“In the Research Spotlight”: A New Blog Post Series

In addition to the continued contributions to the AI community through Apache MXNet and the Amazon AI services of Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition, AWS also has an active team of AI researchers. These researchers have rich and interesting backgrounds in machine learning and deep learning, from academia, startups, and enterprises, all with one primary mission: to lower the barrier to AI for all AWS developers by making it more accessible and easier to use. As Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Machine Learning at AWS, succinctly stated in a recent article in Silicon Angle, “Our goal is to basically democratize artificial intelligence, to make AI accessible to every developer.”

In this Research Spotlight series, I sit down with many of these researchers for in-depth conversations about their past experiences and to provide a peek into what they are working on now at AWS. We’re excited to have such a strong group of AI experts joining AWS, including  the following recent hires:

Alex Smola joined AWS last July as the Director of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. He is an active member of the academic research community, authoring or contributing to 462 titles with 75,000+ citations, frequently speaking on the topic of Apache MXNet and how to design efficient algorithms at scale.

Anima Anandkumar joined Amazon Web Services in November 2016, as Principal Scientist on Deep Learning, currently on leave from the EECS Department at UC Irvine, where she has been an associate professor since August 2010. Her research interests are in the areas of large-scale machine learning, non-convex optimization and high-dimensional statistics.

Hassan Sawaf is our Director of Applied Science & Artificial Intelligence. From DARPA to eBay and now AWS, Hassan has been working in the fields of Automatic Speech Recognition, Computer Vision, Natural Language Understanding, and Machine Translation for over 20 years.

Mu Li is a senior applied scientist for machine learning at Amazon Web Services. Before joining Amazon, he was the CTO of Marianas Labs, an Artificial Intelligence startup. He also served as a principal research architect at the Institute of Deep Learning at Baidu.

Edo Liberty is a Principal Scientist and the manager of the Amazon AI Algorithms group. Edo and his group tackle some of the most interesting problems in machine learning, data science, and scalable systems.

I’ll continue to highlight members of this group in future blog posts. Watch this space!