Dr. Nashlie Sephus

Dr. Nashlie H. Sephus is the Applied Science manager for Amazon’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) focusing on fairness and identifying biases in AWS AI technologies. 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 is a result of former startup Partpic (Atlanta) being acquired by Amazon, for which she was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). 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 in 2007. She is featured as Georgia Tech’s inaugural top 40 under 40 alumni in the Class of 2020.

Dr. Sephus is a native of Jackson, Mississippi and a 2003 graduate of Murrah High School/Power Academic and Performing Arts Complex (APAC). She had several internships and research experiences worldwide with companies such as IBM, Delphi, University of California at Berkeley, GE Research Center, GE Energy, Miller Transporters, and Kwangwoon University in Seoul, South Korea.

In 2018, Dr. Sephus became the founder and CEO of The Bean Path non-profit organization based in Jackson, MS, 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 12-acres of mixed-use commercial real-estate in downtown Jackson to bring tech training and workforce/economic development to the area. In addition to these, she is the co-founder of KITTLabs in Atlanta, GA which was created to assist in building equity and opportunity, targeting Black entrepreneurs in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math). During her leisure time, she enjoys playing tennis, playing the piano, listening to music, bargain hunting, biking, gardening and working on do-it-yourself (DIY) projects at home.