Neural and Symbolic: Friend or Foe?

Kanna Shimizu leads the Neuro-Symbolic AI Lab at AWS, focused on integrating machine learning with automated reasoning technologies such as Lean 4. She and her team develop novel approaches to code verification that keep pace with AI-generated software. Previously, she led the machine learning teams behind Alexa’s music experience and Fire TV voice search, features shipped in hundreds of millions of Amazon consumer devices. Earlier in her career, Kanna led the hardware security architecture for the PlayStation 3 at the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Design Center, defining the on-chip root of trust that shipped in over 80 million consumer devices. She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Oxford, and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.