Customer Science

A professor-friend of mine recently told me about a program he is participating in called Amazon Scholar.

The program brings together world-class academics to work on large-scale technical challenges while continuing to teach and conduct research at their universities.

Amazon Scholar is part of a larger program called Amazon Science, through which Amazon makes R&D investments with hundreds of researchers and applied scientists committed to innovation across every part of the company.

Amazon Science’s research areas include …

Cloud and Systems

Computer Vision

Conversational AI

Economics

Information Management

Machine Learning

Operations Research

Quantum Technologies

Robotics

Search and Information Retrieval

Security, Privacy, Abuse Prevention

Sustainability

Although they call it “customer science” reminding Amazon’s intense focus on customers, as you can see it looks a lot more like “computer science” with economic and sustainability threads.

The program creates value for all parties - Amazon, the researchers, and Amazon’s customers too.

The academics get to tap into Amazon’s massive platform-level data to conduct and apply their research to real world problems.

Amazon gets to direct world’s finest minds toward accelerating the future of commerce and a customer experience like no other.

And the customers get more of what they want, when they want it. Maybe even before they want it if the forecasting is good enough.

You can read some of the interesting outputs from the program here on their blog … https://www.amazon.science/blog