In the global persecution of the Top AI talent, the world’s leading researchers and researchers often face a difficult choice between academia and industry. But this choice has potentially debilitating long -term consequences because today’s university professors are stewards for tomorrow’s talent. When they department from Akademia, the pipeline to AI talent, which is available to all sectors – industry, academia and government – shrinks over time. To have this tragedy of commons, there is a critical need for new paradigms in multisector partnership between academia, government and industry, enabling a better balance between talent across sectors.
Historically, the industry has looked at Academia for specialized talent across Mayry expertise areas. And over the years, various models of collaboration have been explored, including academic consultant, private sector Sabbaticals, industry-musearch at universities and even venture funding that allows the university to pursue an entrepreneurial idea for a year or two.
But starting in the mid-2010s, with the arrival of deep learning, grew the need for artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science talent exponentially and introduced to the fundamental change of these long-standing historical mechanisms for industry-academic partnership. Becaus AI development requires a rare combination of multidisciplinary skills, large data sets and calculation capacity, many long-established faculty members with special expertise in AI and Machine Learning left their academic positions to take full-time roles.
This one -way migrant pattern can have lasting and unwanted influence on top universities. Especially when the entire research departments are hired away in bulk, as was the case when an American university in the top rank lost its entire frame of world-class robotics to a venture-funded business.
At Amazon, we had a need for world-class AI talent, and we challenged ourselves to come up with a solution that would meet that needs without causing the interference of disruption of vitality and success at the world’s best universities. We acknowledged that Top AI and Machine Learning Talent are drawn to industrial by the clean scale of the opportunity-to work on big, complex problem with the real world that can change the way we live and work. But in the absence of a more accommodation scheme, many have to choose to go away from their passion to nurture the next generation of Great AI talent.
We recognize the need for new models of partnership that allow industry to exploit academic expertise while strengthening, rather than weakening, our universities, we used an Amazonian approach by first developing a few principles:
- Partnership models should strengthen all participants – industry, academia and the government.
- Partnership models must be sustainable and accelerate scientific discovery and promotion of each sector.
- Partnership models should provide demonstrable value to all voters – society as a whole, faculty, students, university administrations, end customers, government units and industrial laboratories.
These principles led the development of the Amazon Scholars program, which allows academics to participate in Amazon in flexible capacity through part-time events and sabbaticals. The program is designed for academics from universities across the globe who want to use new and established research methods in practice, work with real world systems and deliver value to end users and communities as a whole. Overcoming some of the most difficult technical challenges requires the best expertise in the world to get together, and the Amazon Scholars program allows the university faculty to tackle these technical challenges in scale while hambing their professional homes in Academy.
To help universities develop the next generation of academic leaders, we expanded the Scholars program in 2020 by adding Amazon’s visiting academics positionThat gives pre-venture-to-newew-new-tentured academicics an opportunity to keep in touch with new challenges and opportunities. Amazon is a unique place to measure the impact of new scientific ideas considering the diversity of our customers’ needs and expectations.
The value of the Amazon Scholars program is shown in the unique quality of the academic talent connected to Amazon as part of this program and its global appeal: We launched the Scholars program in 2019, and today we host more than 250 scholars and visit academics in 24 cities across the globe, from Los Angeles to Bangalore Tel Aviv.
In 2019, we launched the University HUBS program to expand access to academic partnerships beyond the faculty, which is Amazon. The University Hubs program created multi -year obligations with gift and sponsored research financing, PhD. -The scholarships and societal events to promote technology collaboration and society.
After starting with the first hub at Columbia University, the program is now tightening five universities. Activity at Hubs is Comabied by university administrators and Amazon program leaders. In 2021, in partnership with Columbia University, we launched the Columbia-Amazon Sour Internal Fellowship program with the aim of giving studying from underrated backgrounds an opportunity to contribute to pioneering research in the world of the world’s largest universities.
Following the resounding success of the pilot defense of the safe program in Columbia in the summer of 2021, the Surde program quadrupled the number of supported trainees in 2022 and expanded the program to two universities – Georgia Tech and the University of Southern California (USC). This year, the program further expanded with the addition of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
“The university hired in collaboration with Amazon provides a truly innovative framework for faculties and scholars to continue basic research in academia or collaboration with industry practitioners in scaling technology breakthroughs to demonstrate effects in the real world,” said Shih-Fu Chang, Dean of Columbia Engineering and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor of the Department of Electric Technology and Computer Science. “We are also extremely enthusiastic about the success of the safe program in expanding access to the Voice pipeline by giving the combined resources from both industry and academia to education of students from different populations.
Also in 2019, the Amazon Launched Justice program in AI in Partnership with the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a $ 21 million initiative that since it is Indersay has provided funding for 34 University-LED teams and has produced a growing knowledge in the increase and responsible AI. Amazon also contributes to NSF’s National AI R&D Institute program.
The complementary initiatives described above seek to expand access to new technologies by strengthening partnerships Academy, Industry and Government. These initiatives enable Akademia-based talent to harmonize their passions, life stations and career ambitions by acknowledging that academia and industry offered different paths for intellectual fulfillment. The success of these initiatives shows that achieving such harmony can enable industrials to be while preserving – and even strengthening – the crucial pipeline of future talent.