Every News | Zhang Zitong | Editor: He Xiaotao
On July 22nd, Wang Mingyin, the Chief Application Scientist at AWS Amazon Cloud Technology Shanghai AI Research Institute, shared on WeChat that he had received a notification stating, “AWS Amazon Cloud Technology Shanghai AI Research Institute (also the last overseas research institute of AWS) has officially disbanded.”
Wang Mingyin expressed his gratitude, “Over the past six years leading the team, I have been fortunate to be part of the golden period for foreign enterprise research institutes and even more so, thanks to the meticulous guidance of Professor Zhang Zheng. It was an honor to become the youngest Chief Application Scientist in AWS’s Asia-Pacific region.”
On July 23rd, an Amazon spokesperson responded to Daily Economic News saying, “After conducting an in-depth assessment of the company’s organizational structure, development priorities, and future strategic directions, we have decided to streamline some teams within AWS Cloud Technologies. Making these decisions is very challenging for us, but we will fully support our employees in their transition smoothly.
The necessary decisions we have made are aimed at sustaining investment and optimizing resources, thereby bringing more innovation to our customers.”
According to the official website of AWS Cloud Technologies, the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute was established in autumn 2018 and is affiliated with AWS Cloud Technologies Machine Learning. The institute focuses on:
Developing and contributing open-source projects, such as the widely popular DeepGraphLibrary (DGL) framework
Fundamental research in the field of graph neural networks (GNNs) and its applications
Empowering customers through AWS Cloud Technologies services (such as SageMakerDGL and NetpuneML), etc.
Actively collaborating with the academic community
Public reports indicate that on September 17th, 2018, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, a number of global artificial intelligence innovation projects were signed and settled in Shanghai, including the AWS AI Research Institute. According to reports, the AWS AWS Shanghai AI Research Institute will gather top AI talent globally, participating in and developing the open-source deep learning framework ecosystem.
According to reports at the time, Professor Zhang Zheng from Shanghai New York University will be in charge of the research institute.
Zhang Zheng is a professor in both the Computer Science Department at Shanghai New York University and the Global Network at New York University. He has extensive experience in large-scale distributed computing theory and practice, as well as its intersection with machine learning. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After joining the research lab, he will retain his teaching position.
At that time, AWS also stated that it would introduce an expert team including Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Scientist Alex Smola, AWS’s Director of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Pietro Perona, a PhD from the Electrical Engineering Department at Caltech, Allen E. Puckett, a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Computer Science Professor at UCLA, Amazon AI Application Science Director Stefano Soatto, and AWS’s Chief Scientist for Machine Learning, Li Mu.
Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AWS, stated: “With the establishment of the AWS Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, we will collaborate closely with the AWS China team, the industry, and academia to help more customers realize artificial intelligence democratization, making advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies accessible to everyone.”