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Philip Klein Has Been Recognized As An Amazon Scholar

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Click the links that follow for more news about Philip Klein and other recent accomplishments by Brown CS faculty.

Brown CS faculty member Philip Klein was selected as an Amazon Scholar in the Spring semester of this year. The Amazon Scholar Program invites academics to collaborate with Amazon’s teams on technical challenges, offering them the chance to apply their research in a real-world context while maintaining ties to their academic institutions. Klein joins a group of scholars helping to solve complex problems using Amazon’s vast information and physical infrastructure.

The Amazon Scholars Program provides academics with flexible opportunities, such as part-time arrangements, to contribute to Amazon’s groundbreaking innovations. Scholars work on technical challenges across various fields like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and optimization, making an impact on Amazon’s systems and business. 

With access to Amazon’s blend of digital and physical resources, scholars have a platform to test and apply their research methods on a large scale, driving solutions that benefit the company and its customers. At Amazon, Philip is working with the Models and Optimization team, whose goal is to develop algorithms, software tools, and analyses to help Amazon plan changes to their delivery network to improve speed and/or efficiency. 

“I enjoy working on the challenging computational problems arising in operating a huge-scale delivery network, and I find that the experience informs my efforts to educate the next generation of computer scientists,” Philip says.

Philip’s research focuses on the design of algorithms, particularly in the areas of combinatorial optimization and graph analysis. He has made significant contributions to approximation, randomized, and parallel algorithms, including breakthroughs in solving the Steiner forest problem (for which he and his students received the 2023 STOC Test of Time Award) and developing linear-time algorithms for minimum-cost spanning trees. His recent work centers on optimization problems in planar graphs, such as finding efficient solutions for the traveling salesperson problem and maximum st-flows in directed planar graphs.

Reflecting on his experience, Klein shares, "Walking around Amazon's facilities, I see a network of people and trucks and machines, not computers. I'm especially interested in where computer science impacts the physical world, how algorithms help us use resources in the real world effectively."

Brown CS regularly publishes news articles about our pioneering and innovative faculty, students, and alums. We have no financial involvement in any of the companies mentioned above and have not been compensated in any way for this story.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.