Margarita Chli, vice director at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich, is seen standing in front of a room giving a talk.
Margarita Chli, an Amazon Research Award recipient, is vice director at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich, where she heads up the Vision for Robotics Lab.
Lukas Bigler/wavelighthouse

How Margarita Chli is using drones to go where people can’t

When it comes to assisting search-and-rescue missions, dogs are second to none, but an Amazon Research Award recipient says they might have some competition from drones.

Today, using drones in responding to natural or man-made disasters is limited by the fact that they need to be both individually piloted and have their observations interpreted by a human. But what if drones could “see” on their own? What if they could not only make decisions about navigation, but also where to look more closely — or even collaborate with other drones and robots to observe a specific location?

That suite of skills is exactly what Margarita Chli, an Amazon Research Award recipient and vice director at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), is exploring. Chli heads up the Vision for Robotics Lab there (V4RL), and she’s been using her 2019 Amazon Research Award (she was awarded one in 2020 as well) to advance robotic vision for small aircraft, including drones.

Chli grew up in Greece and Cyprus with math teachers as parents, so while she was “heavily trained” in the language of mathematics, she didn’t always know robotics would be her professional focus.

Chli says it was really a series of lucky events that led to her introduction to “influential and brilliant scientists who planted the seed of intellectual curiosity in this area.”

After studying computer science and engineering at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she considered her options.

“The coolest thing at the time seemed to be this PhD position at Imperial College in London, where my advisor, Andrew Davison, brought me into the area of robotic vision. That’s how it all started,” says Chli.

Related content
Measuring the displacement between location estimates derived from different camera views can help enforce the local consistency vital to navigation.

Davison’s expertise was pioneering monocular SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), which is about “understanding how a camera moves in space,” says Chli. In pursuing her PhD, Chli did a lot of coding on her laptop, connecting that computer to a single camera and testing algorithms.

During her postdoc at ETH Zurich, which began in 2010, she applied her computer-vision algorithms to small drones. Chli says it was exciting to translate what she was doing on her laptop to a robot that was actually moving. That’s when she envisioned the potential impact for this technology.

“It's one thing to write some code and look at beautiful images, and another thing to get a robot moving – you get a feeling that you're creating something. And even going beyond that, to create something that can help people,” says Chli.

Drones in disaster zones

Her time at ETH Zurich also marked an era where drones, which had once been prohibitively expensive, were becoming more popular and accessible. “The technological hardware side of things was blooming, which meant we could run then-expensive image-processing algorithms onboard smaller and smaller platforms.” Those drones were more expensive, bulkier, less flexible, and lacked the processing power compared to today’s drones, “but nevertheless, the applications and imagination were there already,” she says.

As she wrote her research proposals, Chli expanded her thinking about the power of this technology. “What can we do with this? How we can use drones and robots and robotic vision to have robots in our everyday lives, that that can help us with tasks that we don't want to do?”

Those questions have propelled her research ever since.

Margarita Chli is seen speaking behind a lectern that says ETH Zürich on it, there are two large flower vases just behind her
One of the first projects for Margarita Chli at ETH Zurich: using drones for search-and-rescue missions.
Oliver Bartenschlager

One of the first projects Chli got to work on at ETH Zurich — where she was appointed as a deputy director of the lab she was working as a postdoc — was using drones for search-and-rescue missions. That work involved drones accessing areas that would be too dangerous or time-consuming for rescuers on foot, allowing rescuers to search for missing people with less risk.

Working backwards from the end-user, Chli spoke with rescuers at Club Alpino Italiano and learned that they didn’t want anything in the field that wasn’t directly useful — drones that worked independently made more sense than dedicating human resources to flying and monitoring drones.

These rescuers had lost colleagues to this very risky work, which takes place in harsh weather conditions, and so they were understandably demanding — and skeptical. “They had no time for delays or mistakes from fussy hardware or software,” she says.

The requirement for simplicity and a just-works solution has “been a great drive for my research ever since, to be honest: to develop plug-and-play, no-fuss systems, such that mission experts do not need to also be robotics experts or pilots.”

Related content
Radhika Nagpal has created robots that can build towers without anyone in charge. Now she’s turned her focus to fulfillment center robots.

While supporting the work of search-and-rescue teams is still an important component of her work, Chli and team have expanded the scope of their research.

Chli also envisions drones being used for inspecting hard-to-reach areas like wind-turbine blades, or power plants. “In 2012, there was a big explosion in the power plant on the island where I come from in Cyprus. We needed drones to be able to inspect the boilers for cracks to figure out how safe it was for humans to go closer,” she says.

Truly useful robots

This incident inspired Chli to focus on designing robots with real utility.

“I found it quite astonishing that we would see in the news robots that could do all sorts of gimmicky things, but we didn’t have reliable enough robots that could really help humans in a time of dire need.” She wanted to change that, and with her background in robotic vision and interest in drones, creating an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could “see” was the next challenge. In 2013, she was part of the team that ran the first vision-based autonomous flights of a small helicopter.

Margarita Chli is seen standing on a garden terrace, a drone is hovering over her shoulder in the background.
Margarita Chli is tackling drone challenges such as how a drone can maintain estimating its motion as accurately as possible.
Daniel Winkler

That same year, Chli took a post as a professor at the University of Edinburgh as a Chancellor's fellow. There, she started Vision for Robotics Lab (V4RL), which focuses on vision for robots, especially UAVs. In 2015, she returned to ETH Zurich, where she’s now professor and continues to lead V4RL.

Her research has been accelerated thanks to the resources made available to her as an Amazon Research Award recipient; resources that include access to AWS EC2 and S3.

“I think that what Amazon is doing is a great thing, because it's helping us actually see what researchers can do with its tools and it is democratizing where research is going,” she says.

She’s using those tools to tackle some of the most important problems in her work at ETH Zurich, like “how to figure out where a good spot to land is for our drones, and how we can keep a drone estimating its motion as accurately as possible, without being affected by water, trees, pedestrians, cars, and other dynamic, moving parts of the scene.” While flight-critical tasks must be processed on the drones themselves, transferring other processing tasks to the cloud, like semantic segmentation and high-level path planning, makes sense, says Chli.

Drones helping humanity

Chli thinks drones that can see and make decisions on their own will serve humanity outside search-and-rescue operations.

Researchers tracking wildlife migrations or large, dispersed herds could use drones to keep tabs on individual animals in ways humans on foot can’t, while at the same time understanding group movements.

Robots are going to help us in many ways that today we cannot really imagine, in ways we never thought possible.
Margarita Chli

“Archaeologists have come to us and said, ‘We have about 250 archaeological sites in Greece, we have a few tools around like a tripod, and I can put it in different places and take laser scans, but it's heavy, it's bulky. I don't want to find holes in my model, because I don't have time to go back to every one of these sites to capture new data.’ That’s where drones could be ideal, because they can map an area,” says Chli.

Chli says she’s become a bit of a drone evangelist because often when people hear her speak about autonomous drones, they think of military applications — whereas her focus is on what robots can do to improve the human condition.

Chli said she understands how that distrust emerged. “This technology has been growing very quickly, particularly comparing the progress today to a few years back,” she said. “And the less we know about how this technology works, the more scared we are of it.”

That’s why, she says, it’s important to raise questions and have open dialogues to address concerns because, as she sees it, robots are going to be part of our everyday lives.

“Robots are going to help us in many ways that today we cannot really imagine,” Chli says, “in ways we never thought possible.”

Research areas

Related content

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
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, 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 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, 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
IN, KA, Bengaluru
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. We are highly motivated, collaborative and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities. The ATT team, based in Bangalore, is responsible for ensuring that ads are relevant and is of good quality, leading to higher conversion for the sellers and providing a great experience for the customers. We deal with one of the world’s largest product catalog, handle billions of requests a day with plans to grow it by order of magnitude and use automated systems to validate tens of millions of offers submitted by thousands of merchants in multiple countries and languages. In this role, you will build and develop ML models to address content understanding problems in Ads. These models will rely on a variety of visual and textual features requiring expertise in both domains. These models need to scale to multiple languages and countries. You will collaborate with engineers and other scientists to build, train and deploy these models. As part of these activities, you will develop production level code that enables moderation of millions of ads submitted each day.
US, WA, Seattle
The Search Supply & Experiences team, within Sponsored Products, is seeking an Applied Scientist to solve challenging problems in natural language understanding, personalization, and other areas using the latest techniques in machine learning. In our team, you will have the opportunity to create new ads experiences that elevate the shopping experience for our hundreds of millions customers worldwide. As an Applied Scientist, you will partner with other talented scientists and engineers to design, train, test, and deploy machine learning models. You will be responsible for translating business and engineering requirements into deliverables, and performing detailed experiment analysis to determine how shoppers and advertisers are responding to your changes. We are looking for candidates who thrive in an exciting, fast-paced environment and who have a strong personal interest in learning, researching, and creating new technologies with high customer impact. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist on the Search Supply & Experiences team you will: - Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous datasets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales, without compromising the shopper experience. - Drive end-to-end machine learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, and complexity. - Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your ML models. - Design and run experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis. - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving. - Stay up to date on the latest advances in machine learning. About the team We are a customer-obsessed team of engineers, technologists, product leaders, and scientists. We are focused on continuous exploration of contexts and creatives where advertising delivers value to shoppers and advertisers. We specifically work on new ads experiences globally with the goal of helping shoppers make the most informed purchase decision. We obsess about our customers and we are continuously innovating on their behalf to enrich their shopping experience on Amazon
US, WA, Seattle
Have you ever wondered how Amazon launches and maintains a consistent customer experience across hundreds of countries and languages it serves its customers? Are you passionate about data and mathematics, and hope to impact the experience of millions of customers? Are you obsessed with designing simple algorithmic solutions to very challenging problems? If so, we look forward to hearing from you! At Amazon, we strive to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where both internal and external customers can find and discover anything they want in their own language of preference. Our Translations Services (TS) team plays a pivotal role in expanding the reach of our marketplace worldwide and enables thousands of developers and other stakeholders (Product Managers, Program Managers, Linguists) in developing locale specific solutions. Amazon Translations Services (TS) is seeking an Applied Scientist to be based in our Seattle office. As a key member of the Science and Engineering team of TS, this person will be responsible for designing algorithmic solutions based on data and mathematics for translating billions of words annually across 130+ and expanding set of locales. The successful applicant will ensure that there is minimal human touch involved in any language translation and accurate translated text is available to our worldwide customers in a streamlined and optimized manner. With access to vast amounts of data, cutting-edge technology, and a diverse community of talented individuals, you will have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the way customers and stakeholders engage with Amazon and our platform worldwide. Together, we will drive innovation, solve complex problems, and shape the future of e-commerce. Key job responsibilities * Apply your expertise in LLM models to design, develop, and implement scalable machine learning solutions that address complex language translation-related challenges in the eCommerce space. * Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including software engineers, data scientists, and product managers, to define project requirements, establish success metrics, and deliver high-quality solutions. * Conduct thorough data analysis to gain insights, identify patterns, and drive actionable recommendations that enhance seller performance and customer experiences across various international marketplaces. * Continuously explore and evaluate state-of-the-art modeling techniques and methodologies to improve the accuracy and efficiency of language translation-related systems. * Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, providing clear explanations and guidance on proposed solutions and their potential impact. About the team We are a start-up mindset team. As the long-term technical strategy is still taking shape, there is a lot of opportunity for this fresh Science team to innovate by leveraging Gen AI technoligies to build scalable solutions from scratch. Our Vision: Language will not stand in the way of anyone on earth using Amazon products and services. Our Mission: We are the enablers and guardians of translation for Amazon's customers. We do this by offering hands-off-the-wheel service to all Amazon teams, optimizing translation quality and speed at the lowest cost possible.
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon.com strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company where customers can shop in our stores to find and discover anything they want to buy. We hire the world's brightest minds, offering them a fast paced, technologically sophisticated and friendly work environment. Economists at Amazon partner closely with senior management, business stakeholders, scientist and engineers, and economist leadership to solve key business problems ranging from Amazon Web Services, Kindle, Prime, inventory planning, international retail, third party merchants, search, pricing, labor and employment planning, effective benefits (health, retirement, etc.) and beyond. Amazon Economists build econometric models using our world class data systems and apply approaches from a variety of skillsets – applied macro/time series, applied micro, econometric theory, empirical IO, empirical health, labor, public economics and related fields are all highly valued skillsets at Amazon. You will work in a fast moving environment to solve business problems as a member of either a cross-functional team embedded within a business unit or a central science and economics organization. You will be expected to develop techniques that apply econometrics to large data sets, address quantitative problems, and contribute to the design of automated systems around the company. About the team The International Seller Services (ISS) Economics team is a dynamic group at the forefront of shaping Amazon's global seller ecosystem. As part of ISS, we drive innovation and growth through sophisticated economic analysis and data-driven insights. Our mission is critical: we're transforming how Amazon empowers millions of international sellers to succeed in the digital marketplace. Our team stands at the intersection of innovative technology and practical business solutions. We're leading Amazon's transformation in seller services through work with Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI, while tackling fundamental questions about seller growth, marketplace dynamics, and operational efficiency. What sets us apart is our unique blend of rigorous economic methodology and practical business impact. We're not just analyzing data – we're building the frameworks and measurement systems that will define the future of Amazon's seller services. Whether we're optimizing the seller journey, evaluating new technologies, or designing innovative service models, our team transforms complex economic challenges into actionable insights that drive real-world results. Join us in shaping how millions of businesses worldwide succeed on Amazon's marketplace, while working on problems that combine economic theory, advanced analytics, and innovative technology.
GB, London
Are you looking to work at the forefront of Machine Learning and AI? Would you be excited to apply cutting edge Generative AI algorithms to solve real world problems with significant impact? The AWS Industries Team at AWS helps AWS customers implement Generative AI solutions and realize transformational business opportunities for AWS customers in the most strategic industry verticals. This is a team of data scientists, engineers, and architects working step-by-step with customers to build bespoke solutions that harness the power of generative AI. The team helps customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, select and train and fine tune the right models, define paths to navigate technical or business challenges, develop proof-of-concepts, and build applications to launch these solutions at scale. The AWS Industries team provides guidance and implements best practices for applying generative AI responsibly and cost efficiently. You will work directly with customers and innovate in a fast-paced organization that contributes to game-changing projects and technologies. You will design and run experiments, research new algorithms, and find new ways of optimizing risk, profitability, and customer experience. In this Data Scientist role you will be capable of using GenAI and other techniques to design, evangelize, and implement and scale cutting-edge solutions for never-before-solved problems. Key job responsibilities - Collaborate with AI/ML scientists, engineers, and architects to research, design, develop, and evaluate cutting-edge generative AI algorithms and build ML systems to address real-world challenges - Interact with customers directly to understand the business problem, help and aid them in implementation of generative AI solutions, deliver briefing and deep dive sessions to customers and guide customer on adoption patterns and paths to production - Create and deliver best practice recommendations, tutorials, blog posts, publications, sample code, and presentations adapted to technical, business, and executive stakeholder - Provide customer and market feedback to Product and Engineering teams to help define product direction About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship and Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.