KingFisher

KingFisher is a team of several graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign led by faculty advisor Julia Hockenmaier.

The team's interests and experiences include computer vision, goal-oriented dialogue, multimodal learning, robotics and action planning, and real world applications of embodied NLP agents. Their vision for the project is a robot that can both understand and utilize the complexities of human language to interact with users and the environment in meaningful ways.

uofillinois_kingfisher_teamphoto.jpg
Location: Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
Faculty advisor: Julia Hockenmaier

Neeloy C. — Team leader

Neeloy is a second year PhD student in the Human-Centered Autonomy Lab at UIUC studying robotics and artificial intelligence. Some of his research works include applying reinforcement learning (RL) to dense robot crowd navigation, tackling sparse reward RL problems, vehicle anomaly detection, and human-robot interaction tasks in vehicle cockpits. Throughout his higher-level education, he has gained industry experience from companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Qualcomm, Brunswick, and Ford. He has also been a teaching assistant for the Introduction to Robotics class at UIUC, aiding students to learn the fundamentals of robotics in a laboratory setting. Neeloy is excited to apply what he has learned from other problem settings to the embodied AI task, and gain experience in computer vision and natural language processing.

Abhinav A.

Abhinav is a first year Statistics (Concentration: Analytics) Graduate student at UIUC with 5 years of experience at Verizon as a Data Scientist. He completed his undergraduate in Computer Science & Engineering (Concentration: AI) in 2016 from Lovely Professional University, India. He has worked as a DevOps Administrator, Applications Developer, Real Time Streaming Data Engineer along with experience in Data Science. In that space, he has worked on Predictive Modeling, NLP, Anomaly Detection, Sequence Mining, XAI, and CV. He has been a Microsoft Student Ambassador in 2014-2015 and a AI6 city ambassador of Hyderabad, India in 2018.

Blerim A.

Blerim is a 3rd-year undergraduate studying computer engineering at UIUC and a recent transfer from the College of DuPage. His research interests include computer vision and perception with applications in robotics. His main areas of expertise include embedded systems and electronics with applications in robotics and IoT. He has worked as an embedded security intern at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory creating machine learning models for network security within IoT devices. He has also led the development of a mining robot for the NASA Lunabotics Competition which leveraged ROS, Realsense cameras and various other electronics.

Peixin C.

Peixin is an Electrical and Computer Engineering Ph.D. student at UIUC in the area of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. His research interests are embodied language understanding, robotics, and reinforcement learning. His works involve developing embodied vision-based spoken language understanding agents for robotic systems using reinforcement learning. He also has experience in learning-based robotic navigation in both static and dynamic environments. He is familiar with robotic simulation and has designed and created multiple OpenAI Gym environments based on PyBullet and AI2Thor. He is also familiar with deep learning packages such as TensorFlow and Pytorch.

Haomiao C.

Haomiao is an undergraduate student at UIUC studying statistics, computer science and physics. He is interested in machine learning, robotics, NLP and computer vision. Haomiao has experience working on computer vision projects focusing on 3D structure reconstruction. Haomiao also has experience with implementing, training, and optimizing different machine learning models. Haomiao has some previous experience in NLP, applying semi-supervised learning in language classification. Haomiao is interested in all kinds of NLP models and applications and is willing to learn and explore more through the project.

Runxiang (Sam) C.

Sam is a third year Computer Science PhD student at UIUC. I work on machine learning, currently focusing on multimodal learning. Previously, Sam researched on reliability of distributed systems, specifically on misconfiguration-related failure prevention. Sam obtained a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UC Davis in 2019, where he worked on multimodal machine translation, conversational AI, and software data analysis.

Jongwon P.

Jongwon is an undergraduate student at UIUC majoring in Computer Science. Jognwon's interest lies in the intersection of NLU and Multimodal Learning, envisioning weakly supervised models that assimilate the functionalities of the brain. I am passionate about the attention mechanism employed by transformers and their applications outside language tokens. Jognwon's prior experience includes creating a BERT model that simulates the day-and-night continual learning process of the brain for text summarization. Outside the ML research, Jognwon develops websites (fullstack) and deploys ML strategies for quantitative trading in the cryptocurrency space.

Devika P.

Devika is a third-year undergraduate at UIUC majoring in Computer Science. She has previously interned at Motorola Solutions as a Software Engineering Intern working on their predictive analytics team developing machine learning algorithms for mission-critical radio networks. Devika has also interned at Apple on the Siri Product team within their ML organization working on optimizing resources for best performance using data analytics and ML models. Previously, her research interests have included packet-scheduling in high criticality networks and theoretical topology

Nikil R.

Nikil is an undergraduate studying Mathematics and Computer Science at UIUC. His research interests are primarily in natural language processing and computer vision. He has experience working on multiple NLP sub-areas such as topic modeling, semantic similarity, keyphrase extraction and generation, and text embeddings. He also has experience training,
testing, optimizing and deploying deep learning models (involving computer vision and time series forecasting) using the power of high performance computing, with applications to diverse domains including astrophysics, spectroscopy and cancer research. In addition, he has some familiarity with AWS, having used it in projects involving NLP and machine learning.

Risham S.

Risham is a Computer Science PhD student at UIUC in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Her current interests are grounding and multimodal networks and she is working on a similar goal-oriented dialogue task on a Commander model on the Minecraft Dialogue Corpus. She also has experience working on a range of NLP projects including evaluating the faithfulness of grounded representations and their training dynamics within VQA, information extraction from scientific papers, annotating, creating, and updating datasets, and text classification and generation.

Kulbir S.

Kulbir is currently pursuing a PhD at UIUC where he works to integrate the Alexa API with Agricultural robots to enable remote voice control of CNC based gardening robots. Kulbir's interest in Robotics was fostered during undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering. During Kulbir's masters in robotics at the University of Maryland, he built a solid theoretical foundation in computer science and robotics, by taking core robotics courses focussing on Planning and Perception for Autonomous Systems, ROS and Decision Making.

Julia Hockenmaier — Faculty advisor

Julia Hockenmaier is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her main area of research is computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Latest news

The latest updates, stories, and more about Alexa Prize.
ES, B, Barcelona
Are you interested in defining the science strategy that enables Amazon to market to millions of customers based on their lifecycle needs rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns? We are seeking a Applied Scientist to lead the science strategy for our Lifecycle Marketing Experimentation roadmap within the PRIMAS (Prime & Marketing analytics and science) team. The position is open to candidates in Amsterdam and Barcelona. In this role, you will own the end-to-end science approach that enables EU marketing to shift from broad, generic campaigns to targeted, cohort-based marketing that changes customer behavior. This is a high-ambiguity, high-impact role where you will define what problems are worth solving, build the science foundation from scratch, and influence senior business leaders on marketing strategy. You will work directly with Business Directors and channel leaders to solve critical business problems: how do we win back customers lost to competitors, convert Young Adults to Prime, and optimize marketing spend by de-averaging across customer cohorts. Key job responsibilities Science Strategy & Leadership: 1. Own the end-to-end science strategy for lifecycle marketing, defining the roadmap across audience targeting, behavioral modeling, and measurement 2. Navigate high ambiguity in defining customer journey frameworks and behavioral models – our most challenging science problem with no established playbook 3. Lead strategic discussions with business leaders translating business needs into science solutions and building trust across business and tech partners 4. Mentor and guide a team of 2-3 scientists and BIEs on technical execution while contributing hands-on to the hardest problems Advanced Customer Behavior Modeling: 1. Build sophisticated propensity models identifying customer cohorts based on lifecycle stage and complex behavioral patterns (e.g., Bargain hunters, Young adults Prime prospects) 2. Define customer journey frameworks using advanced techniques (Hidden Markov Models, sequential decision-making) to model how customers transition across lifecycle stages 3. Identify which customer behaviors and triggers drive lifecycle progression and what messaging/levers are most effective for each cohort 4. Integrate 1P behavioral data with 2P survey insights to create rich, actionable audience definitions Measurement & Cross-Workstream Integration: 1. Partner with measurement scientist to design experiments (RCTs) that isolate audience targeting effects from creative effects 2. Ensure audience definitions, journey models, and measurement frameworks work coherently across Meta, LiveRamp, and owned channels 3. Establish feedback loops connecting measurement insights back to model improvements About the team The PRIMAS (Prime & Marketing Analytics and Science) is the team that support the science & analytics needs of the EU Prime and Marketing organization, an org that supports the Prime and Marketing programs in European marketplaces and comprises 250-300 employees. The PRIMAS team, is part of a larger tech tech team of 100+ people called WIMSI (WW Integrated Marketing Systems and Intelligence). WIMSI core mission is to accelerate marketing technology capabilities that enable de-averaged customer experiences across the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to create state-of-the-art solutions for providing better value to Amazon’s customers? Do you want to build and deploy advanced algorithmic systems that help optimize millions of transactions every day? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data to solve real world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you like to innovate and simplify? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Machine Learning and Data Sciences team for India Consumer Businesses. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, know how to deliver, love to work with data, are deeply technical, highly innovative and long for the opportunity to build solutions to challenging problems that directly impact the company's bottom-line, we want to talk to you. Major responsibilities - Use machine learning and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems - Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data to help automate and optimize key processes - Design, development, evaluate and deploy innovative and highly scalable models for predictive learning - Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches - Work closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations - Work closely with business owners and operations staff to optimize various business operations - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation - Mentor other scientists and engineers in the use of ML techniques
ES, M, Madrid
At Amazon, we are committed to being the Earth's most customer-centric company. The European International Technology group (EU INTech) owns the enhancement and delivery of Amazon's engineering to all the varied customers and cultures of the world. We do this through a combination of partnerships with other Amazon technical teams and our own innovative new projects. You will be joining the Tamale team to work on Haul. As part of EU INTech and Haul, Tamale strives to create a discovery-driven shopping experience using challenging machine learning and ranking solutions. You will be exposed to large-scale recommendation systems, multi-objective optimization, and state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, and you'll be part of a key effort to improve our customers' browsing experience by building next-generation ranking models for Amazon Haul's endless scroll experience. We are looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Scientist with a strong machine learning background to help build industry-leading ranking solutions. We strongly value your hard work and obsession to solve complex problems on behalf of Amazon customers. Key job responsibilities We look for applied scientists who possess a wide variety of skills. As the successful applicant for this role, you will work closely with your business partners to identify opportunities for innovation. You will apply machine learning solutions to optimize multi-objective ranking, improve discovery engagement through contextual signals, and scale ranking systems across multiple marketplaces. You will work with business leaders, scientists, and product managers to translate business and functional requirements into concrete deliverables, including the design, development, testing, and deployment of highly scalable distributed ranking services. You will be part of a team of scientists and engineers working on solving ranking and personalization challenges at scale. You will be able to influence the scientific roadmap of the team, setting the standards for scientific excellence. You will be working with state-of-the-art architectures and real-time feature serving systems. Your work will improve the experience of millions of daily customers using Amazon Haul worldwide. You will have the chance to have great customer impact and continue growing in one of the most innovative companies in the world. You will learn a huge amount - and have a lot of fun - in the process!
IN, HR, Gurugram
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to create state-of-the-art solutions for providing better value to Amazon’s customers? Do you want to build and deploy advanced ML systems that help optimize millions of transactions every day? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data to solve real-world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you like to innovate and simplify? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Machine Learning team for International Emerging Stores (IES). Machine Learning, Big Data and related quantitative sciences have been strategic to Amazon from the early years. Amazon has been a pioneer in areas such as recommendation engines, ecommerce fraud detection and large-scale optimization of fulfillment center operations. As Amazon has rapidly grown and diversified, the opportunity for applying machine learning has exploded. We have a very broad collection of practical problems where machine learning systems can dramatically improve the customer experience, reduce cost, and drive speed and automation. These include product bundle recommendations for millions of products, safeguarding financial transactions across by building the risk models, improving catalog quality via extracting product attribute values from structured/unstructured data for millions of products, enhancing address quality by powering customer suggestions We are developing state-of-the-art machine learning solutions to accelerate the Amazon India growth story. Amazon is an exciting place to be at for a machine learning practitioner. We have the eagerness of a fresh startup to absorb machine learning solutions, and the scale of a mature firm to help support their development at the same time. As part of the International Machine Learning team, you will get to work alongside brilliant minds motivated to solve real-world machine learning problems that make a difference to millions of our customers. We encourage thought leadership and blue ocean thinking in ML. Key job responsibilities Use machine learning and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data to help automate and optimize key processes Design, develop, evaluate and deploy, innovative and highly scalable ML models Work closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations Work closely with business partners to identify problems and propose machine learning solutions Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model maintenance Work proactively with engineering teams and product managers to evangelize new algorithms and drive the implementation of large-scale complex ML models in production Leading projects and mentoring other scientists, engineers in the use of ML techniques About the team International Machine Learning Team is responsible for building novel ML solutions across International Emerging Store (India, MENA, Far-East, LatAm) problems and impact the bottom-line and top-line of India business. Learn more about our team from https://www.amazon.science/working-at-amazon/how-rajeev-rastogis-machine-learning-team-in-india-develops-innovations-for-customers-worldwide
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is seeking a dedicated, skilled, and innovative Applied Scientist with a robust background in machine learning, statistics, quality assurance, auditing methodologies, and automated evaluation systems to ensure the highest standards of data quality, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As part of the AGI team, an Applied Scientist will collaborate closely with core scientist team developing Amazon Nova models. They will lead the development of comprehensive quality strategies and auditing frameworks that safeguard the integrity of data collection workflows. This includes designing auditing strategies with detailed SOPs, quality metrics, and sampling methodologies that help Nova improve performances on benchmarks. The Applied Scientist will perform expert-level manual audits, conduct meta-audits to evaluate auditor performance, and provide targeted coaching to uplift overall quality capabilities. A critical aspect of this role involves developing and maintaining LLM-as-a-Judge systems, including designing judge architectures, creating evaluation rubrics, and building machine learning models for automated quality assessment. The Applied Scientist will also set up the configuration of data collection workflows and communicate quality feedback to stakeholders. An Applied Scientist will also have a direct impact on enhancing customer experiences through high-quality training and evaluation data that powers state-of-the-art LLM products and services. A day in the life An Applied Scientist with the AGI team will support quality solution design, conduct root cause analysis on data quality issues, research new auditing methodologies, and find innovative ways of optimizing data quality while setting examples for the team on quality assurance best practices and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and quality framework development, an Applied Scientist will also work closely with talented engineers, domain experts, and vendor teams to put quality strategies and automated judging systems into practice.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is seeking a dedicated, skilled, and innovative Applied Scientist with a robust background in machine learning, statistics, quality assurance, auditing methodologies, and automated evaluation systems to ensure the highest standards of data quality, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As part of the AGI team, an Applied Scientist will collaborate closely with core scientist team developing Amazon Nova models. They will lead the development of comprehensive quality strategies and auditing frameworks that safeguard the integrity of data collection workflows. This includes designing auditing strategies with detailed SOPs, quality metrics, and sampling methodologies that help Nova improve performances on benchmarks. The Applied Scientist will perform expert-level manual audits, conduct meta-audits to evaluate auditor performance, and provide targeted coaching to uplift overall quality capabilities. A critical aspect of this role involves developing and maintaining LLM-as-a-Judge systems, including designing judge architectures, creating evaluation rubrics, and building machine learning models for automated quality assessment. The Applied Scientist will also set up the configuration of data collection workflows and communicate quality feedback to stakeholders. An Applied Scientist will also have a direct impact on enhancing customer experiences through high-quality training and evaluation data that powers state-of-the-art LLM products and services. A day in the life An Applied Scientist with the AGI team will support quality solution design, conduct root cause analysis on data quality issues, research new auditing methodologies, and find innovative ways of optimizing data quality while setting examples for the team on quality assurance best practices and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and quality framework development, an Applied Scientist will also work closely with talented engineers, domain experts, and vendor teams to put quality strategies and automated judging systems into practice.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is seeking a dedicated, skilled, and innovative Applied Scientist with a robust background in machine learning, statistics, quality assurance, auditing methodologies, and automated evaluation systems to ensure the highest standards of data quality, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As part of the AGI team, an Applied Scientist will collaborate closely with core scientist team developing Amazon Nova models. They will lead the development of comprehensive quality strategies and auditing frameworks that safeguard the integrity of data collection workflows. This includes designing auditing strategies with detailed SOPs, quality metrics, and sampling methodologies that help Nova improve performances on benchmarks. The Applied Scientist will perform expert-level manual audits, conduct meta-audits to evaluate auditor performance, and provide targeted coaching to uplift overall quality capabilities. A critical aspect of this role involves developing and maintaining LLM-as-a-Judge systems, including designing judge architectures, creating evaluation rubrics, and building machine learning models for automated quality assessment. The Applied Scientist will also set up the configuration of data collection workflows and communicate quality feedback to stakeholders. An Applied Scientist will also have a direct impact on enhancing customer experiences through high-quality training and evaluation data that powers state-of-the-art LLM products and services. A day in the life An Applied Scientist with the AGI team will support quality solution design, conduct root cause analysis on data quality issues, research new auditing methodologies, and find innovative ways of optimizing data quality while setting examples for the team on quality assurance best practices and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and quality framework development, an Applied Scientist will also work closely with talented engineers, domain experts, and vendor teams to put quality strategies and automated judging systems into practice.
US, WA, Bellevue
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is seeking a dedicated, skilled, and innovative Applied Scientist with a robust background in machine learning, statistics, quality assurance, auditing methodologies, and automated evaluation systems to ensure the highest standards of data quality, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As part of the AGI team, an Applied Scientist will collaborate closely with core scientist team developing Amazon Nova models. They will lead the development of comprehensive quality strategies and auditing frameworks that safeguard the integrity of data collection workflows. This includes designing auditing strategies with detailed SOPs, quality metrics, and sampling methodologies that help Nova improve performances on benchmarks. The Applied Scientist will perform expert-level manual audits, conduct meta-audits to evaluate auditor performance, and provide targeted coaching to uplift overall quality capabilities. A critical aspect of this role involves developing and maintaining LLM-as-a-Judge systems, including designing judge architectures, creating evaluation rubrics, and building machine learning models for automated quality assessment. The Applied Scientist will also set up the configuration of data collection workflows and communicate quality feedback to stakeholders. An Applied Scientist will also have a direct impact on enhancing customer experiences through high-quality training and evaluation data that powers state-of-the-art LLM products and services. A day in the life An Applied Scientist with the AGI team will support quality solution design, conduct root cause analysis on data quality issues, research new auditing methodologies, and find innovative ways of optimizing data quality while setting examples for the team on quality assurance best practices and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and quality framework development, an Applied Scientist will also work closely with talented engineers, domain experts, and vendor teams to put quality strategies and automated judging systems into practice.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is seeking a dedicated, skilled, and innovative Applied Scientist with a robust background in machine learning, statistics, quality assurance, auditing methodologies, and automated evaluation systems to ensure the highest standards of data quality, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As part of the AGI team, an Applied Scientist will collaborate closely with core scientist team developing Amazon Nova models. They will lead the development of comprehensive quality strategies and auditing frameworks that safeguard the integrity of data collection workflows. This includes designing auditing strategies with detailed SOPs, quality metrics, and sampling methodologies that help Nova improve performances on benchmarks. The Applied Scientist will perform expert-level manual audits, conduct meta-audits to evaluate auditor performance, and provide targeted coaching to uplift overall quality capabilities. A critical aspect of this role involves developing and maintaining LLM-as-a-Judge systems, including designing judge architectures, creating evaluation rubrics, and building machine learning models for automated quality assessment. The Applied Scientist will also set up the configuration of data collection workflows and communicate quality feedback to stakeholders. An Applied Scientist will also have a direct impact on enhancing customer experiences through high-quality training and evaluation data that powers state-of-the-art LLM products and services. A day in the life An Applied Scientist with the AGI team will support quality solution design, conduct root cause analysis on data quality issues, research new auditing methodologies, and find innovative ways of optimizing data quality while setting examples for the team on quality assurance best practices and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and quality framework development, an Applied Scientist will also work closely with talented engineers, domain experts, and vendor teams to put quality strategies and automated judging systems into practice.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is seeking a dedicated, skilled, and innovative Applied Scientist with a robust background in machine learning, statistics, quality assurance, auditing methodologies, and automated evaluation systems to ensure the highest standards of data quality, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As part of the AGI team, an Applied Scientist will collaborate closely with core scientist team developing Amazon Nova models. They will lead the development of comprehensive quality strategies and auditing frameworks that safeguard the integrity of data collection workflows. This includes designing auditing strategies with detailed SOPs, quality metrics, and sampling methodologies that help Nova improve performances on benchmarks. The Applied Scientist will perform expert-level manual audits, conduct meta-audits to evaluate auditor performance, and provide targeted coaching to uplift overall quality capabilities. A critical aspect of this role involves developing and maintaining LLM-as-a-Judge systems, including designing judge architectures, creating evaluation rubrics, and building machine learning models for automated quality assessment. The Applied Scientist will also set up the configuration of data collection workflows and communicate quality feedback to stakeholders. An Applied Scientist will also have a direct impact on enhancing customer experiences through high-quality training and evaluation data that powers state-of-the-art LLM products and services. A day in the life An Applied Scientist with the AGI team will support quality solution design, conduct root cause analysis on data quality issues, research new auditing methodologies, and find innovative ways of optimizing data quality while setting examples for the team on quality assurance best practices and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and quality framework development, an Applied Scientist will also work closely with talented engineers, domain experts, and vendor teams to put quality strategies and automated judging systems into practice.