Dr. Nashlie H. Sephus is the former Applied Science manager/recently promoted Tech Evangelist for Amazon AI focusing on fairness and identifying biases at AWS AI. She formerly led the Amazon Visual Search team in Atlanta, which launched visual search for replacement parts on the Amazon Shopping app in June 2018. This technology was a result of former Atlanta-based startup Partpic being acquired by Amazon, for which she was the Chief Technology Officer. Prior to working at Partpic, she received her Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2014 and worked for a year with Exponent, a technical consulting firm, in New York City. Her core research areas were digital signal processing, machine learning, and computer engineering. She received her B.S. in Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University (MSU) in 2007. She was featured as Georgia Tech’s inaugural top 40 under 40 alumni in 2020 and received MSU’s College of Engineering Young Emerging Leader Award in 2019. In 2018, Dr. Sephus became the founder and CEO of The Bean Path non-profit organization based in Jackson, MS, her hometown, assisting individuals and startups with technical expertise and guidance. In September of 2020, she became the owner and developer of the Jackson Tech District, at least 14-acres of mixed-use commercial real-estate in downtown Jackson to bring tech training and workforce/economic development to the area.
