Raffay Hamid

Raffay Hamid is an industry leader in web-scale Computer Vision and Machine Learning. He is currently the single-threaded-leader of some of the key improvements for Rufus – Amazon’s generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience. Before that, he was the Chief Scientist at Prime Video and Amazon Studios where he headed Amazon’s global R&D for automatic understanding and synthesis of cinematic and live video content (see more details here). At Prime Video, Raffay served as a board member of MIT-Amazon Science Hub, as well as a co-founder and technical advisor for Prime Video’s technology blog.

In the past, Raffay has headed DigitalGlobe’s R&D to build their planet-scale satellite-image analysis platform. He has also led teams at Disney Research to build immersive live sports CX for ESPN, and at eBay Research to build web-scale visual search for online shopping. Raffay has founded and managed the successful exit of an AI start-up, as well as served as a technical advisor for multiple tech start-ups, including Turi (acquired by Apple).

Raffay regularly mentors scientists to publish research in top academic conferences and journals. Some of the research works led by Raffay have been featured on BBC, Time, MIT Technology Review, and TechCrunch among several other media outlets.