Raffay Hamid

Sr. Principal Scientist / Director at Amazon

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Raffay Hamid is an industry leader in developing AI-driven products and services. He is currently the single-threaded leader of some of the key capabilities of Rufus – Amazon’s flagship generative AI-powered conversational shopping assistant. 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).

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 holds 35+ granted patents and has published 40+ research papers 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.

news

Feb 1, 2024 Amazon Rufus is launched (role: single-threaded-leader for some of its key capabilities)
Jun 25, 2023 Served as an Area Chair for CVPR 2024.
Jun 20, 2023 Gave the keynote talk at CVPR 2023 RetailVision workshop.
Feb 14, 2023 Launch of Prime Video’s tech blog (role: co-founder and technical advisor).
Oct 16, 2022 Gave a keynote talk at ECCV 2022 workshop on AI for Creative Video Editing & Understanding.
May 2, 2022 Launch of Virtual Product Placements (role: co-founder and Chief Scientist).