Robotics Institute faculty member Florian Shkurti won an Amazon worldwide Research Award for his proposal on generating physically realizable adversarial driving scenarios via differentiable physics and rendering simulators. The award is intended to support the work of one or two graduate students or postdoctoral students for one year.
Amazon received a record number of submissions this year, and gave out 101 awards representing researchers from 59 universities in 13 countries. Only three researchers from Canada received the award: Florian Shkurti and Jimmy Ba from UofT, and Helen Chen from University of Waterloo.
Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content, their creativity, and their potential to impact both the research community, and society more generally. Theoretical advances, creative new ideas, and practical applications were all considered. Recipients have access to more than 200 Amazon public datasets, and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools through their AWS Promotional Credits. Recipients also are assigned an Amazon research contact who offers consultation and advice along with opportunities to participate in Amazon events and training sessions.
Additionally, Amazon encourages the publication of research results, presentations of research at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.