October 9, 2025 / Glass Pavilion / JHU Homewood Campus
2025 AI2AI Research Festival
Join us for a day of celebration as we honor newly appointed Amazon Fellows and winners of the AI2AI Research Awards. The event will feature research leaders from Amazon sharing their insights on current research directions in interactive AI and related topics.
The event will include presentations from award recipients and Amazon Fellows, panel discussions, a poster session, and opportunities to connect with the Amazon + JHU research communities.
Agenda
8:30 to 9 a.m. ET Breakfast + Coffee
9 to 9:10 a.m. Welcome + Intro from JHU and Amazon
- Sanjeev Khudanpur, Initiative Director, AI2AI
- Anne Szeto, Head of Academic Research Initiatives, Amazon
9:10 to 9:45 a.m. Amazon Science Perspectives
- Grant Strimel, Principal Applied Scientist, AGI
- Fei Xiong, Senior Applied Scientist, AWS Security
- Dongwei Jiang, Applied Scientist, AWS AI, Fundamental Research
- Kapil Katyal, Sr. Manager, Applied Science, Amazon Robotics
9:45 to 11:15 a.m. Research Awardee Lightning Talks (5–7 mins each)
Research Awardee Lightning Talks (5-6-mins each)
- Daniel Khashabi | Multi-Modal Inference-Scaling (virtual)
- Berrak Sisman | Multimodal Speech Synthesis: Leveraging Computer Vision and LLMs for Expressive Voice Generation
- Philipp Koehn | Reasoning over Information in Tabular Data
- Tianmin Shu | Long-horizon AI Assistance via Continuous Mental Reasoning from Streaming Multimodal Inputs
- Carey Priebe | Representing a Collection of Large Language Models as a Gaussian Mixture in Data Kernel Perspective Space
- Mahsa Yarmohammadi | Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Multi-Vector Representations
- Yanxun Xu | Precision AI: Enhancing Deep Search for Expert Knowledge Domains with Multi-agent GUI System
- Alan Yuille | Next-Generation 3D Vision-Language Models with Physics, Counterfactual Reasoning & Planning
Spotlight from prior Award Cohort (15 mins):
- Tianmin Shu ’24/’25 + ’25/’26 Award Recipient
- Hyokun Yun, Principal Applied Scientist, Store Front AI (virtual)
11:15 to Noon. Panel: “Interactive and Embodied AI”
- Kapil Katyal, Sr. Manager, Applied Science, Amazon Robotic
- Tinoosh Mohsenin, Associate Professor, JHU ECE
- Mathias Unberath, John C. Malone Associate Professor, JHU Computer Science
- Rene Vidal, Rachleff University Professor, University of Pennsylvania
- Moderator: Sanjeev Khudanpur, Initiative Director
Noon to 12:10 p.m. Reflections
- Ed Schlesinger, Benjamin T. Rome Dean
12:10 to 1:10 p.m. Lunch + Poster Session
1:10 to 1:30 p.m. Amazon Science Perspectives
- Dawn Heisey-Grove, Health Lead, AWS Social Responsibility & Impact
- Tancrede Lepoint, Principal Applied Scientist, AWS Provable Security
- Ferhat Erata, Applied Scientist, Automated Reasoning Group
1:30 to 2 p.m. Amazon Fellow Presentations + Spotlight
- Spotlight from ‘25 cohort (10 mins)
- Yiqing Shen, Amazon Fellow ’24/’25 +’25/’26
- Fei Xiong, Senior Applied Scientist, AWS Security
- Amazon Fellows (Introduced by Sanjeev Khudanpur)
- Siyuan “Cyan” Huang | Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Chuanyang Jin | Computer Science
- Amandeep Kumar | Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Tianhao Li | Materials Science and Engineering
- Yen-Ju Lu | Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Yuxin Ma | Applied Mathematics and Statistics
- Caio Netto | Applied Mathematics and Statistics
- Yiqing Shen | Computer Science
- Jingyu (Jack) Zhang | Computer Science
- Yang Zhao | Civil and Systems Engineering
2 to 3 p.m. JHU + Amazon networking meetings
Amazon visitors are encouraged to meet with past, present, or future JHU researchers. If interested in scheduling, contact Seth Zonies
