Three computer science graduate students have been named Amazon Fellows in a program run by the JHU + Amazon Initiative for Interactive Artificial Intelligence, or AI2AI. The fellowship supports PhD students who are pursuing innovations that advance the state of the art in all areas of interactive AI technologies that will enhance interactions between humans and intelligent machines.
Ambar Pal, Aniket Roy, and Xuan Zhang were selected based on their outstanding publication records, research proposals, and mentor support.
Fellows will receive a full stipend, 20% tuition, and student health insurance for the fall and spring semesters. Additionally, they will be nominated for a paid summer internship at Amazon, during which they will gain valuable industry insights and experiences via engagement with Amazon researchers.
Meet the Fellows
Ambar Pal is a final-year PhD student advised by René Vidal and Jeremias Sulam. His research focuses on the theory and practice of safety in AI. Pal’s central philosophy is that incorporating structural constraints from data can efficiently mitigate current machine learning systems’ vulnerabilities to malicious agents. On the theoretical side, he has built frameworks formalizing how exploiting structure in data (e.g., low dimensionality) can lead to improved formal guarantees for safety. On the practical side, he has demonstrated the utility of such data-driven constraints for systems used for image and graph classification.
Pal is from New Delhi, India. He received a bachelor’s degree from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins. In his spare time, he enjoys biking and studying microscopic organisms.
Aniket Roy is a fourth-year PhD student advised by Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Rama Chellappa. His current research in computer vision and machine learning specifically focuses on few-shot learning, multimodal learning, and generative AI, including diffusion models and large language models.
Roy earned a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Roy is originally from the city of Joy, Kolkata. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling and listening to music.
Xhuan Zhang is a fifth-year PhD student advised by Kevin Duh. Her current research is focused on sign language processing and machine translation. Sign language processing is the task of recognizing and translating sign language videos to spoken languages; common tasks in this area include sign language detection, segmentation, production, recognition, and translation.
Zhang has both master’s and bachelor’s degrees in computer science. She is originally from Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China. In her spare time, she enjoys learning ASL and Japanese and practicing Kendo.