Events & Conferences
“Helping people stay reliably informed … that’s my motivation”
Once upon a time, we could confidently pull on the threads of information around us and weave them into useful knowledge, because the higher-quality threads tended to stand out. Today, as we’re swept along by an information tsunami, it can be hard to know what to reach for, what information to trust. Amazon Scholar Heng Ji, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has made it her life’s work to help us separate the signal from the noise.
“It’s a challenge, but if we don’t work on it, this is going to become a serious societal problem,” says Ji, who also directs the Amazon-Illinois Center on Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE). “Helping people stay reliably informed, so they can make good choices: that’s my motivation.”
To that end, Ji leads the Blender Lab at UIUC, where she seeks to foster a future of information accessibility in which computers will be capable of discerning precise, succinct, and reliable knowledge from the information swirling through that tsunami. Not only that, she says, we will also be able to access this reliable knowledge by conversing with computers using natural language.
“We want to know who did what, to whom, where and when, entities, events and actions, claims and counter-claims, their interconnections, and then make sense of it all,” says Ji.
The key approach Ji brings to bear on this challenge is natural-language processing (NLP) and her pioneering work in information extraction (IE).
Situation reports
The roots of IE can be traced back to the Message Understanding Conference (MUC), a series of events that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency started in the late 1980s. The program was co-led by Ralph Grishman who would later become Ji’s PhD advisor. Today, Ji is bringing IE back to its roots with a technology her team revealed in March, called SmartBook, with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
In times of disaster, such as a global pandemic, or ongoing conflicts such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, good decision-making requires gathering comprehensive intelligence of the reality on the ground. In conflicts, this intel is referred to as situation reports (sitreps).
Analysts and humanitarian workers must gather and digest large amounts of up-to-date documents daily, then combine that with extensive local and cultural knowledge, and the broader dynamics of a disaster. Only then can analysts create useful sitreps that military leaders or politicians can use to make strategic decisions. It’s a tough process to automate.
In 2022, Ji came across the nonprofit organization Data Friendly Space, which produces a situational analysis of the Ukraine crisis every two weeks.
“I wanted to help this group by automating a first draft of their sitreps, so that they could spend time on what they are really good at — using their expertise to shape that draft, adding strategically important information and making recommendations.”
What Ji and her collaborators, led by Clare Voss at the US Army Research Laboratory, came up with was the SmartBook framework. Using the Ukraine crisis as a case study, the SmartBook digests large amounts of news data from the internet, automatically extracting information including events, places, people, weapons, and military actions and pulls it all together to produce sitreps.
The reports are structured within timelines featuring major events as chapters, with relevant strategic questions used as section headings and corresponding summaries across claims grounded with links to the sources of information (Fig 1). Everything is automatic.
While the SmartBook uses large language models (LLMs) to produce the summaries (Fig 1, above, bottom right) conditioned on extracted claims from news sources, it is only one of many components in the SmartBook framework. ChatGPT alone, for example, could not generate a structured sitrep, not least because it is not trained on up-to-date information. And LLMs are prone to hallucinate, generating information or “answers” that are not grounded in the source news data, leading to outputs that can be inaccurate, misleading, or entirely fabricated.
When an expert analyst was asked to edit the sitreps produced by the SmartBook, they added more detail to the document but removed only about 2% of the content. “This indicates the SmartBook can act as a good starting point for analysts to expand upon for the generation of situation reports,” says Ji.
This early iteration of the SmartBook relies on news reports in English, but Ji’s team is currently increasing the variety of information sources and languages, to produce a more rounded picture.
Drug discovery
Another of Ji’s passions is applying her skills to support drug discovery. Ji envisions a future in which a doctor can write a few sentences describing a bespoke drug for treating a specific patient and then receive the exact structure of a drug with the desired characteristics, which could in turn be tested and synthesized to order. Currently, the development of a single novel drug can take over a decade and cost upwards of a billion dollars.
Ji and her team developed a novel learning framework that jointly represents molecules and language and enables translations between the two. “I was trained as a computational linguist, so I tend to see everything as a foreign language, and that includes molecules, images, or videos,” she says.
The framework is called MolT5 — a self-supervised-learning framework for pretraining models on a vast amount of unlabeled, natural-language text and molecule strings (a notation system that represents molecular structure). Given a molecule string, Ji and her team report that MotT5 will provide a text description that includes that molecule’s medicinal, atomic, and chemical properties. On the flip side, provide MolT5 with a description of desired molecular properties, and it will generate the string for a molecule that best fits that description.
The idea is that MolT5, or its descendants, will allow chemists to exploit AI technologies to discover new drugs using natural-language descriptions.
Human interactions
In March this year, Ji helped strengthen the relationship between Amazon and UIUC by becoming the founding director of AICE. AICE aims to develop new conversational AI systems that can automatically learn, reason, update their own knowledge, and interact in more modalities.
“If your digital assistant could also read the books and watch the movies that you have enjoyed, they will be able to conduct much more knowledgeable, informative, and interesting conversations with you,” says Ji. “It would make interacting with them more natural — more human.”
Another focus of AICE is to improve the truthfulness, fairness, and transparency of conversational AI systems.
Can the modern information tsunami truly be tamed? “There’s a trade-off between creativity and truthfulness,” Ji says, “but yes, I believe we can design novel algorithms to achieve both goals.”
Conversational-AI boom
Having spent her career working in NLP, what would Ji tell students who are considering it as an area of research, particularly in light of the LLM boom?
“First, keep your optimism! This LLM wave is exciting, although it has hit a lot of students hard, especially those already in the middle of their thesis,” Ji says. “While LLMs appear to close some research avenues, they open important new ones, such as structured prediction, cross-document reasoning, theoretical understanding of LLMs, factual-error correction, and so many more.”
Ji also notes the Chinese proverb “frequent moves make a tree die but a person prosperous” and recommends mixing academic and industry research. Ji herself has worked with the Alexa organization in her capacity as an Amazon Scholar since March. “I chose Amazon because it provided the opportunity to tackle real-world problems,” she says. For example, Ji is working with LLM teams at Amazon to, among other things, develop systems to minimize and prevent hallucinations.
“With Amazon, I want the ideas I’ve contributed to become part of the next generation of AI systems and for lots of customers to feel the benefit of that. It’s a very different way of measuring success compared with academia, and that’s refreshing.”
Have you ever worked is legacy code? Are you curious what it takes to modernize systems at a massive scale?
Pascal Hartig is joined on the latest Meta Tech Podcast by Elaine and Buping, two software engineers working on a bold project to rewrite the decades-old C code in one of Meta’s core messaging libraries in Rust. It’s an ambitious effort that will transform a central messaging library that is shared across Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, and Meta’s AR/VR platforms.
They discuss taking on a project of this scope – even without a background in Rust, how they’re approaching it, and what it means to optimize for ‘developer happiness.’
Download or listen to the episode below:
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The Meta Tech Podcast is a podcast, brought to you by Meta, where we highlight the work Meta’s engineers are doing at every level – from low-level frameworks to end-user features.
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Amazon Research Awards (ARA) provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating various research topics in multiple disciplines. This cycle, ARA received many excellent research proposals from across the world and today is publicly announcing 73 award recipients who represent 46 universities in 10 countries.
This announcement includes awards funded under five call for proposals during the fall 2024 cycle: AI for Information Security, Automated Reasoning, AWS AI, AWS Cryptography, and Sustainability. Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content and their potential to impact both the research community and society. 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.
Recipients have access to more than 700 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.
“Automated Reasoning is an important area of research for Amazon, with potential applications across various features and applications to help improve security, reliability, and performance for our customers. Through the ARA program, we collaborate with leading academic researchers to explore challenges in this field,” said Robert Jones, senior principal scientist with the Cloud Automated Reasoning Group. “We were again impressed by the exceptional response to our Automated Reasoning call for proposals this year, receiving numerous high-quality submissions. Congratulations to the recipients! We’re excited to support their work and partner with them as they develop new science and technology in this important area.”
“At Amazon, we believe that solving the world’s toughest sustainability challenges benefits from both breakthrough scientific research and open and bold collaboration. Through programs like the Amazon Research Awards program, we aim to support academic research that could contribute to our understanding of these complex issues,” said Kommy Weldemariam, Director of Science and Innovation Sustainability. “The selected proposals represent innovative projects that we hope will help advance knowledge in this field, potentially benefiting customers, communities, and the environment.”
ARA funds proposals throughout the year in a variety of research areas. Applicants are encouraged to visit the ARA call for proposals page for more information or send an email to be notified of future open calls.
The tables below list, in alphabetical order by last name, fall 2024 cycle call-for-proposal recipients, sorted by research area.
AI for Information Security
| Recipient | University | Research title |
| Christopher Amato | Northeastern University | Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Cyber Defense for Securing Cloud Computing Platforms |
| Bernd Bischl | Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich | Improving Generative and Foundation Models Reliability via Uncertainty-awareness |
| Shiqing Ma | University Of Massachusetts Amherst | LLM and Domain Adaptation for Attack Detection |
| Alina Oprea | Northeastern University | Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Cyber Defense for Securing Cloud Computing Platforms |
| Roberto Perdisci | University of Georgia | ContextADBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Contextual Anomaly Detection |
Automated Reasoning
| Recipient | University | Research title |
| Nada Amin | Harvard University | LLM-Augmented Semi-Automated Proofs for Interactive Verification |
| Suguman Bansal | Georgia Institute of Technology | Certified Inductive Generalization in Reinforcement Learning |
| Ioana Boureanu | University of Surrey | Phoebe+: An Automated-Reasoning Tool for Provable Privacy in Cryptographic Systems |
| Omar Haider Chowdhury | Stony Brook University | Restricter: An Automatic Tool for Authoring Amazon Cedar Access Control Policies with the Principle of Least Privilege |
| Stefan Ciobaca | Alexandru Ioan Cuza University | An Interactive Proof Mode for Dafny |
| João Ferreira | INESC-ID | Polyglot Automated Program Repair for Infrastructure as Code |
| Sicun Gao | University Of California, San Diego | Monte Carlo Trees with Conflict Models for Proof Search |
| Mirco Giacobbe | University of Birmingham | Neural Software Verification |
| Tobias Grosser | University of Cambridge | Synthesis-based Symbolic BitVector Simplification for Lean |
| Ronghui Gu | Columbia University | Scaling Formal Verification of Security Properties for Unmodified System Software |
| Alexey Ignatiev | Monash University | Huub: Next-Gen Lazy Clause Generation |
| Kenneth McMillan | University of Texas At Austin | Synthesis of Auxiliary Variables and Invariants for Distributed Protocol Verification |
| Alexandra Mendes | University of Porto | Overcoming Barriers to the Adoption of Verification-Aware Languages |
| Jason Nieh | Columbia University | Scaling Formal Verification of Security Properties for Unmodified System Software |
| Rohan Padhye | Carnegie Mellon University | Automated Synthesis and Evaluation of Property-Based Tests |
| Nadia Polikarpova | University Of California, San Diego | Discovering and Proving Critical System Properties with LLMs |
| Fortunat Rajaona | University of Surrey | Phoebe+: An Automated-Reasoning Tool for Provable Privacy in Cryptographic Systems |
| Subhajit Roy | Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur | Theorem Proving Modulo LLM |
| Gagandeep Singh | University of Illinois At Urbana–Champaign | Trustworthy LLM Systems using Formal Contracts |
| Scott Stoller | Stony Brook University | Restricter: An Automatic Tool for Authoring Amazon Cedar Access Control Policies with the Principle of Least Privilege |
| Peter Stuckey | Monash University | Huub: Next-Gen Lazy Clause Generation |
| Yulei Sui | University of New South Wales | Path-Sensitive Typestate Analysis through Sparse Abstract Execution |
| Nikos Vasilakis | Brown University | Semantics-Driven Static Analysis for the Unix/Linux Shell |
| Ping Wang | Stevens Institute of Technology | Leveraging Large Language Models for Reasoning Augmented Searching on Domain-specific NoSQL Database |
| John Wawrzynek | University of California, Berkeley | GPU-Accelerated High-Throughput SAT Sampling |
AWS AI
| Recipient | University | Research title |
| Panagiotis Adamopoulos | Emory University | Generative AI solutions for The Spillover Effect of Fraudulent Reviews on Product Recommendations |
| Vikram Adve | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign | Fellini: Differentiable ML Compiler for Full-Graph Optimization for LLM Models |
| Frances Arnold | California Institute of Technology | Closed-loop Generative Machine Learning for De Novo Enzyme Discovery and Optimization |
| Yonatan Bisk | Carnegie Mellon University | Useful, Safe, and Robust Multiturn Interactions with LLMs |
| Shiyu Chang | University of California, Santa Barbara | Cut the Crap: Advancing the Efficient Communication of Multi-Agent Systems via Spatial-Temporal Topology Design and KV Cache Sharing |
| Yuxin Chen | University of Pennsylvania | Provable Acceleration of Diffusion Models for Modern Generative AI |
| Tianlong Chen | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Cut the Crap: Advancing the Efficient Communication of Multi-Agent Systems via Spatial-Temporal Topology Design and KV Cache Sharing |
| Mingyu Ding | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Aligning Long Videos and Language as Long-Horizon World Models |
| Nikhil Garg | Cornell University | Market Design for Responsible Multi-agent LLMs |
| Jessica Hullman | Northwestern University | Human-Aligned Uncertainty Quantification in High Dimensions |
| Christopher Jermaine | Rice University | Fast, Trusted AI Using the EINSUMMABLE Compiler |
| Yunzhu Li | Columbia University | Physics-Informed Foundation Models Through Embodied Interactions |
| Pattie Maes | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Understanding How LLM Agents Deviate from Human Choices |
| Sasa Misailovic | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign | Fellini: Differentiable ML Compiler for Full-Graph Optimization for LLM Models |
| Kristina Monakhova | Cornell University | Trustworthy extreme imaging for science using interpretable uncertainty quantification |
| Todd Mowry | Carnegie Mellon University | Efficient LLM Serving on Trainium via Kernel Generation |
| Min-hwan Oh | Seoul National University | Mutually Beneficial Interplay Between Selection Fairness and Context Diversity in Contextual Bandits |
| Patrick Rebeschini | University of Oxford | Optimal Regularization for LLM Alignment |
| Jose Renau | University of California, Santa Cruz | Verification Constrained Hardware Optimization using Intelligent Design Agentic Programming |
| Vilma Todri | Emory University | Generative AI solutions for The Spillover Effect of Fraudulent Reviews on Product Recommendations |
| Aravindan Vijayaraghavan | Northwestern University | Human-Aligned Uncertainty Quantification in High Dimensions |
| Wei Yang | University of Texas at Dallas | Optimizing RISC-V Compilers with RISC-LLM and Syntax Parsing |
| Huaxiu Yao | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Aligning Long Videos and Language as Long-Horizon World Models |
| Amy Zhang | University of Washington | Tools for Governing AI Agent Autonomy |
| Ruqi Zhang | Purdue University | Efficient Test-time Alignment for Large Language Models and Large Multimodal Models |
| Zheng Zhang | Rutgers University-New Brunswick | AlphaQC: An AI-powered Quantum Circuit Optimizer and Denoiser |
AWS Cryptography
| Recipient | University | Research title |
| Alexandra Boldyreva | Georgia Institute of Technology | Quantifying Information Leakage in Searchable Encryption Protocols |
| Maria Eichlseder | Graz University of Technology, Austria | SALAD – Systematic Analysis of Lightweight Ascon-based Designs |
| Venkatesan Guruswami | University of California, Berkeley | Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation: A Research Program on Cryptography at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing |
| Joseph Jaeger | Georgia Institute of Technology | Analyzing Chat Encryption for Group Messaging |
| Aayush Jain | Carnegie Mellon | Large Scale Multiparty Silent Preprocessing for MPC from LPN |
| Huijia Lin | University of Washington | Large Scale Multiparty Silent Preprocessing for MPC from LPN |
| Hamed Nemati | KTH Royal Institute of Technology | Trustworthy Automatic Verification of Side-Channel Countermeasures for Binary Cryptographic Programs using the HoIBA libary |
| Karl Palmskog | KTH Royal Institute of Technology | Trustworthy Automatic Verification of Side-Channel Countermeasures for Binary Cryptographic Programs using the HoIBA libary |
| Chris Peikert | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | Practical Third-Generation FHE and Bootstrapping |
| Dimitrios Skarlatos | Carnegie Mellon University | Scale-Out FHE LLMs on GPUs |
| Vinod Vaikuntanathan | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Can Quantum Computers (Really) Factor? |
| Daniel Wichs | Northeastern University | Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation: A Research Program on Cryptography at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing |
| David Wu | University Of Texas At Austin | Fast Private Information Retrieval and More using Homomorphic Encryption |
Sustainability
| Recipient | University | Research title |
| Meeyoung Cha | Max Planck Institute | Forest-Blossom (Flossom): A New Framework for Sustaining Forest Biodiversity Through Outcome-Driven Remote Sensing Monitoring |
| Jingrui He | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign | Foundation Model Enabled Earth’s Ecosystem Monitoring |
| Pedro Lopes | University of Chicago | AI-powered Tools that Enable Engineers to Make & Re-make Sustainable Hardware |
| Cheng Yaw Low | Max Planck Institute | Forest-Blossom (Flossom): A New Framework for Sustaining Forest Biodiversity Through Outcome-Driven Remote Sensing Monitoring |
AI safety is a priority at Amazon. Our investment in safe, transparent, and responsible AI (RAI) includes collaboration with the global community and policymakers. We are members of and collaborate with organizations such as the Frontier Model Forum, the Partnership on AI, and other forums organized by government agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Consistent with Amazon’s endorsement of the Korea Frontier AI Safety Commitments, we published our Frontier Model Safety Framework earlier this year.
During the development of the Nova Premier model, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation to assess its performance and safety. This included testing on both internal and public benchmarks and internal/automated and third-party red-teaming exercises. Once the final model was ready, we prioritized obtaining unbiased, third-party evaluations of the model’s robustness against RAI controls. In this post, we outline the key findings from these evaluations, demonstrating the strength of our testing approach and Amazon Premier’s standing as a safe model. Specifically, we cover our evaluations with two third-party evaluators: PRISM AI and ActiveFence.
Evaluation of Nova Premier against PRISM AI
PRISM Eval’s Behavior Elicitation Tool (BET) dynamically and systematically stress-tests AI models’ safety guardrails. The methodology focuses on measuring how many adversarial attempts (steps) it takes to get a model to generate harmful content across several key risk dimensions. The central metric is “steps to elicit” — the number of increasingly sophisticated prompting attempts required before a model generates an inappropriate response. A higher number of steps indicates stronger safety measures, as the model is more resistant to manipulation. The PRISM risk dimensions (inspired by the MLCommons AI Safety Benchmarks) include CBRNE weapons, violent crimes, non-violent crimes, defamation, and hate, amongst several others.
Using the BET Eval tool and its V1.0 metric, which is tailored toward non-reasoning models, we compared the recently released Nova models (Pro and Premier) to the latest models in the same class: Claude (3.5 v2 and 3.7 non-reasoning) and Llama4 Maverick, all available through Amazon Bedrock. PRISM BET conducts black-box evaluations (where model developers don’t have access to the test prompts) of models integrated with their API. The evaluation conducted with BET Eval MAX, PRISM’s most comprehensive/aggressive testing suite, revealed significant variations in safety against malicious instructions. Nova models demonstrated superior overall safety performance, with an average of 43 steps for Premier and 52 steps for Pro, compared to 37.7 for Claude 3.5 v2 and fewer than 12 steps for other models in the comparison set (namely, 9.9 for Claude3.7, 11.5 for Claude 3.7 thinking, and 6.5 for Maverick). This higher step count suggests that on average, Nova’s safety guardrails are more sophisticated and harder to circumvent through adversarial prompting. The figure below presents the number of steps per harm category evaluated through BET Eval MAX.
The PRISM evaluation provides valuable insights into the relative safety of different Amazon Bedrock models. Nova’s strong performance, particularly in hate speech and defamation resistance, represents meaningful progress in AI safety. However, the results also highlight the ongoing challenge of building truly robust safety measures into AI systems. As the field continues to evolve, frameworks like BET will play an increasingly important role in benchmarking and improving AI safety. As a part of this collaboration Nicolas Miailhe, CEO of PRISM Eval, said, “It’s incredibly rewarding for us to see Nova outperforming strong baselines using the BET Eval MAX; our aim is to build a long-term partnership toward safer-by-design models and to make BET available to various model providers.” Organizations deploying AI systems should carefully consider these safety metrics when selecting models for their applications.
Manual red teaming with ActiveFence
The AI safety & security company ActiveFence benchmarked Nova Premier on Bedrock on prompts distributed across Amazon’s eight core RAI categories. ActiveFence also evaluated Claude 3.7 (non-reasoning mode) and GPT 4.1 API on the same set. The flag rate on Nova Premier was lower than that on the other two models, indicating that Nova Premier is the safest of the three.
| Model | 3P Flag Rate [↓ is better] |
| Nova Premier | 12.0% |
| Sonnet 3.7 (non-reasoning) | 20.6% |
| GPT4.1 API | 22.4% |
“Our role is to think like an adversary but act in service of safety,” said Guy Paltieli from ActiveFence. “By conducting a blind stress test of Nova Premier under realistic threat scenarios, we helped evaluate its security posture in support of Amazon’s broader responsible-AI goals, ensuring the model could be deployed with greater confidence.”
These evaluations conducted with PRISM and ActiveFence give us confidence in the strength of our guardrails and our ability to protect our customers’ safety when they use our models. While these evaluations demonstrate strong safety performance, we recognize that AI safety is an ongoing challenge requiring continuous improvement. These assessments represent a point-in-time snapshot, and we remain committed to regular testing and enhancement of our safety measures. No AI system can guarantee perfect safety in all scenarios, which is why we maintain monitoring and response systems after deployment.
Acknowledgments: Vincent Ponzo, Elyssa Vincent
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