Nashlie Sephus | |
---|---|
Born | Jackson, Mississippi, U.S. |
Alma mater | Mississippi State University Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering |
Occupation(s) | Computer engineer, entrepreneur, technology evangelist |
Awards | Ada Lovelace Award (2019) |
Nashlie H. Sephus is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur specialized in machine learning and algorithmic bias identification. She is a technology evangelist at Amazon Web Services. Sephus is co-founder and chief executive officer of Bean Path, a nonprofit startup company developing Jackson Tech District, a planned community and business incubator in Jackson, Mississippi.
Sephus was born in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was raised in an all-female household. She attended a two-week sleepaway engineering camp for girls that introduced her to computer engineering. [1] Sephus graduated from Murrah High School in 2003. [2] In 2007, she completed a B.S. in computer engineering at Mississippi State University. [3] [1] After graduating, Sephus won a GEM fellowship, which provided her a full-tuition graduate scholarship, internships, and a job placement at Delphi Electronics & Safety upon finishing her Ph.D. [4] She earned a master's degree and Ph.D. (2014) in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Engineering. [3] Her dissertation was titled A framework for exploiting modulation spectral features in music data mining and other applications. Sephus' doctoral advisors were Aaron D. Lanterman and David V. Anderson . [5]
In 2013, Sephus, then a doctoral student, began working part-time for the all black women startup [1] Partpic, where she developed visual recognition algorithms and prototypes. [4] Sephus later worked as a software engineer at Exponent in New York. In 2015, she joined Partpic full time as their chief technology officer. [4] In 2016, Amazon acquired Partpic, and Sephus became leader of the Amazon Visual Search team in Atlanta. [3] [4] Sephus later became a machine learning and applied science manager at Amazon Web Services Artificial Intelligence. [3] Her team develops tools for bias-identification for machine learning models. [1] She is currently a technology evangelist at Amazon. [6]
In 2018, Sephus began plans to create a technology community and business incubator in Jackson, Mississippi as part of her nonprofit startup company Bean Path. [7] She is the company's cofounder and CEO. [3] In 2019, Sephus and Julie Cwikla were awarded an Ada Lovelace Award. [8] On September 11, 2020, Sephus purchased 12 acres near Jackson State University to create the Jackson Tech District. [3] [9] [10]
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