Building Amazon Astro: The First Multi-Purpose Home Robot

Ken Washington (NAE) is vice president of software engineering at Amazon, where he leads a team of engineers developing consumer robot devices and services. Before joining Amazon, Dr. Washington was chief technology officer at Ford Motor Company, overseeing the development and implementation of the automaker’s technology strategy. His portfolio at Ford included propulsion systems, sustainable and advanced materials, additive manufacturing, next- gen vehicle architectures, controls, and automated systems.

Prior to joining Ford in 2014, Dr. Washington was Lockheed Martin Corporation’s first chief privacy officer, vice president of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Advanced Technology Center, and vice president and chief technology officer for Lockheed Martin IT. He previously served as the chief information officer for Sandia National Laboratories. In addition to his election to the NAE in 2020, he is the recipient of the 2012 Black Engineer of the Year Award in Research Leadership.

Dr. Washington has a BS, MS, and PhD in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University and is a fellow of the MIT Seminar XXI program on International Relations.

Vijay Karunamurthy is currently Field CTO at Scale AI, where he is enabling Scale's mission to democratize AI to help business, governments and organizations see its full potential. Previously he was a Director of Engineering at Apple, where he worked on scalability, personalization and ML research for the App Store, TV+, Apple Watch and more. Prior to Apple, Vijay led Search and Discovery engineering teams at YouTube, and cofounded (with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley) startups focused on live video and content discovery (acquired by Apple and BlueJeans Network.)