Amandeep Kumar, an Indian American Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student at the Johns Hopkins University, has received a fellowship from Amazon’s new AI PhD Fellowship program.
Kumar, a member of the Visual Intelligence and Understanding (VIU) Lab, studies computer vision and generative AI with the aim of enhancing the efficiency of long-form video generation.
Advised by Dr. Vishal Patel, his research focuses on computer vision and generative AI, particularly improving the efficiency of long-form video generation.
Before joining Johns Hopkins, Kumar worked as a researcher in computer vision at the IVAL Lab of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the United Arab Emirates.
He also interned at the SketchX Lab at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and earned his bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from West Bengal University of Technology.
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Johns Hopkins University is one of nine universities selected by Amazon for its new AI PhD Fellowship program, an initiative that will provide nearly $68 million in funding over two years to more than 100 doctoral students nationwide, according to a university release.
In its inaugural year, the program will support seven Whiting School of Engineering doctoral students studying core AI topics in areas including machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing.
Additionally, three new Amazon-funded Whiting School fellows were announced through the JHU + Amazon Initiative for Interactive AI (AI2AI).
The AI PhD Fellows, chosen based on their proposals for research projects that have the potential for significant societal impact, receive tuition, a stipend, fees, a travel grant, and mentorship from Amazon scientists, along with Amazon Web Services cloud-computing credits to support their computational research.
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Each fellow is matched with an Amazon research liaison—a senior scientist whose expertise aligns with their work.
Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist in Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence views collaborating with the some of the brightest PhD students at the nation’s leading research universities as big win for Amazon.
“What makes this program special is how it brings together Amazon’s real-world experience across diverse industries with the fresh perspectives of these top researchers to cultivate the next generation of AI leaders,” Prasad says.
This initiative builds on Amazon’s history of supporting academic research at Johns Hopkins and complements AI2AI, which since 2022 has provided funding for faculty research and 17 doctoral fellows in machine learning, computer vision, natural language understanding, and speech processing, according to the release.