Prime Video continually works to solve a broad range of cutting-edge technical problems to delight our customers by offering them the most engaging video-watching experience globally.
In 2022, Prime Video partnered with the Amazon Research Awards (ARA) program, which provides unrestricted funds and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating topics across a number of disciplines. Together, Prime Video and ARA announced a call for proposals in the fields of anomaly detection and insights, personalization and discovery, and video quality analysis, with the aim of accelerating progress in the state-of-the-art for video-watching. Today, Prime Video and ARA announced the recipients of these awards.
“The incredible response to Prime Video’s fall 2022 Call for Proposals is a testament to the exciting work the ARAs have inspired across four cutting-edge research categories,” said BA Winston, VP of Technology at Prime Video. “I am delighted by the winning proposals and look forward to the ongoing research across several areas in Prime Video that is helping us create even more impactful customer-obsessed technology.”
Raffay Hamid (Senior Principal Scientist – Prime Video) said: “It’s great to see all these scientific collaborations between Prime Video and some of the top universities from around the world on a diverse set of research topics.” Yongjun Wu (Senior Principal Engineer – Prime Video) added: “I am pleased to see many high-quality research proposals for Prime Video’s ARA, and the opportunities of deep research engagement between Prime Video and professors in universities, which will eventually enable cutting-edge technologies to optimize Prime Video customer experiences.”
The recipients are listed, in alphabetical order, in the following table.
| Recipient | University | Research title |
| David Bull | University of Bristol | Generic deep video quality assessment in the extended parameter space |
| Eamonn Keogh | University of California Riverside | A proposal to make any time series anomaly detection algorithm faster, more accurate and more practical |
| Xiaorui Liu | North Carolina State University | Deep reinforcement learning for the mixed ranking of recommendations and advertisements with page-wise display |
| Anders Møller | Aarhus University | Securing node.js programs with static resource analysis |
| Jiliang Tang | Michigan State University | Deep reinforcement learning for the mixed ranking of recommendations and advertisements with page-wise display |
| Hanghang Tong | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | Graph algorithms for personalized recommendation |
| Fan Zhang | University of Bristol | Generic deep video quality assessment in the extended parameter space |
For the full recipient list and more information on the ARA awards, see the 79 Amazon Research Awards recipients announcement article on the Amazon Science website.