Johns Hopkins and Amazon collaborate to explore transformative power of AI

Johns Hopkins University and Amazon are teaming up to harness the power of artificial intelligence to transform the way humans interact online and with the world. The new JHU Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI, housed in the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, will leverage the university's world-class expertise in interactive AI to advance groundbreaking technologies in machine learning, computer vision, natural language understanding, and speech processing; democratize access to the benefits of AI innovations; and broaden participation in research from diverse, interdisciplinary scholars and other innovators. Amazon's investment will span five years, comprising doctoral fellowships, sponsored research funding, gift funding, and community projects. Sanjeev Khudanpur, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Whiting School, will serve as the initiative's founding director. Khudanpur is an expert in the application of information-theoretic methods to human language technologies such as automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and natural language processing.