A quick guide to Amazon’s 40-plus papers at ICASSP

Topics such as code generation, commonsense reasoning, and self-learning complement the usual focus on speech recognition and acoustic-event classification.

As usual at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), a plurality of Amazon’s accepted papers concentrate on automatic speech recognition — with, this year, a particular emphasis on personalized speech recognition. The topics of acoustic-event detection, keyword spotting, and signal processing are also well represented.

But as is also usual, some of the Amazon papers wander farther afield, to topics like commonsense reasoning, self-learning, query rewriting, and general machine learning techniques. Below is a quick guide to Amazon’s more than 40 papers at the conference.

Acoustic-event classification

FedRPO: Federated relaxed Pareto optimization for acoustic event classification
Meng Feng, Chieh-Chi Kao, Qingming Tang, Amit Solomon, Viktor Rozgic, Chao Wang

Multiscale audio spectrogram transformer for efficient audio classification
Wentao Zhu, Mohamed Omar

Transformer-based bioacoustic sound event detection on few-shot learning tasks
Liwen You, Erika Pelaez Coyotl, Suren Gunturu, Maarten Van Segbroeck

Weight-sharing supernet for searching specialized acoustic event classification networks across device constraints
Guan-Ting Lin, Qingming Tang, Chieh-Chi Kao, Viktor Rozgic, Chao Wang

Automatic speech recognition

Cross-utterance ASR rescoring with graph-based label propagation
Srinath Tankasala, Long Chen, Andreas Stolcke, Anirudh Raju, Shally Deng, Chander Chandak, Aparna Khare, Roland Maas, Venkatesh Ravichandran

Dynamic chunk convolution for unified streaming and non-streaming Conformer ASR
Xilai Li, Goeric Huybrechts, Srikanth Ronanki, Jeff Farris, Sravan Bodapati

Domain adaptation with external off-policy acoustic catalogs for scalable contextual end-to-end automated speech recognition
David M. Chan, Shalini Ghosh, Ariya Rastrow, Björn Hoffmeister

Gated contextual adapters for selective contextual biasing in neural transducers
Anastasios Alexandridis, Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, Grant Strimel, Feng-Ju (Claire) Chang, Ariya Rastrow, Nathan Susanj, Athanasios Mouchtaris

Mask the bias: Improving domain-adaptive generalization of CTC-based ASR with internal language model estimation
Nilaksh Das, Monica Sunkara, Sravan Bodapati, Jason Cai, Devang Kulshreshtha, Jeff Farris, Katrin Kirchhoff

On-the-fly text retrieval for end-to-end ASR adaptation
Bolaji Yusuf, Aditya Gourav, Ankur Gandhe, Ivan Bulyko

Robust acoustic and semantic contextual biasing in neural transducers for speech recognition
Xuandi Fu, Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, Ankur Gandhe, Jing Liu, Grant Strimel, Ross McGowan, Athanasios Mouchtaris

Code generation

Conversational text-to-SQL: An odyssey into state-of-the-art and challenges ahead
Sree Hari Krishnan Parthasarathi, Lu Zeng, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Conversational text-to-SQL.png
A proposed text-to-SQL system has three parts: (a) multitasking on coherent tasks with discrete prompts; (b) constrained decoding; and (c) N-best list reranking with a query plan model and a schema linking algorithm. From "Conversational text-to-SQL: An odyssey into state-of-the-art and challenges ahead".

Commonsense reasoning

CLICKER: Attention-based cross-lingual commonsense knowledge transfer
Ruolin Su, Zhongkai Sun, Sixing Lu, Chengyuan Ma, Chenlei Guo

Continual learning

Quantifying catastrophic forgetting in continual federated learning
Christophe Dupuy, Jimit Majmudar, Jixuan Wang, Tanya Roosta, Rahul Gupta, Clement Chung, Jie Ding, Salman Avestimehr

Endpoint detection

Adaptive endpointing with deep contextual multi-armed bandits
Do June Min, Andreas Stolcke, Anirudh Raju, Colin Vaz, Di He, Venkatesh Ravichandran, Viet Anh Trinh

Towards accurate and real-time end-of-speech estimation
Yifeng Fan, Colin Vaz, Di He, Jahn Heymann, Viet Anh Trinh, Zhe Zhang, Venkatesh Ravichandran

Keyword spotting

Dual-attention neural transducers for efficient wake word spotting in speech recognition
Saumya Sahai, Jing Liu, Thejaswi Muniyappa, Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, Anastasios Alexandridis, Grant Strimel, Ross McGowan, Ariya Rastrow, Feng-Ju Chang, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Siegfried Kunzmann

Fixed-point quantization aware training for on-device keyword-spotting
Sashank Macha, Om Oza, Alex Escott, Francesco Caliva, Robbie Armitano, Santosh Kumar Cheekatmalla, Sree Hari Krishnan Parthasarathi, Yuzong Liu

Self-supervised speech representation learning for keyword-spotting with light-weight transformers
Chenyang Gao, Yue Gu, Francesco Caliva, Yuzong Liu

Small-footprint slimmable networks for keyword spotting
Zuhaib Akhtar, Mohammad Omar Khursheed, Dongsu Du, Yuzong Liu

Language learning

Phonetic RNN-transducer for mispronunciation diagnosis
Daniel Zhang, Soumya Saha, Sarah Campbell

Machine learning

Prune then distill: Dataset distillation with importance sampling
Anirudh Sundar, Gokce Keskin, Chander Chandak, I-Fan Chen, Pegah Ghahremani, Shalini Ghosh

Role of bias terms in dot-product attention
Mahdi Namazifar, Devamanyu Hazarika, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Natural-language understanding

Distill-quantize-tune: Leveraging large teachers for low-footprint efficient multilingual NLU on edge
Pegah Kharazmi, Zhewei Zhao, Clement Chung, Samridhi Choudhary

Pyramid dynamic inference: Encouraging faster inference via early exit boosting
Ershad Banijamali, Pegah Kharazmi, Sepehr Eghbali, Jixuan Wang, Clement Chung, Samridhi Choudhary

Personalized speech recognition

Dialog act guided contextual adapter for personalized speech recognition
Feng-Ju (Claire) Chang, Thejaswi Muniyappa, Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, Kai Wei, Grant Strimel, Ross McGowan

PROCTER: Pronunciation-aware contextual adapter for personalized speech recognition in neural transducers
Rahul Pandey, Roger Ren, Qi Luo, Jing Liu, Ariya Rastrow, Ankur Gandhe, Denis Filimonov, Grant Strimel, Andreas Stolcke, Ivan Bulyko

Slot-triggered contextual biasing for personalized speech recognition using neural transducers
Sibo Tong, Philip Harding, Simon Wiesler

Query rewriting

KG-ECO: Knowledge graph enhanced entity correction for query rewriting
Jason Cai, Mingda Li, Ziyan Jiang, Eunah Cho, Zheng Chen, Yang Liu, Xing Fan, Chenlei Guo

Self-learning

Federated self-learning with weak supervision for speech recognition
Milind Rao, Gopinath Chennupati, Gautam Tiwari, Anit Kumar Sahu, Anirudh Raju, Ariya Rastrow, Jasha Droppo

Self-healing through error detection, attribution, and retraining
Ansel MacLaughlin, Anna Rumshisky, Rinat Khaziev, Anil Ramakrishna, Yuval Merhav, Rahul Gupta

Signal processing

A framework for unified real-time personalized and non-personalized speech enhancement
Zhepei Wang, Ritwik Giri, Devansh Shah, Jean-Marc Valin, Michael M. Goodwin, Paris Smaragdis

Augmentation robust self-supervised learning for human activity recognition
Cong Xu, Yuhang Li, Dae Lee, Andrew Park, Hongda Mao, Huyen Do, Jonathan Chung, Dinesh Nair

Retraction.png
The concept of retraction, mapping a point in the tangent space back to the manifold. From "Generative modeling based manifold learning for adaptive filtering guidance".

Generative modeling based manifold learning for adaptive filtering guidance
Karim Helwani, Paris Smaragdis, Michael M. Goodwin

SPADE: Self-supervised pretraining for acoustic disentanglement
John Harvill, Jarred Barber, Arun Nair, Ramin Pishehvar

Spoken-language understanding

End-to-end spoken language understanding using joint CTC loss and self-supervised, pretrained acoustic encoders
Jixuan Wang, Martin Radfar, Kai Wei, Clement Chung

Exploring subgroup performance in end-to-end speech models
Alkis Koudounas, Eliana Pastor, Giuseppe Attanasio, Vittorio Mazzia, Manuel Giollo, Thomas Gueudre, Luca Cagliero, Luca de Alfaro, Elena Baralis, Daniele Amberti

Multilingual end-to-end spoken language understanding for ultra-low footprint applications
Markus Mueller, Anastasios Alexandridis, Zach Trozenski, Joel Whiteman, Grant Strimel, Nathan Susanj, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Siegfried Kunzmann

Text-to-speech

Framewise WaveGAN: High speed adversarial vocoder in time domain with very low computational complexity
Ahmed Mustafa, Jean-Marc Valin, Jan Buethe, Paris Smaragdis, Mike Goodwin

Modelling low-resource accents without accent-specific TTS frontend
Georgi Tinchev, Marta Czarnowska, Kamil Deja, Kayoko Yanagisawa, Marius Cotescu

Video

ModEFormer: Modality-preserving embedding for audio-video synchronization using transformers
Akash Gupta, Rohun Tripathi, Wondong Jang

Multi-scale compositional constraints for representation learning on videos
Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Chandrashekhar Lavania, Lovish Chum, Shiva Sundaram

Voice communication

Low-bitrate redundancy coding of speech using a rate-distortion-optimized variational autoencoder
Jean-Marc Valin, Jan Buethe, Ahmed Mustafa

Research areas

Related content

US, CA, Pasadena
The Amazon Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena, CA, is looking to hire an Applied Scientist specializing in Testing of Control Systems hardware. Working alongside other scientists and engineers, you will validate hardware and software systems performing the control and readout functions for Amazon quantum processors. Working effectively within a cross-functional team environment is critical. The ideal candidate will have an established background in test engineering applicable to large mixed-signal systems. 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. 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. Key job responsibilities Our scientists and engineers collaborate across diverse teams and projects to offer state of the art, cost effective solutions for the control of Amazon quantum processor systems. You’ll bring a passion for innovation and collaboration to: Develop automated test scripts for mid-volume electronics manufacturing, utilizing high-speed test equipment such as Gsps oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and network analyzers. Design and implement test plans for high-speed, mixed-signal PCAs and instrument assemblies, covering analog/digital interfaces, ADCs/DACs, FPGAs, and power distribution systems. Develop test requirements and coverage matrices with hardware and software stakeholders, including optimization of test coverage vs test time. Analyze test data to identify failure root causes and trends, implement corrective actions, and drive design-for-testability (DFT) enhancements. Drive continuous test improvement to improve test accuracy, improve final product reliability, and adapt to new measurement requirements.
US, WA, Seattle
This role will contribute to developing the Economics and Science products and services in the Fee domain, with specialization in supply chain systems and fees. Through the lens of economics, you will develop causal links for how Amazon, Sellers and Customers interact. You will be a key and senior scientist, advising Amazon leaders how to price our services. You will work on developing frameworks and scalable, repeatable models supporting optimal pricing and policy in the two-sided marketplace that is central to Amazon's business. The pricing for Amazon services is complex. You will partner with science and technology teams across Amazon including Advertising, Supply Chain, Operations, Prime, Consumer Pricing, and Finance. We are looking for an experienced Economist to improve our understanding of seller Economics, enhance our ability to estimate the causal impact of fees, and work with partner teams to design pricing policy changes. In this role, you will provide guidance to scientists to develop econometric models to influence our fee pricing worldwide. You will lead the development of causal models to help isolate the impact of fee and policy changes from other business actions, using experiments when possible, or observational data when not. Key job responsibilities The ideal candidate will have extensive Economics knowledge, demonstrated strength in practical and policy relevant structural econometrics, strong collaboration skills, proven ability to lead highly ambiguous and large projects, and a drive to deliver results. They will work closely with Economists, Data / Applied Scientists, Strategy Analysts, Data Engineers, and Product leads to integrate economic insights into policy and systems production. Familiarity with systems and services that constitute seller supply chains is a plus but not required. About the team The Stores Economics and Sciences team is a central science team that supports Amazon's Retail and Supply Chain leadership. We tackle some of Amazon's most challenging economics and machine learning problems, where our mandate is to impact the business on massive scale.
US, WA, Seattle
WW Amazon Stores Finance Science (ASFS) works to leverage science and economics to drive improved financial results, foster data backed decisions, and embed science within Finance. ASFS is focused on developing products that empower controllership, improve business decisions and financial planning by understanding financial drivers, and innovate science capabilities for efficiency and scale. We are looking for a data scientist to lead high visibility initiatives for forecasting Amazon Stores' financials. You will develop new science-based forecasting methodologies and build scalable models to improve financial decision making and planning for senior leadership up to VP and SVP level. You will build new ML and statistical models from the ground up that aim to transform financial planning for Amazon Stores. We prize creative problem solvers with the ability to draw on an expansive methodological toolkit to transform financial decision-making with science. The ideal candidate combines data-science acumen with strong business judgment. You have versatile modeling skills and are comfortable owning and extracting insights from data. You are excited to learn from and alongside seasoned scientists, engineers, and business leaders. You are an excellent communicator and effectively translate technical findings into business action. Key job responsibilities Demonstrating thorough technical knowledge, effective exploratory data analysis, and model building using industry standard ML models Working with technical and non-technical stakeholders across every step of science project life cycle Collaborating with finance, product, data engineering, and software engineering teams to create production implementations for large-scale ML models Innovating by adapting new modeling techniques and procedures Presenting research results to our internal research community
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 Research 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 Research Scientist role will impact the large product strategy, identifies new business opportunities and provides strategic direction which is very exciting.
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions Core Services organization, we're advancing the frontier of geospatial intelligence and AI-powered spatial reasoning. Our vision is to be the trusted foundation for transforming every business with Amazon AI teammates. Our mission is to deliver turnkey, enterprise-grade foundational AI capabilities that create delightful AI powered solutions. We're building sophisticated AI systems that enable intelligent agents to understand and operate effectively in the physical world through advanced geospatial optimization. Key job responsibilities - Develop geospatial optimization models that generalize across diverse customer use cases in logistics, transportation, and spatial planning - Scope optimization projects with multiple customers in mind, abstracting away complex science problems to create scalable solutions - Discover, evaluate, and adapt existing optimization models and geospatial tools for customer deployment - Develop semantic enrichment methods to integrate heterogeneous data sources including open geospatial data, multimodal sensor data, images, videos, satellite imagery, and documents - Research novel approaches combining AI agents with geospatial optimization to solve complex spatial problems - Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate science components into production systems - Conduct rigorous experimentation and establish evaluation frameworks to measure solution performance A day in the life A day in the life As an Applied Scientist, you'll develop optimization algorithms and AI-powered geospatial solutions while maintaining a clear path to customer impact. You'll investigate novel approaches to spatial optimization, develop methods for semantic data enrichment, and validate ideas through rigorous experimentation with real customer data. You'll collaborate with other scientists and engineers to transform research insights into scalable solutions, work directly with enterprise customers to understand requirements, and help shape the future direction. Leveraging and advancing generative AI technology will be a big part of your charter. About the team Our Applied AI Solutions Core Services Science team is tackling fundamental challenges in geospatial optimization and AI-powered spatial reasoning. We're investigating novel approaches to how AI systems can solve complex logistics and transportation problems, reason about spatial relationships, and integrate diverse data sources to create enterprise-grade geospatial intelligence. Working at the intersection of optimization, large language models, and geospatial data science, we're developing practical techniques that advance the state-of-the-art in geospatial AI.
US, WA, Bellevue
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to apply their causal inference and/or structural econometrics skillsets to solve real world problems. The intern will work in the area of Economics Intelligence in Amazon Returns and Recommerce Technology and Innovation and develop new, data-driven solutions to support the most critical components of this rapidly scaling team. Our PhD Economist Internship Program offers hands-on experience in applied economics, supported by mentorship, structured feedback, and professional development. Interns work on real business and research problems, building skills that prepare them for full-time economist roles at Amazon and beyond. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis collaborating with economists, scientists, and product managers. These skills will translate well into writing applied chapters in your dissertation and provide you with work experience that may help you with placement. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. About the team The WWRR Economics Intelligence (RREI) team brings together Economists, Data Scientists, and Business Intelligence Engineers experts to delivers economic solutions focused on forecasting, causality, attribution, customer behavior for returns, recommerce, and sustainability domains.
US, WA, Bellevue
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to apply their causal inference and/or structural econometrics skillsets to solve real world problems. The intern will work in the area of Economics Intelligence in Amazon Returns and Recommerce Technology and Innovation and develop new, data-driven solutions to support the most critical components of this rapidly scaling team. Our PhD Economist Internship Program offers hands-on experience in applied economics, supported by mentorship, structured feedback, and professional development. Interns work on real business and research problems, building skills that prepare them for full-time economist roles at Amazon and beyond. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis collaborating with economists, scientists, and product managers. These skills will translate well into writing applied chapters in your dissertation and provide you with work experience that may help you with placement. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. About the team The WWRR Economics Intelligence (RREI) team brings together Economists, Data Scientists, and Business Intelligence Engineers experts to delivers economic solutions focused on forecasting, causality, attribution, customer behavior for returns, recommerce, and sustainability domains.
US, CA, San Francisco
AWS is one of Amazon’s largest and fastest growing businesses, serving millions of customers in more than 190 countries. We use cloud computing to reshape the way global enterprises use information technology. We are looking for entrepreneurial, analytical, creative, flexible leaders to help us redefine the information technology industry. If you want to join a fast-paced, innovative team that is making history, this is the place for you. AWS Central Economics & Science (ACES) drives best practices for objectively applying economics and science in decision making across AWS. The team collaborates with AWS science and business teams to identify, frame, and analyze complex and ambiguous problems of the highest priority. Through data-driven insights and modeling, ACES supports strategic decision-making across the AWS global organization, including sales operations and business performance optimization. The ACES Sales Channels team is hiring an Applied Scientist (Senior or below) to advance our mission of providing rigorous, causal-inference-driven recommendations for AWS sales optimization. This role will focus on building ML systems with a causal modeling foundation, designing seller incentive mechanisms, and developing intervention strategies across the entire sales motion. Key job responsibilities • Causal ML System Development: Build and deploy machine learning models that emphasize causal inference, ensuring recommendations are grounded in valid interventions • Incentive Design: Define and model incentives that drive desirable behaviors across AWS sales channels, partner programs, and reseller ecosystems • Stakeholder Collaboration: Work with business stakeholders to understand requirements, validate approaches, and ensure practical applicability of scientific solutions • Scientific Rigor: Promote findings at internal conferences and contribute to the team's reputation for methodological excellence A day in the life The ACES Sales Channels team works on understanding and optimizing AWS's sales channels, both direct (generalist and specialist sellers) and indirect (partners and Marketplace). Our work falls into three core areas: developing rigorous causal measurement and modeling frameworks using cutting-edge economics and statistical methods; designing programs and incentives to improve customer and business outcomes; and building ML-based recommendation systems for sellers, partners, and other AWS stakeholders. About the team 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. 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 conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship & 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. 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. Hybrid Work We value innovation and recognize this sometimes requires uninterrupted time to focus on a build. We also value in-person collaboration and time spent face-to-face. Our team affords employees options to work in the office every day or in a flexible, hybrid work model near one of our U.S. Amazon offices.
US, WA, Bellevue
The Central Learning Solutions (CLS) - Science team builds state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for enhancing leadership and associate development within the organization. We develop technology and mechanisms for building personalized learning courses based on the profiles of different learners and asses the post-training performance curves for different learner profiles. As a Data Scientist on the team, you will be driving the data science/ML roadmap for the CLS t Science team. You will leverage your knowledge in statistics and econometrics, estimate the causal impact of training interventions, recommend the right interventions for a given learner profile, and measure the post-launch success of these interventions through A/B weblabs. These insights will help in dynamically changing the training content of Learning & Development courses and unlock opportunities to improve both training effectiveness and learner experience. You will collaborate effectively with internal stakeholders and cross-functional teams for solving business problems, create operational efficiencies, and deliver successfully against high organizational standards. Key job responsibilities - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and implementation. - Use advanced causal inference methodologies to estimate the learning curves for different learner profiles and the effectiveness of training content. - Perform statistical analysis and statistical tests including hypothesis testing and A/B testing. - Implement new statistical, machine learning, or other mathematical methodologies to solve specific business problems. - Present deep dives and analysis to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, ensure clarity, and influence the strategy of business partners. About the team We serve North America L&D orgs as the strategic thought leader, looking beyond where other teams are focused to drive transformative solutions that leverage technology and processes to improve learning outcomes and drive down the cost to serve.
US, WA, Bellevue
The Principal Applied Scientist will own the science mission for building next-generation proactive and autonomous agentic experiences across Alexa AI's Personalization, Autonomy and Proactive Intelligence organization. You will technically lead a team of applied scientists to harness state-of-the-art technologies in machine learning, natural language processing, LLM training and application, and agentic AI systems to advance the scientific frontiers of autonomous intelligence and proactive user assistance. The right candidate will be an inventor at heart, provide deep scientific leadership, establish compelling technical direction and vision, and drive ambitious research initiatives that push the boundaries of what's possible with AI agents. You will need to be adept at identifying promising research directions in agentic AI, developing novel autonomous agent solutions, and translating advanced AI research into production-ready agentic systems. You will need to be adept at influencing and collaborating with partner teams, launching AI-powered autonomous agents into production, and building team mechanisms that will foster innovation and execution in the rapidly evolving field of agentic AI. This role represents a unique opportunity to tackle fundamental challenges in how Alexa proactively understands user needs, autonomously takes actions on behalf of users, and delivers intelligent assistance through state-of-the-art agentic AI technologies. As a science leader in Alexa AI, you will shape the technical strategy for making Alexa a truly proactive and autonomous agent that anticipates user needs, takes intelligent actions, and provides seamless assistance without explicit prompting. Your team will be at the forefront of solving complex problems in agentic reasoning, multi-step task planning, autonomous decision-making, proactive intelligence, and context-aware action execution that will fundamentally transform how users interact with Alexa as an intelligent agent. The successful candidate will bring deep technical expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, and agentic AI systems, along with the leadership ability to guide talented scientists in pursuing ambitious research that advances the state of the art in autonomous agents, proactive intelligence, and AI-driven personalization. Experience with multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, goal-oriented dialogue systems, and production-scale agentic architectures is highly valued. You will lead the development of breakthrough capabilities that enable Alexa to: 1) proactively anticipate user needs through advanced predictive modeling and contextual understanding; 2) autonomously execute complex multi-step tasks with minimal user intervention; 3) reason and plan intelligently across diverse user goals and environmental contexts; 4) learn and adapt continuously from user interactions to improve agentic behaviors; 5) coordinate actions seamlessly across multiple domains and services as a unified intelligent agent. This is a unique opportunity to define the future of conversational AI agents and build technology that will impact hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities Technical Leadership - Lead complex research and development projects - Partner closely with the T&C Product and Engineering leaders on the technical strategy and roadmap - Evaluate emerging technologies and methodologies - Make high-level architectural decisions Technical leadership and mentoring: - Mentor and develop technical talent - Set team project goals and metrics - Help with resource allocation and project prioritization from technical side Research & Development - Drive innovation in applied science areas - Translate research into practical business solutions - Author technical papers and patents - Collaborate with academic and industry partners About the team PAPI (Personalization Autonomy and Proactive Intelligence) aims to accelerate personalized and intuitive experiences across Amazon's customer touchpoints through automated, scalable, self-serve AI systems. We leverage customer, device, and ambient signals to deliver conversational, visual, and proactive experiences that delight customers, increase engagement, reduce defects, and enable natural interactions across Amazon touch points including Alexa, FireTV, and Mobile etc. Our systems offer personalized suggestions, comprehend customer inputs, learn from interactions, and propose appropriate actions to serve millions of customers globally.