Amina Shabbeer

I am an Applied Science Manager at Amazon where I manage the Music ML Personalization team. I have 15y experience in industry and academic research in machine learning, optimization and artificial intelligence and their applications to problems in bioinformatics, conversational AI, natural language processing, distributed computing. At Amazon, I lead efforts in recommender models and ranking using deep learning based models and multi-armed bandits that serve personalized podcast recommendations to millions of customers. Previously, I lead development of spoken language understanding and reinforcement learning based dialogue management systems for music on Alexa. Previously, at IBM, I developed an optimization-based approach to data distribution by partition placement in a cloud-based datawarehouse that guarantees high availability and fault tolerance. 

I received my PhD in Computer Science, with a focus on machine learning, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). My thesis was on non-convex non-smooth optimization with applications for Bioinformatics. I did research on classification and visualization tools for molecular biology of tuberculosis in collaboration with the Centers of Disease Control (CDC). The tools and techniques I developed continue to be used by researchers and epidemiologists worldwide.