Location Seattle, WA Arlington, VA New York, NY San Francisco, CA

Description Join us at the cutting edge of Amazon's sustainability initiatives to work on environmental and social advancements to support Amazon's long term worldwide sustainability strategy. At Amazon, we're working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. To get there, we need exceptionally talented, bright, and driven people.

The Worldwide Sustainability (WWS) organization capitalizes on Amazon’s scale & speed to build a more resilient and sustainable company. We manage our social and environmental impacts globally, driving solutions that enable our customers, businesses, and the world around us to become more sustainable.

Sustainability Science and Innovation (SSI) is a multi-disciplinary team within the WW Sustainability organization that combines science, analytics, economics, statistics, machine learning, product development, and engineering expertise. We use this expertise and skills to identify, develop and evaluate the science and innovations necessary for Amazon, customers and partners to meet their long-term sustainability goals and commitments.

We’re seeking a Senior Principal Scientist for Sustainability and Climate AI to drive technical strategy and innovation for our long-term sustainability and climate commitments through AI & ML. You will serve as the strategic technical advisor to science, emerging tech, and climate pledge partners operating at the Director, VPs, and SVP level. You will set the next generation modeling standards for the team and tackle the most immature/complex modeling problems following the latest sustainability/climate sciences. Staying hyper current with emergent sustainability/climate science and machine learning trends, you'll be trusted to translate recommendations to leadership and be the voice of our interpretation. You will nurture a continuous delivery culture to embed informed, science-based decision-making into existing mechanisms, such as decarbonization strategies, ESG compliance, and risk management. You will also have the opportunity to collaborate with the Climate Pledge team to define strategies based on emergent science/tech trends and influence investment strategy. As a leader on this team, you'll play a key role in worldwide sustainability organizational planning, hiring, mentorship and leadership development.

If you see yourself as a thought leader and innovator at the intersection of climate science and tech, we’d like to connect with you.

Canberra/Australia

We are looking for new outstanding PhD students for the upcoming scholarship round (application is due on 31st August 2024) at the Australian National University (ANU is ranked #30 in the QS Ranking 2025) or possibly at another Australian universities.

We are looking for new PhD students to work on new problems that may span over (but are not limited to) "clever" adapting of Foundation Models, LLMs, diffusion models (LORAs etc.,), NERF, or design of Graph Neural Networks, design of new (multi-modal) Self-supervised Learning and Contrastive Learning Models (masked models, images, videos, text, graphs, time series, sequences, etc. ) or adversarial and/or federated learning or other contemporary fundamental/applied problems (e.g., learning without backprop, adapting FMs to be less resource hungry, planning and reasoning, hyperbolic geometry, protein property prediction, structured output generative models, visual relation inference, incremental/learning to learn problems, low shot, etc.)

To succeed, you need an outstanding publication record, e.g., one or more first-author papers in venues such CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, IJCAI, ACM KDD, ACCV, BMVC, ACM MM, IEEE. Trans. On Image Processing, CVIU, IEEE TPAMI, or similar (the list is non-exhaustive). Non-first author papers will also help if they are in the mix. Some patents and/or professional experience in Computer Vision, Machine Learning or AI are a bonus. You also need a good GPA to succeed.

We are open to discussing your interests and topics, if you reach out, we can discuss what is possible. Yes, we have GPUs.

If you are interested, reach out for an informal chat with Dr. Koniusz. I am at CVPR if you want to chat?): piotr.koniusz@data61.csiro.au (or piotr.koniusz@anu.edu.au, www.koniusz.com)

Geomagical Labs is a 3D R&D lab, in partnership with IKEA. We create magical mixed-reality experiences for hundreds of millions of users, using computer vision, neural networks, graphics, and computational photography. Last year we launched IKEA Kreativ, and we’re excited for what’s next! We have an opening in our lab for a senior computer vision researcher, with 3D Reconstruction and Deep Learning expertise, to develop and improve the underlying algorithms powering our consumer products. We are looking for highly-motivated, creative, applied researchers with entrepreneurial drive, that are excited about building novel technologies and shipping them all the way to the hands of millions of customers!

Requirements: Ph.D. and 2+ years of experience, or Master's and 6+ years of experience, focused on 3D Computer Vision and Deep Learning. Experience in classical methods for 3D Reconstruction: SfM/SLAM, Multi-view Stereo, RGB-D Fusion. Experience in using Deep Learning for 3D Reconstruction and/or Scene Understanding, having worked in any of: Depth Estimation, Room Layout Estimation, NeRFs, Inverse Rendering, 3D Scene Understanding. Familiarity with Computer Graphics and Computational Photography. Expertise in ML frameworks and libraries, e.g. PyTorch. Highly productive in Python. Ability to architect and implement complex systems at the micro and macro level. Entrepreneurial: Adventurous, self-driven, comfortable under uncertainty, with a desire to make systems work end-to-end. Innovative; with a track record of patents and/or first-authored publications at leading workshops or conferences such as CVPR, ECCV/ICCV, SIGGRAPH, ISMAR, NeurIPS, ICLR etc. Experience in developing technologies that got integrated into products, as well as post-launch performance tracking and shipping improvements. [Bonus] Comfortable with C++.

Benefits: Join a mission-driven R&D lab, strategically backed by an influential global brand. Work in a dynamic team of computer vision, AI, computational photography, AR, graphics, and design professionals, and successful serial entrepreneurs. Opportunity to publish novel and relevant research. Fully remote work available to people living in the USA or Canada. Headquartered in downtown Palo Alto, California --- an easy walk from restaurants, coffee shops and Caltrain commuter rail. The USA base salary for this full-time position ranges from $180,000 to $250,000 determined by location, role, skill, and experience level. Geomagical Labs offers a comprehensive set of benefits, and for qualifying roles, substantial incentive grants, vesting annually.

We are looking for a Research Engineer, with passion for working on cutting edge problems that can help us create highly realistic, emotional and life-like synthetic humans through text-to-video.

Our aim is to make video content creation available for all - not only to studio production!

🧑🏼‍🔬 You will be someone who loves to code and build working systems. You are used to working in a fast-paced start-up environment. You will have experience with the software development life cycle, from ideation through implementation, to testing and release. You will also have extensive knowledge and experience in Computer Vision domain. You will also have experience within Generative AI space (GANs, Diffusion models and the like!).

👩‍💼 You will join a group of more than 50 Engineers in the R&D department and will have the opportunity to collaborate with multiple research teams across diverse areas, our R&D research is guided by our co-founders - Prof. Lourdes Agapito and Prof. Matthias Niessner and director of Science Prof. Vittorio Ferrari.

If you know and love DALL.E, MUSE, IMAGEN, MAKE-A-VIDEO, STABLE DIFFUSION and more - and you love large data, large compute and writing clean code, then we would love to talk to you.

Location Niskayuna, NY

Description Job Description Summary At GE Aerospace Research, our team develops advanced embedded systems technology for the future of flight. Our technology will enable sustainable air travel and next generation aviation systems for use in commercial as well as military applications. As a Lead Embedded Software Engineer, you will architect and develop state-of-the-art embedded systems for real-time controls and communication applications. You will lead and contribute to advanced research and development programs for GE Aerospace as well as with U.S. Government Agencies. You will collaborate with fellow researchers from a range of technology disciplines, contributing to projects across the breadth of GE Aerospace programs. Job Description Essential Responsibilities: As a Lead Embedded Software Engineer, you will:

Work independently as well as with a team to develop and apply advanced software technologies for embedded controls and communication systems for GE Aerospace products Interact with hardware suppliers and engineering tool providers to identify the best solutions for the most challenging applications Lead small to medium-sized projects or tasks Be responsible for documenting technology and results through patent applications, technical reports, and publications Expand your expertise staying current with advances in embedded software to seek out new ideas and applications Collaborate in a team environment with colleagues across GE Aerospace and government agencies

Qualifications/Requirements:

Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related disciplines with a minimum of 7 years of industry experience OR a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related disciplines with a minimum of 5 years of industry experience OR a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related disciplines with a minimum of 3 years of industry experience. Strong background in software development for embedded systems (e.g., x86, ARM) Strong embedded programming skills such as: C/C++, Python, and Rust Familiarity with CNSA and NIST cryptographic algorithms Willingness to travel at a minimum of 2 weeks per year Ability to obtain and maintain US Government Security Clearance US Citizenship required Must be willing to work out of an office located in Niskayuna, NY You must submit your application for employment on the careers page at www.gecareers.com to be considered Ideal Candidate Characteristics:

Coding experience with Bash, Python, C#, MATLAB, ARMv8 assembly, RISCV assembly Experience with embedded devices from Intel, AMD, Xilinx, NXP, etc. Experience with hardware-based security (e.g., UEFI, TPM, ARM TrustZone, Secure Boot) Understanding of embedded system security requirements and security techniques Experience with Linux OS and Linux security Experience with OpenSSL and/or wolfSSL Experience with wired and wireless networking protocols or network security Knowledge of 802.1, 802.3, and/or 802.11 standards Experience in software defined networks (SDN) and relevant software such as OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, or Mininet Hands-on experience with embedded hardware (such as protoboards) or networking equipment (such as switches and analyzers) in a laboratory setting Experience with embedded development in an RTOS environment (e.g., VxWorks, FreeRTOS) Demonstrated ability to take an innovative idea from a concept to a product Experience with the Agile methodology of program management The base pay range for this position is 90,000 - 175,000 USD Annually. The specific pay offered may be influenced by a variety of factors, including the candidate’s experience, education, and skill set. This position is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus based on a percentage of your base salary. This posting is expected to close on June 16, 2024

Tokyo, Tokyo-to, Japan

Overview As one of the world's leading industrial research laboratories, Microsoft Research (MSR) has more than 1,000 researchers and engineers working across the globe. In the past 30 years, Microsoft scientists have not only carried out world-class computer science research, but also transferred the advanced technologies into our products and services that have changed millions of people’s lives and ensured that Microsoft is at the forefront of digital transformation.

Part of Microsoft Research, Microsoft Research Asia (MSR Asia), established in 1998, is a leading research lab with major sites in Beijing, Shanghai and Vancouver. Over the years, technologies developed by MSR Asia have made a significant impact within Microsoft and also around the world, and new, innovative technologies are constantly being born from the lab. As one of the world-class research labs, MSRA offers an exhilarating, supportive, open and inclusive environment for top talents to create the future through their disruptive and cutting-edge research. (More information about Microsoft Research Lab - Asia - Microsoft Research).

Along with business growth, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) is increasing its presence in Japan, and looking for a Principal Research Manager who specializes in AI with an emphasis on Embodied AI and Robotics, AI Model innovations (NLP, vision, multi-modality), Societal AI, Wireless sensing, and Wellbeing. This is a unique opportunity to lead an ambitious research agenda and work with various teams to explore new applications of those research areas.

Responsibilities •As a leading and accomplished expert in a broad research area (e.g., Embodied AI and Robotics, AI Model, Multimedia and Vision), has a comprehensive understanding of the relevant literature, research methods, and business and academic context. •Defines and articulates a clear long-term research vision that is in line with MSRA strategic focus and drive research agenda landing with planned schedule •As a local representative, fosters cooperative relationships with local governments, academic communities, industry partners and business groups within Microsoft to establish MSRA presence locally and support future growth •Creates synergy among MSRA research groups in multiple locations to enable collaboration and creativity • As a people manager, hires and retains top talents. Deliveries success through empowerment and accountability

Location Madrid, ESP

Description Amazon's International Technology org in EU (EU INTech) is creating new ways for Amazon customers discovering Amazon catalog through new and innovative Customer experiences. Our vision is to provide the most relevant content and CX for their shopping mission. We are responsible for building the software and machine learning models to surface high quality and relevant content to the Amazon customers worldwide across the site.

The team, mainly located in Madrid Technical Hub, London and Luxembourg, comprises Software Developer and ML Engineers, Applied Scientists, Product Managers, Technical Product Managers and UX Designers who are experts on several areas of ranking, computer vision, recommendations systems, Search as well as CX. Are you interested on how the experiences that fuel Catalog and Search are built to scale to customers WW? Are interesting on how we use state of the art AI to generate and provide the most relevant content?

We are looking for Applied Scientists who are passionate to solve highly ambiguous and challenging problems at global scale. You will be responsible for major science challenges for our team, including working with text to image and image to text state of the art models to scale to enable new Customer Experiences WW. You will design, develop, deliver and support a variety of models in collaboration with a variety of roles and partner teams around the world. You will influence scientific direction and best practices and maintain quality on team deliverables.

We are seeking a highly motivated candidate for a fully funded postdoctoral researcher position to work in 3D computer graphics and 3D computer vision.

The successful candidate will join the 3D Graphics and Vision research group led by Prof. Binh-Son Hua at the School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland to work on topics related to generative AI in the 3D domain. The School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin is a collegiate, friendly, and research-intensive centre for academic study and research excellence. The School has been ranked #1 in Ireland, top 25 in Europe, and top 100 Worldwide (QS Subject Rankings 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021).

The postdoctoral researcher is expected to conduct fundamental research and publish in top-tier computer vision and computer graphics conferences (CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, SIGGRAPH) and journals (TPAMI, IJCV). Other responsibilities include supporting graduate or undergraduate students with technical guidance and engagement in other research activities such as paper reviews, reading group, workshop organization, etc.

The start date of the position is August 01, 2024. Contract duration is 1 year with the option of renewing for a second year. The successful candidate will require the following skills and knowledge: • PhD in Computer Science or related fields; • Strong tracked records in 3D computer graphics, 3D computer vision; • Hands-on experience in training deep models and generative models is required; • Hands-on experience and relevant skills in computer graphics and computer vision application development such as OpenGL, OpenCV, CUDA, Blender is desirable; • Strong programming skills in C++, Python. Capability in implementing systems from research papers and open-source software. • Additional background in math, statistics, or physics is an advantage.

Applicants should provide the following information: • A comprehensive CV including a full list of publications; • The name and contact details of two referees. One of the referees should be the applicant’s PhD supervisor; • Two representative papers by the applicant. Interested candidates should email their applications to Binh-Son Hua (https://sonhua.github.io) directly. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the position has been filled.

Location Multiple Locations

Description The Qualcomm Cloud Computing team is developing hardware and software for Machine Learning solutions spanning the data center, edge, infrastructure, automotive market. Qualcomm’s Cloud AI 100 accelerators are currently deployed at AWS / Cirrascale Cloud and at several large organizations. We are rapidly expanding our ML hardware and software solutions for large scale deployments and are hiring across many disciplines.

We are seeing to hire for multiple machine learning positions in the Qualcomm Cloud team. In this role, you will work with Qualcomm's partners to develop and deploy best in class ML applications (CV, NLP, GenAI, LLMs etc) based on popular frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow and ONNX, that are optimized for Qualcomm's Cloud AI accelerators. The work will include model assessment of throughput, latency and accuracy, model profiling and optimization, end-to-end application pipeline development, integration with customer frameworks and libraries and responsibility for customer documentation, training, and demos. This candidate must possess excellent communication, leadership, interpersonal and organizational skills, and analytical skills.

This role will interact with individuals of all levels and requires an experienced, dedicated professional to effectively collaborate with internal and external stakeholders. The ideal candidate has either developed or deployed deep learning models on popular ML frameworks. If you have a strong appetite for technology and enjoy working in small, agile, empowered teams solving complex problems within a high energy, oftentimes chaotic environment then this is the role for you.

Minimum Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 4+ years of Software Applications Engineering, Software Development experience, or related work experience. OR Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 3+ years of Software Applications Engineering, Software Development experience, or related work experience. OR PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 2+ years of Software Applications Engineering, Software Development experience, or related work experience.

• 2+ years of experience with Programming Language such as C, C++, Java, Python, etc. • 1+ year of experience with debugging techniques.Key Responsibilities: Key contributor to Qualcomm’s Cloud AI GitHub repo and developer documentation. Work with developers in large organizations to Onboard them on Qualcomm’s Cloud AI ML stack improve and optimize their Deep Learning models on Qualcomm AI 100 deploy their applications at scale Collaborate and interact with internal teams to analyze and optimize training and inference for deep learning. Work on Triton, ExecuTorch, Inductor, TorchDynamo to build abstraction layers for inference accelerator. Optimize LLM/GenAI workloads for both scale-up (multi-SoC) and scale-out (multi-card) systems. Partner with product management, hardware/software engineering to highlight customer progress, gaps in product features etc.

Captions is the AI-powered creative studio. Millions of creators around the world have used Captions to make their video content stand out from the pack and we're on a mission to empower the next billion.

Based in NYC, we are a team of ambitious, experienced, and devoted engineers, designers, and marketers. You'll be joining an early team where you'll have an outsized impact on both the product and company's culture.

We’re very fortunate to have some the best investors and entrepreneurs backing us, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Antoine Martin, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, SVAngel, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, Chapter One, Lenny Rachitsky, and more.

Check out our latest milestone and our recent feature on the TODAY show and the New York Times.

** Please note that all of our roles will require you to be in-person at our NYC HQ (located in Union Square) **

Responsibilities:

Conduct research and develop models to advance the state-of-the-art in generative computer vision technologies, with a focus on creating highly realistic digital faces, bodies, avatars.

Strive to set new standards in the realism of 3D digital human appearance, movement, and personality, ensuring that generated content closely resembles real-life scenarios.

Implement techniques to achieve high-quality results in zero-shot or few-shot settings, as well as customized avatars for different use cases while maintaining speed and accuracy.

Develop innovative solutions to enable comprehensive customization of video content, including the creation of digital people, modifying scenes, and manipulating actions and speech within videos.

Preferred Qualifications:

PhD in computer science (or related field) and/ or 5+ years of industry experience.

Strong academic background with a focus on computer vision and transformers, specializing in NeRFs, Gaussian Splatting, Diffusion, GANs or related areas.

Publication Record: Highly relevant publication history, with a focus on generating or manipulating realistic digital faces, bodies, expressions, body movements, etc. Ideal candidates will have served as the primary author on these publications.

Expertise in Deep Learning: Proficiency in deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar, with hands-on experience in designing, training, and deploying neural networks for multimodal tasks.

Strong understanding of Computer Science fundamentals (algorithms and data structures).

Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans

Anything you need to do your best work

We’ve done team off-sites to places like Paris, London, Park City, Los Angeles, Upstate NY, and Nashville with more planned in the future.

Captions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Please note benefits apply to full time employees only.

Location Sunnyvale, CA Seattle, WA New York, NY Cambridge, MA

Description The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to help build industry-leading technology with multimodal systems.

As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art with multimodal systems. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of vision and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate development with multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) in Computer Vision.

About the role You will join a team of 40+ Researchers and Engineers within the R&D Department working on cutting edge challenges in the Generative AI space, with a focus on creating highly realistic, emotional and life-like Synthetic humans through text-to-video. Within the team you’ll have the opportunity to work with different research teams and squads across multiple areas led by our Director of Science, Prof. Vittorio Ferrari, and directly impact our solutions that are used worldwide by over 55,000 businesses.

If you have seen the full ML lifecycle from ideation through implementation, testing and release, and you have a passion for large data, large model training and building solutions with clean code, this is your chance. This is an opportunity to work for a company that is impacting businesses at a rapid pace across the globe.

Location San Diego

Description

At Qualcomm, we are transforming the automotive industry with our Snapdragon Digital Chassis and building the next generation software defined vehicle (SDV).

Snapdragon Ride is an integral pillar of our Snapdragon Digital Chassis, and since its launch it has gained momentum with a growing number of global automakers and Tier1 suppliers. Snapdragon Ride aims to address the complexity of autonomous driving and ADAS by leveraging its high-performance, power-efficient SoC, industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and pioneering vision and drive policy stack to deliver a comprehensive, cost and energy efficient systems solution.

Enabling safe, comfortable, and affordable autonomous driving includes solving some of the most demanding and challenging technological problems. From centimeter-level localization to multimodal sensor perception, sensor fusion, behavior prediction, maneuver planning, and trajectory planning and control, each one of these functions introduces its own unique challenges to solve, verify, test, and deploy on the road.

We are looking for smart, innovative and motivated individuals with strong theory background in deep learning, advanced signal processing, probability & algorithms and good implementation skills in python/C++. Job responsibilities include design and development of novel algorithms for solving complex problems related to behavior prediction for autonomous driving, including trajectory and intention prediction. Develop novel deep learning models to predict trajectories for road users and optimize them to run-in real-time systems. Work closely with sensor fusion and planning team on defining requirements and KPIs. Work closely with test engineers to develop test plans for validating performance in simulations and real-world testing.

Minimum Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 6+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience. OR Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 5+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience. OR PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 4+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.Preferred Qualifications: Ph.D + 2 years industry experience in behavior and trajectory prediction Proficient in variety of deep learning models like CNN, Transformer, RNN, LSTM, VAE, GraphCNN etc Experience working with NLP Deep Learning Networks Proficient in state of the art in machine learning tools (pytorch, tensor flow) 3+ years of experience with Programming Language such as C, C++, Python, etc. 3+ years Systems Engineering, or related work experience in the area of behavior and trajectory prediction. Experience working with, modifying, and creating advanced algorithms Analytical and scientific mindset, with the ability to solve complex problems. Experience in Autonomous driving, Robotics, XR/AR/VR Experience with robust software design for safety-critical systems Excellent written and verbal communication skills, ability to work with a cross-functional team

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Overview Microsoft Research (MSR), a leading industrial research laboratory, comprises over 1,000 computer scientists working across the United States, United Kingdom, China, India, Canada, and the Netherlands.

We are currently seeking Principal Researcher in the area of Artificial Specialized Intelligence and artificial general intelligence located in Vancouver, British Columbia.

This is an opportunity to drive an ambitious research agenda while collaborating with diverse teams to push for novel applications of those areas.

Over the past 30 years, our scientists have not only conducted world-class computer science research but also integrated advanced technologies into our products and services, positively impacting millions of lives and propelling Microsoft to the forefront of digital transformation.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities Identifying and driving new research directions, creating new technologies and collaborating with Microsoft product groups and external partners to deploy them in real-world settings. Stay current with the latest trends, research, and developments in AI, machine learning, and system architecture to ensure our systems remain at the forefront of innovation. Evaluate the performance of AI-centric systems and provide recommendations for improvement and optimization. Publish research findings in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and other relevant venues, and present research results to internal and external stakeholders. Mentor and guide researchers and engineers in their research and development efforts. Collaborate with industry partners and academic institutions to drive joint research projects and initiatives.