EECS students drive AI innovation as Amazon PhD Fellows

Today, Amazon announced its new AI PhD Fellowship program, offering two years of funding to over 100 PhD students across nine universities. Ten of these inaugural fellowships have been awarded to graduate students from UC Berkeley EECS’ Sky Computing Lab, supporting cutting-edge research in core AI disciplines like machine learning, computer vision, and natural-language processing, ultimately driving innovations essential for the next evolution of practical AI.

Fellows receive direct mentorship from an Amazon research liaison, a senior scientist whose expertise aligns with their work. These liaisons will meet regularly to offer guidance and explore the real-world impact of the fellows’ research. Fellows can pursue their projects during summer Amazon internships.

Meet the Amazon AI PhD Fellows:

• Dacheng Li: Full-stack Open Intelligent Agents At Scale
• Darya Kaviani: Cryptographic Security for AI Systems
• Hao Wang: Practical Secure Code Generation via Controlled Secure Reasoning
• Jongseok Park: Efficient computation and representation of MoE models
• Lakshya Agrawal: Sample Efficient Optimization of AI Systems
• Melissa Pan: Co-Designing ML and Systems for Energy-Efficient AI Agents
• Reginald Frank: Real Life Is Uncertain. Fault Tolerance Should Be Too!
• Shiyi Cao: Efficient RL System for Advanced Long-horizon Agent Training
• Shuo Yang: Efficient Long Video Generation
• Tyler Griggs: Towards Flexible and Efficient Systems for Post-Training Generative Models

“We are thrilled to partner with Amazon to advance open research in AI,” said Joseph Gonzalez, Professor in EECS and co-director of the Sky Computing Lab. “Through this fellowship, Amazon and UC Berkeley are investing in the next generation of researchers, and I am excited to see how our PhD students will shape the future of artificial intelligence.”

All nine participating universities, including UC Berkeley, already foster robust research collaborations with Amazon through programs like Amazon Hubs, the Amazon Scholar Program, and Amazon Research Awards. The full list of institutions includes Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Washington.

“As AI becomes increasingly part of daily life, training our research leaders has never been more important,” said Jennifer Chayes, Dean, UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. “We are delighted that Amazon is partnering with UC Berkeley and other top universities to help support PhD students as they develop the AI innovations of the future.”