Amazon at Illinois
In a rapidly evolving digital age, partnerships between academia and industry have become crucial in driving innovation. For four years, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Amazon have cultivated a unique and dynamic relationship that has transformed the educational landscape, paved the way for groundbreaking research, and fostered student success.
Amazon Ads Education Alliance and The Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising
Since 2021, The Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising has provided students with valuable, real-world experience through its collaboration with Amazon Ads Education Alliance. These courses have had an impact on hundreds of students so far, and this impact is growing in numbers as these courses expand – classes have been scaled 3x in 2023.
Courses such as Brand Advertising Strategy in Digital Media and E-Commerce and Advertising Immersion give students the opportunity to work on hands-on projects with professionals from the industry, including account managers, creative managers, and strategists. Through these courses, students work with professionals to solve real-world challenges and gain invaluable hands-on experience.
In 2023, Amazon and The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign collaborated to develop intelligent conversational systems that demonstrate contextual understanding and emotional intelligence, allow for personalization, and the ability to interpret non-verbal communication while being ethical and fair. Recent Natural Language Processing advances have allowed the development of complex conversational techniques for scenarios, such as task-oriented, chit-chat, and guiding users in complex real-world tasks. These systems lack deep knowledge acquisition and reasoning, are limited to interactions based on single data modalities (e.g., text or speech), and cannot conduct continued self-learning. The AICE Center aims to revolutionize AI conversational systems.
Amazon and Illinois announce inaugural slate of funded research projects
With the collaboration of Amazon and The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign came the inaugural round of funded research projects and the first cohort of annual fellowships. Research projects allow fellows to further the development of intelligent conversational systems that demonstrate contextual understanding and emotional intelligence. Personalization is also a key factor to keeping each research project unique. Fellowship recipients will be paired with Amazon scientists that will mentor them while conducting research in conversational AI.
The two academic fellowship recipients were Steeve Huang and Ming Zhong, both third-year PhD students. Steeve Huang focused on combating the proliferation of false information using fact-checking, fake-news detection, factual-error correction, and enhancing the faithfulness of text generation models. Ming Zhong focused on tailoring conversational AI to meet the diverse needs of individual users with the use of AI being increasingly used in everyday life.
