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AUSTIN, Texas The University of Texas at Austin and Amazon are launching a science and engineering research partnership to enhance understanding in a variety of areas, including video streaming, search and information retrieval and robotics.

The UT Austin-Amazon Science Hub is the sixth such alliance between the tech company and a leading university. It aims to advance research that prompts new discoveries and addresses significant challenges while creating solutions that benefit society. This will be achieved by fostering collaboration among faculty members and students along with the development of a diverse and sustainable pipeline of research talent.

We are striving to establish even more collaborations with leading companies and organizations in order to bring together more talented people, produce higher-impact research, and help our students reach their greatest ambitions. The launch of the new hub with Amazon is the latest success story in this effort, said UT Austin President Jay Hartzell. I am eager to see the discoveries that our researchers and students will create from this collaboration, and how those discoveries will change the world.

The hub will be hosted in UT Austins Cockrell School of Engineering but engage researchers in a variety of disciplines.

As part of the collaboration, Amazon will provide funding for research projects, doctoral graduate student fellowships, and community-building events designed to diversify and increase cross-disciplinary innovation.

Amazon is thrilled to establish a university hub at UT Austin, said BA Winston, vice president of technology at Prime Video. For years, our top scientists have been a resource to UT Austin graduate students, collaborating on topics such as developing objective machine learning models to predict perceptual video quality that drive smart compression and multimodal AI models that help ensure highest quality media playback experience at scale.

The 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 work with Amazon through the program.

This Science Hub will strengthen the partnership between UT Austin and Amazon by leveraging our collective strengths and creating opportunities for our faculty and students and leaders at Amazon to work together to accelerate progress in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, AI and robotics, said Roger Bonnecaze, dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering.

Research into visual neuroscience, streaming and social media is one of the reasons that UT was attractive to establish the new hub. Al Bovik, director of the new science hub and a professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, helped guarantee the quality and reliability of streaming video and social media worldwide with his research. Joining him in leadership of the hub is an advisory board that includes personnel from UT Austin and Amazon:

UT Austin has built an impressive program in robotics with exceptional faculty and students, said Ken Washington, vice president of Amazon Consumer Robotics. The new hub will allow us to collaborate even more closely with them in robotics and related disciplines, so Im very optimistic about our growing partnership.

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Amazon Teams Up With UT To Establish New Science Hub - UT News - The University of Texas at Austin