Aaron Parness

Aaron Parness is Director of Applied Science at Amazon Robotics. Parness received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2009, advised by Mark Cutkosky. He earned a BS in mechanical engineering and a BS in creative writing from MIT in 2004. Parness is currently director of applied science in robotics and AI at Amazon Robotics.

His teams in Seattle and Berlin build robotic work cells to increase the speed of delivery and reduce the cost of order fulfillment for Amazon customers. Specializing in high-contact and high-clutter applications, he has led advances in giving robots a sense of touch.

Parness’ work in AI and machine learning enables the company’s robots not only to understand their environment, but also to intelligently reason over that environment and predict the outcomes of different actions that they could take.

From 2010 to 2019, Parness worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he founded and led the Robotic Rapid Prototyping Laboratory, specializing in grippers and wall climbing robots. He has received Popular Science’s ‘Best of What’s New’ award in 2012, the National Academy of Engineering’s Gilbreth Lecture Award in 2020, and multiple best paper awards. His Google Scholar listing has more than 3,500 citations, with an h-index of 27.