March 4, 2026 - Two UC Merced computer science and engineering professors will delve deep into artificial intelligence in projects with Amazon.
Dong Li and Xiaoyi Lu earned Amazon Research Awards, the technology giant announced recently.
Amazon Research Awards provide unrestricted funds and Amazon Web Services Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating research topics in multiple disciplines. Li and Lu are among 63 award recipients who represent 41 universities in eight countries for this grant cycle.
Both projects work with AWS Trainium, a chip purpose-built for high-performance deep learning training of generative AI models.
Li's awarded proposal, "Efficient Sparse Training with Adaptive Expert Parallelism on AWS Trainium," is aimed at finding ways for different computers to learn more quickly and use less power.
Lu's project, "Accelerating Large Language and Reasoning Model Workloads with AWS Trainium," is aimed at speeding up computer processes. He will study how to train state-of-the-art AI models, such as those used in OpenAI GPT and Google Gemini, on Trainium. His project will study memory system and communication efficiency to enable high-performance AI model training.
According to Amazon, proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content and their potential to impact the research community and society. Additionally, Amazon encourages the publication of research results, presentations of research at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.
Recipients have access to more than 700 Amazon public datasets and can use AWS AI/ML services and tools through their AWS Promotional Credits. Recipients are each assigned an Amazon research contact who offers consultation and advice, along with opportunities to participate in Amazon events and training sessions.
"Academic AI researchers face a fundamental challenge: Advancing machine learning research and educating the next generation requires access to cutting-edge infrastructure that's both powerful and affordable," said Yida Wang, AWS AI principal applied scientist.
"The Build on Trainium program directly addresses this barrier. … Build on Trainium represents AWS's commitment to democratizing AI research through collaborative partnership with academia - fostering an environment where researchers experiment freely, students learn on production-scale infrastructure and academic innovations shape the future of machine learning for everyone."
Both researchers said they are excited about the possibilities the grants provide.
"By accelerating large language and reasoning model workloads on AWS Trainium, this project seeks to push the performance boundaries of modern AI systems and make advanced AI capabilities more efficient and accessible," Lu said.
Li said the awards recognize the quality of high-performance computing research at UC Merced.
"This award will allow our students to gain access to the state-of-the-art hardware at AWS for AI research, and provide our students with interesting research projects, internships and much more," he said. "It will also connect AWS and UC Merced for collaborations on techniques, education and business."
Source: Merced College
