static reasoning for memory in compilers and intermediate languages

Yinzhi Cao

Johns Hopkins University

Automatic Static Resource Analysis for Serverless Computing

Luca Carlone

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Real-time Spatial AI for Robotics

Trevor Carlson

National University of Singapore

Accelerating SAT Solving with a Flexible FPGA-Programming Platform

Marsha Chechik

University Of Toronto

Unsatisfiability Proofs for Monotonic Theories

Venanzio Cichella

University Of Iowa

Concurrent allocation and planning for large-scale multi-robot systems

Cas Cremers

CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

KeyLife: Automated Formal Analysis for Key Lifecycles in Security Protocols with Policies, Delegation, and Compromise

Elizabeth Croft

Monash University

Help me!: Humans supporting robots through Augmented Reality

Jia Deng

Princeton University

Optimization-Inspired Neural Networks for Visual SLAM

Derek Dreyer

MPI - SWS

RefinedRust: Automating the Verification of Rust Programs in the Presence of Unsafe Code

Tudor Dumitras

University of Maryland, College Park

Mitigating the impact of behavior variability and label noise on ML-based malware detectors

Nima Fazeli

University of Michigan

Object Manipulation with High-Resolution Tactile Sensors

Earlence Fernandes

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Verifiable Distributed Computation

Marcelo Frias

Buenos Aires Institute of Technology

Modular Bounded Verification with Expressive Contracts

Sicun Gao

University of California, San Diego

Interior Search Methods in SMT

Maani Ghaffari-Jadidi

University of Michigan

Robust low-cost dead reckoning and localization for home robotics using invariant state estimation

Roberto Giacobazzi

University of Verona

Implicit program analysis

Ronghui Gu

Columbia University

Learning Inductive Invariants for Real Distributed Protocols

Grace Gu

University of California, Berkeley

Deep learning-enabled robust grasping for pneumatic actuators

Leonidas Guibas

Stanford University

GeneralPurpose 3D Perception of Object Functionality

Arie Gurfinkel

University of Waterloo

Formal Proofs for Trusted Execution Environments

Hamed Haddadi

Imperial College London

Auditable Model Privacy using TEEs

Felix Heide

Princeton University

Inverse Neural Rendering

Ralph Hollis

Carnegie Mellon University

Low Cost Dynamic Mobile Robots for Research and Teaching

Hongxin Hu

SUNY, Buffalo

Explaining Learning-based Intrusion Detection Systems for Active Intrusion Responses

Jean-Baptiste Jeannin

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Automatic Verification of Distributed Systems Implementations

Robert Katzschmann

ETH Zurich

Design and Control Optimization of Soft Gripper Mechanisms for Manipulation

Anirudh Sivaraman Kaushalram

New York University

Observing and controlling microservice deployments

Steve Ko

Simon Fraser University

Practical Symbolic Execution for Rust

Sven Koenig

University of Southern California

Hybrid Search- and Traffic-Based MAPF Systems for Fulfillment Centers

George Konidaris

Brown University

Learning Composable Manipulation Skills

Emmanuel Letouzé

Pompeu Fabra University

Leveraging Digital Data for Monitoring Human Rights and Social Dynamics Along and Around Value Chains

Sergey Levine

University of California, Berkeley

Robotic Learning with Reusable Data

Jennifer Lewis

Harvard University

Computational Co-Design of Dexterous Rigid-Soft Grippers With Intrinsic Tactile-Sensing-Based Control

Maja Matarić

University of Southern California

Learning User Preferences for In-Home Robots Through In Situ Augmented Reality

James Noble

Victoria University Of Wellington

“Programming Made Hard” Made Easier: Improving Dafny’s Human Factors

Rohan Padhye

Carnegie Mellon University

Coverage-Guided Property-Based Testing of Concurrent Programs

Jan Peters

TU Darmstadt

Learning Robot Manipulation from Tactile Feedback

Lerrel Pinto

New York University

Visual Imitation in the Wild through Decoupled Representation Learning

Robert Platt

Northeastern University

On-robot manipulation learning via equivariant models

Nancy Pollard

Carnegie Mellon

Contact Areas for Manipulation Capture, Retargeting, and Hand Design

Pavithra Prabhakar

Kansas State University

Conformance Checking of Evolving ML Software Systems

Francesco Ranzato

University of Verona

Implicit program analysis

Sanjay Rao

Purdue University

Answering counterfactuals from offline data for video streaming

Bruno Ribeiro

Purdue University

Answering counterfactuals from offline data for video streaming

Talia Ringer

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Neurosymbolic Proof Synthesis & Repair

Alessandro Rizzo

Politecnico di Torino

Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Trustworthy Control of Autonomous Robots

Camilo Rocha

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali

Probabilistic and Symbolic Tools for P Program Verification

Andrei Sabelfeld

Chalmers University of Technology

DeepCrawl: Automated Reasoning for Deep Web Crawling

Oren Salzman

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Increasing throughput in automated warehouses via environment manipulation

Ilya Sergey

National University of Singapore

Scaling Automated Verification of Distributed Protocols with Specification Transformation and Synthesis

Michele Sevegnani

University of Glasgow

From Whiteboards to Models: Diagrammatic Formal Modelling for Everyone

Roland Siegwart

ETH Zurich

Autonomous Navigation of Aerial Robotic Manipulators in Unstructured Indoor and Outdoor Environments

Ramesh Sitaraman

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Design and Evaluation of ABR Algorithms for High-Performance Video Delivery

Fu Song

ShanghaiTech University

Efficient and Precise Verification for Constant-Time and Time-Balancing of Cryptosystems

Zhendong Su

ETH Zurich

Practical Techniques for Reliable, Robust and Performant SMT Solvers

Jiliang Tang

Michigan State University

Taming Graph Anomaly Detection via Graph Neural Networks

Pratap Tokekar

University of Maryland, College Park

Multi-Robot Coordination through the Lens of Risk

Daniel Varro

McGill University

Graph Solver as a Service

Yakir Vizel

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Quantified Invariants

David Wagner

University of California, Berkeley

Machine Learning for Malware Detection: Robustness against Concept Drift

James Wang

Pennsylvania State University

Affective and Social Interaction between Human and Intelligent Machine in Daily Activities

Shenlong Wang

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Safely Test Autonomous Vehicles with Augmented Reality

Thomas Wies

New York University

A Modular Library of Verified Concurrent Search Structure Algorithms

Anton Wijs

Eindhoven University of Technology

Many-Core Acceleration of State Space Construction and Analysis

Xinyu Xing

Northwestern University

Battling Noisy-label Classification

Meng Xu

University Of Waterloo

Finding Specification Blind Spots with Fuzz Testing

Yuke Zhu

University of Texas at Austin

Interactive Learning Framework for Building Structured Object Models from Play

Andrew Zisserman

University of Oxford

Audio-Visual Synchronisation for General Videos
Tags
About the Author
Amazon Research Awards team

Related content

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Applied Scientist, Neuro-Symbolic AI Labs
US, MA, Boston
We are looking for researchers who aim to build super-intelligent AI systems that leverage proof assistants to guide learning and reasoning. Our neuro-symbolic AI technology is applied across a wide range of science and engineering domains within Amazon, and you will join the team at the forefront of this research. As an Applied Scientist, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the definition, vision, and development of product features from beginning to end. You will: - Define and implement new neuro-symbolic applications that employ scalable and efficient approaches to solve complex problems. - Work in an agile, startup-like development environment, where you are always working on the most important stuff. - Deliver high-quality scientific artifacts. About the team We work closely with academia. Our team includes an Amazon Scholar in mathematics, and we maintain active research collaborations with faculty at leading CS departments (MIT, Berkeley, CMU).
Applied Scientist II, RBS Tech
IN, KA, Bengaluru
RBS (Retail Business Services) Tech team works towards enhancing the customer experience (CX) and their trust in product data by providing technologies to find and fix Amazon CX defects at scale. Our platforms help in improving the CX in all phases of customer journey, including selection, discoverability & fulfilment, buying experience and post-buying experience (product quality and customer returns). The team also develops GenAI platforms for automation of Amazon Stores Operations. As a Sciences team in RBS Tech, we focus on foundational ML research and develop scalable state-of-the-art ML solutions to solve the problems covering customer experience (CX) and Selling partner experience (SPX). We work to solve problems related to multi-modal understanding (text and images), task automation through multi-modal LLM Agents, supervised and unsupervised techniques, multi-task learning, multi-label classification, aspect and topic extraction for Customer Anecdote Mining, image and text similarity and retrieval using NLP and Computer Vision for product groupings and identifying duplicate listings in product search results. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, you will be responsible to design and deploy scalable GenAI, NLP and Computer Vision solutions that will impact the content visible to millions of customer and solve key customer experience issues. You will develop novel LLM, deep learning and statistical techniques for task automation, text processing, image processing, pattern recognition, and anomaly detection problems. You will define the research and experiments strategy with an iterative execution approach to develop AI/ML models and progressively improve the results over time. You will partner with business and engineering teams to identify and solve large and significantly complex problems that require scientific innovation. You will help the team leverage your expertise, by coaching and mentoring. You will contribute to the professional development of colleagues, improving their technical knowledge and the engineering practices. You will independently as well as guide team to file for patents and/or publish research work where opportunities arise. The RBS org deals with problems that are directly related to the selling partners and end customers and the ML team drives resolution to organization level problems. Therefore, the Applied Scientist role will impact the large product strategy, identifies new business opportunities and provides strategic direction which is very exciting.
Data Scientist II, EU Prime and Marketing Analytics & Science (PRIMAS)
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Are you passionate about giving customers the richest, most inspiring experience in their shopping journey? Do you like to dive deep to understand how customer-centric solutions drive measurable results? Do you enjoy working closely with the business and software engineers to design rigorous experiments, build the data infrastructure behind them, and translate results into decisions? You are in the right place! Come join our Prime & Marketing Analytics and Science (PRIMAS) team, where your work will directly impact millions of customers. The EU Marketing & Prime organization is looking for a Data Scientist to join the PRIMAS team. This role sits at the intersection of applied statistics and large-scale analytics — you'll design experiments and causal models, and also own the data pipelines, metrics, and reporting infrastructure that make those results usable across the business. The PRIMAS team provides a comprehensive understanding of customer segments, affinities, and lifetime value. We use data science tools and advanced statistical techniques to study customer purchase and engagement behaviors, and generate actionable insights on where, when, and how we deliver products and programs to customers. We help increase customer engagement, sales, and marketing efficiency, and our systems are built entirely in-house on automated large-scale analytics infrastructure. You will design, launch, and measure experiments across marketing channels (SEM/SEO, Affiliates, Display, Social, Mobile, Email, Onsite, etc.), engagement products, and customer segments. You will improve our understanding of customer behavior, run rigorous power and minimum detectable effect (MDE) analyses to size experiments correctly, and build the causal and conversion models that value and target our marketing — then build the pipelines and dashboards that keep those signals flowing reliably to stakeholders and downstream systems. You will work at the forefront of consumer analytics, tackling some of the hardest measurement problems in the industry alongside strong scientists, statisticians, and software engineers. Key job responsibilities 1. Design and implement scalable, statistically rigorous experiments (A/B, geo, holdout, quasi-experiments) to measure marketing incrementality across channels. 2. Perform power analysis and minimum detectable effect (MDE) calculations to determine experiment sample sizes, durations, and design trade-offs before launch. 3. Build causal and treatment-effect models that produce conversion and valuation signals consumed by downstream bidding and budgeting systems. 4. Building the ETL, metric definitions, and datasets that make results scalable, extensible, and repeatable rather than one-off analyses. 5. Develop measurement frameworks that quantify the true, platform-independent contribution of marketing over time, and build the dashboards and reporting that keep those metrics visible to the business. 6. Apply statistical, mathematical, and machine learning techniques to solve ambiguous business problems where the right approach isn't obvious. 7. Analyze experiment results for validity — inspecting distributions, checking for sample ratio mismatch, exploring covariate balance, and tracking down the source of anomalies. 8. Communicate experiment design, results, and trade-offs clearly to business and leadership audiences, including inputs into business reviews, and influence decisions and technical direction across teams. 9. Establish scalable, repeatable processes and best practices for experiment design, data modeling, and analysis.
Data Scientist
US, NJ, Newark
At Audible, we believe stories have the power to transform lives. It’s why we work with some of the world’s leading creators to produce and share audio storytelling with our millions of global listeners. We are dreamers and inventors who come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences to empower and inspire each other. Imagine your future with us. ABOUT THIS ROLE We are seeking a data scientist builder to join the Audible economics team. Our group of economists, data scientists, and analysts tackles a wide range of questions, including pricing, experimentation science, data-driven product strategy/optimizations, internal productivity/incentives, audience science, and impact/ROI measurement. The ideal candidate will enjoy wearing many hats, possess an economist's mindset and a strong ability to effectively translate business questions into tractable quantitative frameworks, and excel at leveraging AI to build and scale robust, interpretable, and production-ready models/systems/tools. We're looking for someone who automates the repetitive, builds tools that force-multiply the team's output/influence, and treats AI as a core part of their workflow - not a side project. If you are passionate about leveraging data to shape the future of digital media, we encourage you to apply and be a part of our dynamic team. As a Data Scientist, you will... - Collaborate with economists, analysts, and other data scientists to build and scale econometric/ML models and quantitative tools - owning end-to-end scoping, data pipelining, feature engineering, model development/refinement, production-grade deployment, impact measurement, and adoption - Research and evaluate emerging tools and techniques (AI-driven and otherwise), and identify novel data sources to leverage in quantitative work – both from within Audible/Amazon and from 3P sources - Collaborate closely with Product, Content, and Marketing partners to drive broad impact and ensure that solutions are integrated into cross-functional workflows and executive decision-making - Represent the team in a range of settings - from reviews with senior Amazon scientists to reviews with senior Audible/Amazon business leaders - Mentor junior scientists and raise the bar for a new generation of scalable, AI-enabled science/analytical work, both within Audible and across the broader Amazon community ABOUT AUDIBLE Audible is the leading producer and provider of audio storytelling. We spark listeners’ imaginations, offering immersive, cinematic experiences full of inspiration and insight to enrich our customers daily lives. We are a global company with an entrepreneurial spirit. We are dreamers and inventors who are passionate about the positive impact Audible can make for our customers and our neighbors. This spirit courses throughout Audible, supporting a culture of creativity and inclusion built on our People Principles and our mission to build more equitable communities in the cities we call home. Key job responsibilities
Applied Scientist II, Sponsored Products and Brands - Advertiser Growth and Strategies
US, WA, Seattle
We are looking for an Applied Scientist II to build the AI behind Auto Optimization: agentic systems that automatically optimize advertisers' campaigns on their behalf. Guided by an advertiser's standing instructions, these agents observe how a campaign is performing, reason about what to change, and act on it continuously as conditions in the marketplace shift. Optimizing a campaign well is a collection of decisions. It means working across every control an advertiser has at once: the keywords and products they target, the bids they set, the budgets they allocate, and where their ads appear, all aligned with the preferences of the advertiser. These choices are connected, since a change to targeting changes the right bid, and a change in bids changes how budget should be spent. You will build agents that make these decisions together rather than one lever at a time, and that adapt across many different campaign types and advertiser goals, from growing sales on established products to reaching new customers and launching new ones. Working backwards from the needs of millions of advertisers, you will solve ambiguous problems, invent new methods, and deliver them into a live product that manages real campaigns. You will stay deeply hands-on with the hardest technical problems, collaborate with product and engineering partners on approach, and help raise the quality of the team's science. Key job responsibilities - Build agentic systems that automatically optimize campaigns on an advertiser's behalf, working holistically across every control they have (targeting, bids, budgets, and placements) rather than one lever at a time, and generalizing across many campaign types and advertiser goals, from scaling a proven product to reaching new customers and launching something new. - Encode the dynamics of the auction and marketplace into how the agent reasons, balancing advertiser return, shopper experience, and marketplace health. - Turn raw signal into intelligence by defining and curating the datasets that train and evaluate these agents, from campaign and marketplace data to auction and bid/budget signals, impressions, clicks, conversions, and search-term performance. - Push the frontier of agent design, building the core of the agent itself: planning, tool use (for example, auction simulation, ML models, and optimization routines), and long-horizon reasoning across decisions that interact, and writing the production-quality, critical-path code that carries it from prototype to launch. - Set the bar for trust by developing the evaluation and safety methods that make it trustworthy to let an agent act on live campaigns and real budgets. - Grow with a team that grows the field: contribute to our scientific agenda, learn alongside strong scientists and engineers, and share your work with the broader community. About the team The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through the latest 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. This team within Sponsored Products and Brands is focused on guiding and supporting millions of advertisers to meet their advertising needs of creating and managing ad campaigns. At this scale, the complexity of diverse advertiser goals, campaign types, and market dynamics creates both a massive technical challenge and a transformative opportunity: even small improvements in guidance systems can have outsized impact on advertiser success and Amazon's retail ecosystem. Our vision is to build a highly personalized, context-aware agentic advertiser guidance system that leverages LLMs together with tools such as auction simulations, ML models, and optimization algorithms. This agentic framework will operate across both chat and non-chat experiences in the ad console, scaling to natural language queries as well as autonomously managing campaigns based on deep understanding of the advertiser. To execute this vision, we collaborate closely with stakeholders across Ad Console, Sales, and Marketing to identify opportunities, from high-level product guidance down to granular keyword recommendations, and deliver them through a tailored, personalized experience. Our work is grounded in state-of-the-art agent architectures, tool integration, reasoning frameworks, and model customization approaches (including tuning, MCP, and preference optimization), ensuring our systems are both scalable and adaptive.
Research Scientist, Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Research Scientist to develop cutting-edge interactions that make robots feel alive, personal, and fun. In this role, you will focus on verbal and non-verbal conversational systems, social dynamics, memory, and long-term relationship formation between robots, their environments, and the people they interact with. Your contributions will be essential in advancing robotics by enabling expressive, socially intelligent, and trustworthy interactions between robots and humans.
Research Scientist, Mobile Manipulation Robotics (I/O)
US, MA, North Reading
Amazon Robotics is transforming warehouse automation through edge AI and machine learning applied to real-world robotics challenges. We're seeking a Research Scientist to advance our mobile manipulation capabilities by developing novel learning-based approaches that enable robots to navigate and manipulate objects in dynamic fulfillment environments. This role offers the opportunity to conduct original research and translate state-of-the-art findings into production systems operating at Amazon's unprecedented scale. Key job responsibilities Research and Algorithm Development: Formulate novel research problems in robot learning and manipulation, design new model architectures, validate hypotheses through rigorous experimentation, and advance the state of the art in learning-based robotics. Data Strategy and Pipeline Design: Define data requirements for research initiatives, design scalable collection and curation strategies, establish governance and provenance standards, and build reusable pipelines ensuring data quality and reproducibility. Experimentation and Scientific Validation: Design and execute experiments in simulation and real-world embodiments, develop evaluation methodologies and benchmarks, perform ablation studies and statistical analyses, and iterate systematically to advance model performance. Prototyping and Research Infrastructure: Develop clean, well-documented research codebases, build experimentation frameworks and evaluation tooling, contribute to shared training infrastructure, and implement interfaces for broader robotics integration. Scientific Leadership and Publication: Drive an independent research agenda aligned with team objectives, publish at top-tier venues (e.g., RSS, CoRL, ICRA, NeurIPS), identify research gaps through literature reviews, and present findings via technical reports and talks. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with scientists, engineers, and leaders across teams to translate research into deployable solutions, mentor junior researchers, contribute to the team's scientific culture, and support integration with robotics hardware teams. A day in the life If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply! About the team Are you inspired by invention? Is problem solving through teamwork in your DNA? Do you like the idea of seeing how your work impacts the bigger picture? Answer yes to any of these and you’ll fit right in here at Amazon Robotics. We are a smart, collaborative team of enthusiastic doers that work passionately to apply innovative advances in robotics and software to solve real-world challenges that will transform our customers’ experiences in ways we can’t even image yet. We invent new improvements every day. We are Amazon Robotics and we will give you the tools and support you need to invent with us in ways that are rewarding, fulfilling and fun!
Sr. Applied Scientist, DemandTech - AdDelivery, Experience and Measurement
US, NY, New York
Want to work on building a Amazon Ads billion dollar business, innovate on a new product, and have a positive impact on millions of views while working with industry-leading technologies? We're growing a team to support the Sponsored Ads business that powers the advertising experience for millions of viewers and advertisers daily. Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business and developing a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are constantly challenging ourselves to create world-class products and an unparalleled shopping experience for our hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities We are building the next-gen smart ads campaign. At its core is an Intelligence Flywheel — an architecture where every component's output is designed to train models that improve every other component. The Model Layer that is meant to power every capability currently has no dedicated science ownership. As the Senior Applied Scientist on this team, you own the science that makes the flywheel turn. You will turn static, threshold-based logic into self-improving, closed-loop intelligence, and define the decision policies that let the system act autonomously with advertiser trust. Concretely, you will: * Build predictive issue-detection models that identify under-delivery, over-delivery, and performance degradation from campaign signals before they materially impact advertisers. * Design the intervention-selection policy — which autonomous action to take — framed as a contextual bandit: choose, observe, update. Engineers implement action execution; you define the policy that selects actions. * Establish causal attribution for autonomous optimization, separating the effect of our interventions from organic performance change, so improvements can be attributed and advertiser trust in autonomy can be earned. * Integrate and adapt cross-model signals. Combine creative-quality, product-relevance, and budget signals into a unified advertiser-intelligence picture, and adapt general-purpose partner models to our product reality via fine-tuning, re-ranking, or thin adaptation layers. * Close recommendation and grading feedback loops — define reward schemas for accept/reject and performance-vs-baseline signals, correlate creative-quality scores with real campaign outcomes, and feed empirical findings back to both our product and partner science teams. You will work backwards from ambiguous business problems, set the science roadmap for the Model Layer, and partner closely with the team's software engineers — who own the services, pipelines, and execution infrastructure — so that model artifacts you produce are deployed and served in production. This is a high-leverage, high-autonomy role: your outputs are consumed by multiple engineering workstreams at once, and you set the abstractions the team builds on. About the team We are focused on goal-oriented, AI powered workflows that help advertisers achieve their marketing objectives. We collect campaign goals, surface relevant data at key decision points, and provide reporting that validates decision-making. Our product suite guides advertisers in building campaigns with optimal targeting, creative formats, inventory, and bid models that are highly likely to hit their goals — reducing the need for manual intervention.
Applied Scientist, Catalog System Services Science
US, WA, Seattle
At Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS), our mission is to power the online buying experience for customers worldwide so they can find, discover, and buy any product they want. We innovate on behalf of our customers to ensure uniqueness and consistency of product identity and to infer relationships between products in Amazon Catalog to drive the selection gateway for the search and browse experiences on the website. We're solving a fundamental AI challenge: establishing product relevant information at unprecedented scale with Frontier Models and Agents. The scale is staggering: billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity ranging from electronics to groceries to digital content. The research challenges are immense. GenAI and VLMs hold transformative promise for catalog understanding, but we operate where traditional methods fail: ambiguous problem spaces, incomplete and noisy data, inherent uncertainty, reasoning across both images and textual data, and explaining decisions at scale. Enriching product information requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data, all while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily. Amazon's Catalog System Services Science team is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help us make the world's best product catalog even better. In this role, you will partner with technology and business leaders to build new state-of-the-art algorithms, models, and services. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic shopping experiences, working in a collaborative environment where you can experiment with massive data from the world's largest product catalog, tackle problems at the frontier of AI research, rapidly implement and deploy your algorithmic ideas at scale, across millions of customers. Key job responsibilities - Formulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval. In essence, translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworks - Design and implement leading models leveraging frontier models, and agentic architectures to enrich catalog information at billion-product scale - Pioneer explainable AI methodologies that balance model performance with scalability requirements for production systems impacting millions of daily customer decisions - Own end-to-end ML pipelines from research ideation to production deployment, processing petabytes of multimodal data with rigorous evaluation frameworks - Represent the team in the broader science community - publishing findings, delivering tech talks, and staying at the forefront of GenAI, VLM, and agentic system research
Applied Scientist I, Amazon Shipping
IN, HR, Gurugram
Building large-scale forecasting and optimization systems that power Amazon’s global transportation network and directly impact customer experience and cost. Key job responsibilities 1. Guide model and system design across a range of techniques, including tree-based models, deep learning (LSTMs, transformers), LLMs, and reinforcement learning. 2. Ensure models are production-ready, scalable, and robust through close partnership with stakeholders. 3. Partner with Product, Operations, and Engineering leaders to enable proactive decision-making and corrective actions. 4 Own end-to-end business metrics, directly influencing customer experience, cost optimization, and network reliability. 5. Help contribute to the broader ML community through publications, conference submissions, and internal knowledge sharing.
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