The Amazon Research Awards (ARA) is one of Amazon’s ways of supporting external research that could potentially be integrated into the tech giant’s platform in the future. Recently the 49 projects chosen were announced. This interesting information came to us from Slator in their article, “Natural Language Processing and Neural Machine Translation Figure Prominently in Amazon Research Awards.”
The ARA announced the names of the 49 groups whose projects the organization will be individually granting up to $80,000. A total of 28 institutions would collectively be awarded a total of $3.7M in funds for their research.
The awards were offered in 11 categories—from machine learning to computer vision to multilingual language understanding. The 2017 ARA received over 800 submissions from research groups across North America and Europe.
Among the projects awarded, five were natural language processing related and one was about neural machine translation. Language-related technologies being well represented among the winners is an indicator of the importance of the technology.
Melody K. Smith
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