Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois has been honored with the Trailblazer Award at the September 2025 Coursera Connect conference, recognizing its bold leadership in reshaping online education. From launching the very first degree with Coursera to pioneering tools like Coursera Coach and AI avatars, Gies has consistently pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in accessible, high-quality business education. 

Today, learners around the world can pursue three Gies Business master’s degrees online in conjunction with Coursera: the Master of Business Administration (iMBA), Master of Science in Management (iMSM), and Master of Science in Accountancy (iMSA), as well as access stackable open content in AI, reflecting the school’s commitment to staying innovative and meeting students wherever they are. Yet the truest reflection of this trailblazing spirit comes from its global learners whose voices showcase the impact, community, and transformative nature that define the Gies Business.

Flexible Learning for Diverse Lifestyles

Chelsea Doman, a single mother of four, found the Gies iMBA to be the perfect fit for her busy life. “When I saw Illinois had an online MBA with Coursera, it was like the heavens opened,” she says. The program’s structure allowed her to balance family, work, and studies without the need for a GMAT score. Chelsea emphasizes the value of learning for personal growth, stating, “I did it for the joy of learning, a longtime goal, a holistic business understanding.”

Similarly, Tom Fail, who pursued the iMBA while working in EdTech, appreciated the program’s blend of online flexibility and in-person networking opportunities. He notes, “With this program, you get to blend the benefits of networking and having a hands-on experience that you’d get from an in-person program, with the flexibility of an online program.”

Global Community and Real-World Application

Ishpinder Kailey, an Australia-based learner, leveraged the iMBA to transition from a background in chemistry to a leadership role in business strategy. “This degree gave me the confidence to lead my business from the front.” She also highlights the program’s global reach and collaborative environment: “The professors are exceptional, and the peer learning from a global cohort is a tremendous asset.”

Joshua David Tarfa, a Nigeria-based senior product manager who recently graduated from the 12-month MS in Management (iMSM) degree program, found immediate applicability of his coursework to his professional role. He shares, “From the very beginning, I could apply what I was learning. I remember taking a strategic management course and using concepts from it immediately at work.”

A Commitment to Lifelong Learning and Connection

For many learners, the Gies experience extends far beyond graduation. Dennis Harlow describes how the iMSA program connected him to a global network: “Even though it’s online, I felt like I was part of a community. The connections I made with peers and instructors have been amazing.” Similarly, Patrick Surrett emphasizes the flexibility and ongoing engagement of the program: “I believe in lifelong learning and this program made it possible. It truly is online by design.” Together, their experiences reflect Gies’ dedication to fostering lifelong learning and a supportive global community.

Online with Gies Business: A Degree That Works for You

Congratulations to Gies College of Business on earning the esteemed Trailblazer Award. This recognition reflects not only the school’s pioneering approach to online education but also the achievements and experiences of its learners. From balancing family and careers to pursuing personal growth and professional impact, Gies students around the world continue to thrive in a flexible, rigorous, and supportive environment. Their stories are a testament to the community, innovation, and opportunity that define what it means to learn with Gies.

Interested in an online degree with the University of Illinois Gies College of Business? Check out the programs here→

AWS Certified AI Practitioner

Amazon’s AWS Certified AI Practitioner certification validates your knowledge of AI, machine learning (ML), and generative AI concepts and use cases, as well as your ability to apply those in an enterprise setting. The exam covers the fundamentals of AI and ML, generative AI, applications of foundation models, and guidelines for responsible use of AI, as well as security, compliance, and governance for AI solutions. It’s targeted at business analysts, IT support professionals, marketing professionals, product and project managers, line-of-business or IT managers, and sales professionals. It’s an entry-level certification and there are no prerequisites to take the exam.

Cost: $100

Certified Generative AI Specialist (CGAI)

Offered through the Chartered Institute of Professional Certifications, the Certified Generative AI Specialist (CGAI) certification is designed to teach you the in-depth knowledge and skills required to be successful with generative AI. The course covers principles of generative AI, data acquisition and preprocessing, neural network architectures, natural language processing (NLP), image and video generation, audio synthesis, and creative AI applications. On completing the learning modules, you will need to pass a chartered exam to earn the CGAI designation.

In real-world video and image analysis, businesses often face the challenge of detecting objects that weren’t part of a model’s original training set. This becomes especially difficult in dynamic environments where new, unknown, or user-defined objects frequently appear. For example, media publishers might want to track emerging brands or products in user-generated content; advertisers need to analyze product appearances in influencer videos despite visual variations; retail providers aim to support flexible, descriptive search; self-driving cars must identify unexpected road debris; and manufacturing systems need to catch novel or subtle defects without prior labeling.In all these cases, traditional closed-set object detection (CSOD) models—which only recognize a fixed list of predefined categories—fail to deliver. They either misclassify the unknown objects or ignore them entirely, limiting their usefulness for real-world applications.Open-set object detection (OSOD) is an approach that enables models to detect both known and previously unseen objects, including those not encountered during training. It supports flexible input prompts, ranging from specific object names to open-ended descriptions, and can adapt to user-defined targets in real time without requiring retraining. By combining visual recognition with semantic understanding—often through vision-language models—OSOD helps users query the system broadly, even if it’s unfamiliar, ambiguous, or entirely new.

In this post, we explore how Amazon Bedrock Data Automation uses OSOD to enhance video understanding.

Amazon Bedrock Data Automation and video blueprints with OSOD

Amazon Bedrock Data Automation is a cloud-based service that extracts insights from unstructured content like documents, images, video and audio. Specifically, for video content, Amazon Bedrock Data Automation supports functionalities such as chapter segmentation, frame-level text detection, chapter-level classification Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) taxonomies, and frame-level OSOD. For more information about Amazon Bedrock Data Automation, see Automate video insights for contextual advertising using Amazon Bedrock Data Automation.

Amazon Bedrock Data Automation video blueprints support OSOD on the frame level. You can input a video along with a text prompt specifying the desired objects to detect. For each frame, the model outputs a dictionary containing bounding boxes in XYWH format (the x and y coordinates of the top-left corner, followed by the width and height of the box), along with corresponding labels and confidence scores. You can further customize the output based on their needs—for instance, filtering by high-confidence detections when precision is prioritized.

The input text is highly flexible, so you can define dynamic fields in the Amazon Bedrock Data Automation video blueprints powered by OSOD.

Example use cases

In this section, we explore some examples of different use cases for Amazon Bedrock Data Automation video blueprints using OSOD. The following table summarizes the functionality of this feature.

Ads analysis

Advertisers can use this feature to compare the effectiveness of various ad placement strategies across different locations and conduct A/B testing to identify the most optimal advertising approach. For example, the following image is the output in response to the prompt “Detect the locations of echo devices.”

Smart resizing

By detecting key elements in the video, you can choose appropriate resizing strategies for devices with different resolutions and aspect ratios, making sure important visual information is preserved. For example, the following image is the output in response to the prompt “Detect the key elements in the video.”

Surveillance with intelligent monitoring

In home security systems, producers or users can take advantage of the model’s high-level understanding and localization capabilities to maintain safety, without the need to manually enumerate all possible scenarios. For example, the following image is the output in response to the prompt “Check dangerous elements in the video.”

Custom labels

You can define your own labels and search through videos to retrieve specific, desired results. For example, the following image is the output in response to the prompt “Detect the white car with red wheels in the video.”

Image and video editing

With flexible text-based object detection, you can accurately remove or replace objects in photo editing software, minimizing the need for imprecise, hand-drawn masks that often require multiple attempts to achieve the desired result. For example, the following image is the output in response to the prompt “Detect the people riding motorcycles in the video.”

Sample video blueprint input and output

The following example demonstrates how to define an Amazon Bedrock Data Automation video blueprint to detect visually prominent objects at the chapter level, with sample output including objects and their bounding boxes.

The following code is our example blueprint schema:

blueprint = {
  "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema#",
  "description": "This blueprint enhances the searchability and discoverability of video content by providing comprehensive object detection and scene analysis.",
  "class": "media_search_video_analysis",
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    # Targeted Object Detection: Identifies visually prominent objects in the video
    # Set granularity to chapter level for more precise object detection
    "targeted-object-detection": {
      "type": "array",
      "instruction": "Please detect all the visually prominent objects in the video",
      "items": {
        "$ref": "bedrock-data-automation#/definitions/Entity"
      },
      "granularity": ["chapter"]  # Chapter-level granularity provides per-scene object detection
    },  
  }
}

The following code is out example video custom output:

"chapters": [
        .....,
        {
            "inference_result": {
                "emotional-tone": "Tension and suspense"
            },
            "frames": [
                {
                    "frame_index": 10289,
                    "inference_result": {
                        "targeted-object-detection": [
                            {
                                "label": "man",
                                "bounding_box": {
                                    "left": 0.6198254823684692,
                                    "top": 0.10746771097183228,
                                    "width": 0.16384708881378174,
                                    "height": 0.7655990719795227
                                },
                                "confidence": 0.9174646443068981
                            },
                            {
                                "label": "ocean",
                                "bounding_box": {
                                    "left": 0.0027531087398529053,
                                    "top": 0.026655912399291992,
                                    "width": 0.9967235922813416,
                                    "height": 0.7752640247344971
                                },
                                "confidence": 0.7712276351034641
                            },
                            {
                                "label": "cliff",
                                "bounding_box": {
                                    "left": 0.4687306359410286,
                                    "top": 0.5707792937755585,
                                    "width": 0.168929323554039,
                                    "height": 0.20445972681045532
                                },
                                "confidence": 0.719932173293829
                            }
                        ],
                    },
                    "timecode_smpte": "00:05:43;08",
                    "timestamp_millis": 343276
                }
            ],
            "chapter_index": 11,
            "start_timecode_smpte": "00:05:36;16",
            "end_timecode_smpte": "00:09:27;14",
            "start_timestamp_millis": 336503,
            "end_timestamp_millis": 567400,
            "start_frame_index": 10086,
            "end_frame_index": 17006,
            "duration_smpte": "00:03:50;26",
            "duration_millis": 230897,
            "duration_frames": 6921
        },
        ..........
]

For the full example, refer to the following GitHub repo.

Conclusion

The OSOD capability within Amazon Bedrock Data Automation significantly enhances the ability to extract actionable insights from video content. By combining flexible text-driven queries with frame-level object localization, OSOD helps users across industries implement intelligent video analysis workflows—ranging from targeted ad evaluation and security monitoring to custom object tracking. Integrated seamlessly into the broader suite of video analysis tools available in Amazon Bedrock Data Automation, OSOD not only streamlines content understanding but also help reduce the need for manual intervention and rigid pre-defined schemas, making it a powerful asset for scalable, real-world applications.

To learn more about Amazon Bedrock Data Automation video and audio analysis, see New Amazon Bedrock Data Automation capabilities streamline video and audio analysis.

About the authors

Dongsheng An is an Applied Scientist at AWS AI, specializing in face recognition, open-set object detection, and vision-language models. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University, focusing on optimal transport and generative modeling.

Lana Zhang is a Senior Solutions Architect in the AWS World Wide Specialist Organization AI Services team, specializing in AI and generative AI with a focus on use cases including content moderation and media analysis. She’s dedicated to promoting AWS AI and generative AI solutions, demonstrating how generative AI can transform classic use cases by adding business value. She assists customers in transforming their business solutions across diverse industries, including social media, gaming, ecommerce, media, advertising, and marketing.

Raj Jayaraman is a Senior Generative AI Solutions Architect at AWS, bringing over a decade of experience in helping customers extract valuable insights from data. Specializing in AWS AI and generative AI solutions, Raj’s expertise lies in transforming business solutions through the strategic application of AWS’s AI capabilities, ensuring customers can harness the full potential of generative AI in their unique contexts. With a strong background in guiding customers across industries in adopting AWS Analytics and Business Intelligence services, Raj now focuses on assisting organizations in their generative AI journey—from initial demonstrations to proof of concepts and ultimately to production implementations.