Innovation Forums 2

Bio: Tian Lan is a Senior Principal Scientist at AWS, where he leads research for Amazon Just Walk Out, the world’s first AI-powered checkout-free retail technology. He also leads broader efforts in developing visual agentic AI solutions within AWS. Prior to joining Amazon, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University from 2013 to 2014. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University in 2013.

Bio: Ashwin Swaminathan is a Director in the AGI organization at Amazon where he currently leads the efforts related to multimodal foundational models. His team contributed to the launch of Amazon Nova foundational models. Prior to Amazon, Ashwin was at Magic Leap where he led the team for World Sensing and Metaverse teams.

Ashwin holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland College Park where he conducted research in several topics in image processing, multimedia forensics, security and watermarking. He is an IEEE senior member with seven journal papers, 30 plus conference papers, 40 plus US patents and 50 patent applications with a combined of 6000 citations.

Alireza Fathi is a senior staff research scientist / manager at Google DeepMind. Before joining Google, he spent a couple of great years at Apple working on 3d computer vision. Before that he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in FeiFei Li's lab at Stanford. He received his Ph.D. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, and my B.Sc. degree from Sharif University of Technology.

Bio: Heng Wang is a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research working on the Cosmos World Foundation Model. Before he spent multiple years at TikTok/ByteDance, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and Amazon Go. He has received the Test of Time Award (Helmholtz Prize) at ICCV 2023, AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar at 2022 and National Natural Science Award of China at 2020. He won several challenges including the DataComp challenge, EPIC-Kitchens challenge, TRECVID challenges, etc. Heng holds a Ph.D. in computer vision from Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Bio: Alejandro holds a PhD in Computer Vision from INRIA. He led the development of perception systems for autonomous industrial drones at Iris Automation, work that earned him recognition as an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 in 2017. While working at Amazon Alejandro has contributed to the advancement of action recognition systems for cashierless stores, delivering highly accurate, real-world deployed solutions. He now leads a team at Zoox focused on building Foundation Models that go beyond perception to interact intelligently with the physical world.

Bio: Forrest Iandola completed a PhD in EECS at UC Berkeley, where his research focused on squeezing deep neural networks onto small devices. As part of his dissertation research, he developed the energy-efficient SqueezeNet neural network. His advances in deep learning led to the founding of DeepScale, which was acquired by Tesla in 2019. He is currently an AI Research Scientist at Meta. In his spare time, he drives an electric car in the 24 Hours of Lemons race.