Indian-American professor receives Amazon Research Award to study evolving machine learning systems

New York, November 8

An Indian-American professor of computer science at a university in the US has received an Amazon Research Award to design a tool that minimises negative user experiences.

Pavithra Prabhakar, who is the Peggy and Gary Edwards chair in engineering, was one of 74 recipients of the awards from Amazon, which also includes an unrestricted gift, access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets, and Amazon Web Services’ artificial intelligence and machine learning services and tools, the Kansas State University said in a statement.

Prabhakar currently serves as a programme director at the National Science Foundation while on sabbatical from K-State.

The tool itself would be utilised to minimise disruptive changes to the user experience of machine learning-based software systems as the product is refined and retrained over time.

She explained the issue with an example of a search engine tool being retrained to provide superior automated results but in the process, losing some of the results the end user expects to see.

“The broad objective of the project is to automatically characterise how much two versions of machine learning-based systems are similar or different,” Prabhakar said.