Austin, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin and Amazon are launching a science and engineering research partnership to advance our understanding in areas as diverse as video streaming, search and information retrieval, and robotics.
The UT Austin-Amazon Science Hub is the sixth partnership between a technology company and a major university. We aim to advance research that encourages new discoveries, addresses important issues, and produces solutions that are useful to society. This is achieved by fostering collaboration between faculty and students, along with developing a diverse and sustainable pipeline of research talent.
“We look forward to establishing even more collaborations with leading companies and organizations to bring together more talented people, produce more impactful research, and enable our students to achieve their greatest ambitions. The launch of our new hub with Amazon is the latest success story in this effort,” said UT Austin Principal Jay Hartzell. “We look forward to the discoveries our researchers and students will make from this collaboration and how those discoveries will change the world.”
The hub will be hosted at UT Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering, but will be attended by researchers from a variety of disciplines.
As part of the collaboration, Amazon will fund research projects, PhD student fellowships, and community-building events aimed at diversifying and increasing interdisciplinary innovation.
BA Winston, Vice President of Technology, Prime Video, said: “For years, our top scientists have been a resource for graduate students at UT Austin, collaborating on topics such as developing objective machine learning models to improve perceived video quality driving smart compression. It helps us predict and develop multimodal AI models to ensure the highest quality media playback experience at scale.”
This hub builds on an existing partnership between the two organizations via the Amazon Scholars program. Researchers from the Cockrell School, College of Natural Sciences, McCombs School of Business, and College of Liberal Arts are working with Amazon through this program.
“This science hub strengthens the partnership between UT Austin and Amazon, allowing us to leverage our collective strengths and bring Amazon faculty, students, and leaders together to explore computer vision, machine learning, AI, It creates an opportunity to accelerate progress in the field of robotics, said Roger Bonekadze, dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering.
Visual neuroscience, streaming, and social media research are among the reasons UT was attracted to the establishment of a new hub. Al Bovik, Director of the New Science Hub and Professor of the Chandra Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says his research helps ensure the quality and reliability of his videos and social media streaming around the world. I was. Joining him in leadership of the hub is an advisory board that includes UT Austin and his Amazon personnel.
- Matt Reese, Department of Informatics. Lease is the founder and leader of his Good Systems program at UT Austin. The program is his eight-year university-wide assignment to design responsible AI technologies.
- Adam Klivans, Department of Computer Science, University of Natural Sciences. He leads the Machine Learning Fundamentals Lab at the new National Science Foundation AI Institute and his UT Austin Machine Learning Lab.
- Sujay Sanghavi, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Chandra Family Cockrell School of Engineering. He is Associate Director of Science Hub and Director of his TRIPODS Institute on Fundamentals of Data Science funded by NSF.
- Adam Fineberg, Senior Principal Engineer, Consumer Robotics at Amazon, said:
- Vichy Vishwanathan, Senior Principal of Search Science at Amazon.
- Yongjun Wu, senior principal of software development engineering at Amazon’s Prime Video, said:
Ken Washington, VP of Amazon Consumer Robotics, said: “We are very optimistic about expanding our partnership as the new hub will allow us to work even closer together in robotics and related fields.”
