Have you ever wondered how Amazon delivers timely and reliably millions of packages around the world each day?

We are excited to be hosting Georgios Paschos, Head of Research Science, and Daniel Guimarans, Principal Research Scientist, from the EU Research Science team of Amazon Transportation Services in a hybrid event on Wednesday, 1st June at 5pm (CEST). 

They will be providing insights into state-of-the-art algorithms that power the world's fastest, most reliable, low-cost transportation network and that combine techniques from the fields of combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, deep learning, and reinforcement learning. 

Talk Abstract: Amazon owns one of the largest and most sophisticated middle-mile transportation networks*, and this talk is delivered by scientists owning the planning tools for this network. Although these planning problems are well known in the literature, at Amazon we need to solve them at a scale never encountered before; not only commercial solvers do not provide answers at this scale, but additionally, we operate in regimes where 1% improvement reflects several millions of dollars impact. Therefore, our research science team is taking a computer scientist perspective on a number of classical operations research problems. In this talk, we will explain how we formulate the problem of maximizing the speed of the transportation network as a maximum coverage problem, as well as its interaction with network design decisions. We will then discuss the algorithmic approaches that we are developing, trying to give you a flavor of the scale, complexity, and ambiguity of the problems.

Moreover, attendees will have the opportunity of exclusive early application for 2023 internships at Amazon. Not only for the EU Research Science team, but also for all other science internships available next year. Darragh Burke, from the Science Recruitment team, will briefly outline the opportunities and answer any questions you may have. Make sure to register to the event (either virtually or in-person) not to miss it!

Please note: If you attended/registered to the event and have not received the link to the job opening for 2023 science internships, please contact the organizers at gdsczurich@gmail.com 

After that, in-person attendees will have the chance to chat with our speakers and network around a free aperitif (limited spots available). 

Registration details: There are two types of tickets you can choose from based on your preference: "Hybrid Ticket" and "In-person Ticket with Aperitif". In case you booked the latter and are no longer able to come, due to the limited availability, we kindly ask you to un-RSVP via the button above; you will then be able to select the "Hybrid Ticket" type.

We cannot wait to see you there and learn from our speakers! 

*The middle-mile transportation network refers to the movement of packages across Amazon’s worldwide transportation facilities, including Fulfillment Centers, Sort Centers, Amazon Air Gateways and Delivery Stations. Meanwhile, last-mile delivery is the delivery of products from Fulfillment Centers to Customers.

Main Organizer: Jeff Giliberti