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2019 Amazon Research Awards recipients announcement

Earlier this year, Amazon notified grant applicants who were recipients of the 2019 Amazon Research Awards.

By Amazon Research Awards team
June 17, 2020
6 min read
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Earlier this spring, Amazon notified grant applicants that they were recipients of the 2019 Amazon Research Awards, a grant program that provides up to $80,000 in cash and $20,000 in AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating topics across 11 focus areas. Today, we’re publicly announcing the 51 award recipients who represent 39 universities in 10 countries. The 2019 awards averaged $72,000 in cash awards and $15,000 in AWS Promotional Credits in support of each research project. Each grant 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.

2019 Amazon Research Award recipients ARA.png

The 11 focus areas of this year’s research awards are computer vision; fairness in artificial intelligence; knowledge management and data quality; machine learning algorithms and theory; natural-language processing; online advertising; operations research and optimization; personalization; robotics; search and information retrieval; and security, privacy, and abuse prevention.

Recipients can use more than 150 Amazon public data sets. Amazon encourages the publication of research results, researcher presentations at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.

Each project is assigned an Amazon research contact who is available for consultation and supports the project’s progress.

“The Amazon Research Awards help fund outstanding, innovative research proposals across machine learning, robotics, operations research, and more, while helping strengthen connections between Amazon research teams, academic researchers, and their affiliated institutions,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon Machine Learning. “The breadth and depth of the research this year’s recipients will pursue is impressive and will lead to critical innovations for our customers and meaningful scientific advancements in each of the 11 focus areas.”

Grant proposals for 2020, which will be the program’s sixth year, will be accepted starting this fall. Please check back for more information this summer or send an email to be added to the 2020 Call For Proposal distribution list. Below is the list of 2019 award recipients, presented in alphabetical order.

Recipient

University

Research title

Pulkit Agrawal

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Continual Reinforcement Learning

James Allan

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Explanation of Product Facets for Conversational Search

Chris Amato

Northeastern University

Scalable and Robust Multi-Robot Coordination through High-Level Macro-Actions

Ashis G. Banerjee

University of Washington

Sparse, Deep and Persistent Visual Features Based 3D Object Detection and 6D Pose Estimation in Indoor Environments

Sven Behnke

University of Bonn

Learning Structured Scene Modeling and Physics-Based Prediction for Manipulation

François-Xavier Briol

University College London & the Alan Turing Institute

Transfer Learning for Numerical Integration in Expensive Machine Learning Systems

Flavio du Pin Calmon

Harvard University

Building the Foundations of Fair Machine Learning: From Information Theory to Federated Algorithms

Luca Carlone

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Metric-Semantic SLAM for Long-Term Multi-Robot Deployment

Shayok Chakraborty

Florida State University

Deep Active Learning with Relative Label Feedback

Kai-Wei Chang

University of California Los Angeles

Learning Robust Contextual Language Encoders at Scale

Margarita Chli

ETH Zurich

Semantic-Aware Cloud-Aided Aerial Navigation for Drone Delivery

Jeff Dalton

University of Glasgow

Knowledge-Grounded Conversational Product Information Seeking

N. Lance Downing

Stanford University

DeepStroke: Improving Stroke Diagnosis with Deep Learning on NIH Stroke Scale Assessments

Luciana Ferrer

Computer Science Institute (ICC), UBA-CONICET

Representation Learning for Sound Understanding

Alexander Gammerman

Royal Holloway, University of London

Conformal Martingales for Change-Point Detection

Graeme Gange

Monash University

Robust Prioritised Planning for Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Itai Gurvich

Cornell University

Dynamic Resource Allocation to Heterogeneous Requests: Near Optimal, Computationally Light Policies

Kris Hauser

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Robotic Packing of Novel and Non-Rigid Objects with Visuotactile Modeling

Daqing He

University of Pittsburgh

Transferable, Controllable, Applicable Keyphrase Generation

Jason Hong

Carnegie Mellon University

Designing Alternative Representations of Confusion Matrices to Evaluate Public Perceptions of Fairness in Machine Learning

Wendy Ju

Cornell Tech

Enabling Machines to Recognize and Repair Errors in Interaction

Sertac Karaman

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Learning New Environments with a Tour: Depth and Pose Estimation through Informative Control Actions

Ioannis Karamouzas

Clemson University

Learning Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation from Human Crowd Data

Aryeh Kontorovich

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Advanced Proximity-Based Learning Toolkit for SageMaker

Oliver Kroemer

Carnegie Mellon University

Robust Manipulation Strategies for Delta-Robot Arrays

Beibei Li

Carnegie Mellon University

AI Agent for Targeted Promotion

Changliu Liu

Carnegie Mellon University

Hierarchical Motion Planning for Efficient and Provably Safe Human-Robot Interactions

Anirudha Majumdar

Princeton University

Force-Closure Nets: Manipulating Objects with Provable Guarantees on Generalization

Karthik Narasimhan

Princeton University

Towards Deeper, Broader and Human-Like Conversational Agents

Joseph P. Near

University of Vermont

Provable Fairness for Deep Learning via Automatic Differentiation

Priyadarshini Panda

Yale University

Adversarial Robustness with Efficiency-Driven Optimization of Deep Neural Networks

Guilherme Augsto Silva Pereira

West Virginia University

Parallel and Cloud Computing for Long-Term Robotics

Carlo Pinciroli

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

An Immersive Interface for Multi-User Supervision of Multi-Robot Operations

Ingmar Posner

University of Oxford

Compositional Deep Generative Models for Real-World Robot Perception and Manipulation

Amanda Prorok

University of Cambridge

Learning Explicit Communication for Multi-Robot Path Planning

Sebastian Risi

IT University of Copenhagen

Continually Learning Machines for Industrial Automation

Alessandro Rizzo

Politecnico di Torino

From Shortest to Safest Path Navigation: An AI-Powered Framework for Risk-Aware Autonomous Navigation of UASes

Nicolas Rojas

Imperial College London

Mechanical intelligence for in-hand manipulation

Daniela Rus

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Series Elastic Magnetically Geared Robotic Actuators

Sanjay Sarma

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Multi-modal Sensing for Material ID in Robotic Applications

Alex Schwing

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Seeing the Unseen: Temporal Amodal Instance Level Video Object Segmentation

Roland Siegwart

ETH Zürich

Aerial Manipulation with an Omnidirectional Flying Platform

Niko Suenderhauf

Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

Learning Robotic Navigation and Interaction from Object-based Semantic Maps

Chenhao Tan

University of Colorado at Boulder

Actively Soliciting Human Explanations to Correct Biases in NLP Models

Jian Tang

HEC Montreal: Mila-Quebec AI Institute

Deep Active Learning for Graph Neural Networks

Marynel Vázquez

Yale University

Improving Social Robot Navigation via Group Interaction Awareness

Soroush Vosoughi

Dartmouth College

Protecting Online Anonymity Through Linguistic Style Transfer

Richard M. Voyles

Purdue University

Framework for One-Shot Learning of Contact-Intensive Tasks Through Coaching

May Dongmei Wang

Georgia Institute of Technology

Learning to Unlearn Biases in Recommendation Models

James Wang

The Pennsylvania State University

Advancing Automated Recognition of Emotion in the Wild

Xinyu Xing

The Pennsylvania State University

Fine-grained Malware Classification using Coarse-grained Labels
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In this role you will research and build policy learning algorithms that enable robotic hands to perform grasping and in-hand manipulation in unstructured, real-world environments, using touch and force feedback as first-class signals rather than afterthoughts. Much of this work is grounded in reinforcement learning. To be successful you need to be highly motivated, dive deep, and deliver to the highest standards. You will demonstrate strong working knowledge of modern policy learning methods, with expertise in taking algorithms from simulation onto real hardware. That means being comfortable working against real physical constraints and treating sim-to-real as a core research problem rather than optimizing for benchmark numbers alone. You will work across tactile signal processing, contact-rich manipulation, sim-to-real transfer, and multi-modal sensor fusion to build robust solutions for autonomous grasping, dexterous re-orientation, and fine motor control. You will bring the desire to learn from new challenges, and the problem-solving and communication skills to work within a highly interactive and experienced team. Key job responsibilities - Design and train manipulation policies that leverage tactile and force feedback for dexterous grasping, in-hand manipulation, and contact-rich tasks, using reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or hybrid approaches. - Drive sim-to-real transfer, closing the gap between simulated and physical performance on real robotic hands. - Shape objectives and control strategies with the hardware in mind, accounting for how motors and actuators actually behave: transmission ratios, torque versus power, backdrivability, and thermal limits. - Build simulation-based and on-robot evaluation frameworks, with benchmarks and metrics that make tactile perception and policy performance systematically comparable across iterations. - Own scientific and technical projects within the tactile sensing and manipulation workstreams, driving from research concept through deployment on physical robotic systems — and, at the senior level, set direction across a workstream. - Collaborate with hardware, mechanical design, firmware, and controls teams — and with partner applied science organizations — to translate research advances into deployable robotic capabilities, and to inform sensor and actuator design decisions with policy-level requirements. - Publish at top-tier venues and build collaborations with the external research community. - Contribute to a strong scientific bar on the team through code and design review, and mentor engineers and interns working on real-world manipulation and sensing problems. A day in the life Your morning might start with a standup alongside hardware and controls engineers reviewing overnight sim-to-real training runs on a multi-finger gripper, debugging why a grasp policy that worked in simulation is slipping on a real sensor array. Mid-morning you join the weekly tactile sensing workstream to align on sensor integration milestones and share early results from a contact-state estimator you have been prototyping. After lunch you spend a focused block iterating on a reinforcement learning reward formulation, testing variations in simulation before queuing runs on the cluster. Later you pair with a mechanical engineer to review sensor placement trade-offs on an upcoming gripper revision, then wrap the day by drafting a short experiment write-up and sketching next steps for a conference submission. No two days look exactly the same: one week you may be collecting teleoperated demonstrations on the physical robot to seed an imitation learning pipeline; the next you could be deep in a codebase refactor to support a new tactile modality. Throughout, you balance hands-on research — writing algorithms, running experiments, analyzing data — with cross-team collaboration and mentoring. The common thread is moving from research insight to working capability on real hardware, with a tight feedback loop between simulation and the physical world. About the team Our is developing next-generation manipulation capabilities for highly dexterous multi-fingered grippers and hands. Our work spans tactile sensor development, manipulation policy learning, and the tight integration of sensing hardware with intelligent control software. We are building systems that can feel, adapt, and manipulate with human-level dexterity. You will join a team working at the frontier of tactile sensing and contact-rich manipulation, helping define how robots perceive and interact with objects through touch. Because we build the hands as well as the policies that drive them, you will have a direct line to the sensor, actuator, and mechanism designs your algorithms depend on — and real influence over how they evolve. This is an opportunity to solve hard problems across perception, learning, and physical interaction alongside a team of scientists and engineers building toward real-world deployment.
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2027 Applied Science Internship - Robotics - United States
US, MA, North Reading
Robotics Applied Scientist II Intern/Co-op (2027) Are you passionate about robotics and research? Do you want to solve real customer problems through innovative technology? Do you enjoy working on scalable research and projects in a collaborative team environment? Do you want to see your science solutions directly impact millions of customers worldwide? We’re looking for current PhD students with a passion for robotic research and applications to join us in 2027 as Robotics Applied Scientist II Interns/Co-ops to shape the future of robotics and transform automation at Amazon’s scale. By applying to this role, you will be considered for Robotics Applied Scientist II Intern/Co-op (2027) opportunities across various Robotics teams at Amazon with different robotics research focus. Internship positions are available for multiple locations, durations (3 to 6+ months), and year-round start dates (winter, spring, summer, fall). Join us at the forefront of Applied Science, where your contributions will shape the future of Robotics! Key job responsibilities As a Robotics Applied Scientist II Intern/Co-op, you will work alongside global experts to advance the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence, tackling innovative problems that bridge the gap between research and real-world robotics implementation to innovate and build solutions on behalf of our customers. We are particularly interested in students with specialization and expertise in one or more of the following research areas: - Robotics - Artificial Intelligence - Robotics Manipulation (e.g., robot arm, grasping, dexterous manipulation, end of arm tools/end effector) - Autonomous Mobile Robots - Mobile Manipulation - Multi-Robot Coordination - Autonomous Navigation - Locomotion - Motion/Path Planning - Controls - Perception - Sensing - Robot Learning - Machine Learning - Computer Vision - Large Language Models (LLM), Vision-Language-Action Models (VLA), Vision-Language-Models (VLM) - World Models - Human-Robot Interaction - Robotics Simulation - Optimization - And related! Key responsibilities may include: - Develop novel, scalable algorithms and/or modeling techniques that advance the state-of-the-art in science areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence, or related - Tackle challenging, innovative research problems within robotics, artificial intelligence, or related that bridge the gap between theoretical advancement and practical robotics implementation - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to solve complex problems, and to communicate research findings clearly, leveraging your expertise in robotics, artificial intelligence, or related - Demonstrate the ability to work independently, thrive in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment - Leverage AI-powered tools where applicable to accelerate research, experimentation, and prototyping. - Critically review and validate outputs from AI tools and automated systems. About the team Explore Robotics Teams at Amazon At Amazon, robotics is where innovative research meets real-world deployment. There are many different specialized robotics teams, including the few highlighted below. Learn more about Robotics at Amazon here: https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics Fulfillment Technologies and Robotics We build dynamic partnerships between people and intelligent machines. This intricate collaboration helps Amazon fulfill orders with unmatched accuracy. Working in symphony with our robotic technology, you’ll have the opportunity to extend your technical capabilities by working alongside some of the industry’s most advanced technologies. This includes our fleet of autonomous mobile robots, sophisticated control software, and technologies like language perception, machine learning, object recognition, and semantic understanding of commands. These technologies help us deliver an ever-improving customer and employee experience, as well as improve the safety of our facilities. Amazon Robotics Amazon Robotics is at the epicenter of robotics innovation. We design, test, and build mobile robots and mechatronic systems. Our offices, labs, test floors, and factories are close together, which means we can design the hardware, write the code, test, build, and watch it all come to life. Our areas of focus include advancements in autonomous mobility, AI, robotic management software, and much more. Fauna Fauna is focused on building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Fauna’s goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with everyday. Fauna develops tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Fauna’s work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but overall experience. Amazon Fulfillment Technologies Amazon Fulfillment Technologies develops tech solutions that create network optimizations for all Amazon sites worldwide. We own network infrastructure and devices in all buildings and labor planning and scheduling technology for fulfillment centers in North America and Europe.
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