Amazon has announced the awarding of 63 Amazon Research Awards (ARA) to academic researchers affiliated with 41 universities across eight countries, marking a continuation of its ongoing commitment to fostering innovation in artificial intelligence and related fields. These awards provide unrestricted funds alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) promotional credits, enabling recipients to undertake research across a broad spectrum of disciplines including AI for information security, Amazon Ads, AWS AI, and agentic AI.
The projects selected under the AI for information security category particularly focus on emergent vulnerabilities within machine learning systems, addressing challenges such as interpretable vulnerability detection, secure key management for confidential computing, and safe API discovery tailored for agentic AI. The agentic AI category recipients explore advanced topics like efficient long-horizon reasoning in interactive agents, contextual harm mitigation, automated backtracking, and bug-aware software testing overseen by intelligent agents.
Recipients of the awards gain access to over 700 public datasets curated by Amazon, as well as a wide array of AWS AI and machine learning services and tools. To support their research journey, each awardee is paired with an Amazon research mentor who provides consultation, technical advice, and facilitates participation in Amazon-led events and training sessions. Amazon also encourages the open dissemination of research outputs, including presentations at its global offices and the release of related code under open-source licenses.
Yida Wang, AWS AI principal applied scientist, emphasised AWS’s ambition to democratise AI research by partnering with leading academic institutions such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and UCLA. Wang highlighted the barriers researchers face, particularly the need for affordable access to cutting-edge infrastructure that supports both advanced research and education. As a tangible example of the partnership’s impact, Amazon is collaborating with MIT researchers on 3D medical imaging projects that have significantly reduced the training time for healthcare professionals from months to weeks.
This announcement follows similar Amazon Research Award cycles held recently, which in fall 2024 saw 75 awards granted to researchers from 46 universities across 10 countries, covering additional categories like Automated Reasoning, AWS Cryptography, and Sustainability. Prior cycles in 2023 and early 2024 expanded this support further, with award numbers reaching over 100 and the geographic coverage spanning 15 countries. These programmes reflect Amazon’s strategic investment in supporting high-impact research that has the potential to advance both academic knowledge and practical applications in technology and society.
By maintaining a steady influx of funding, resources, and collaborative opportunities for AI researchers worldwide, Amazon aims to contribute significantly to the evolution of machine learning technologies and their integration into real-world solutions, while also nurturing the next generation of researchers who will shape the future of the field.
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Source: Noah Wire Services