Nashlie Sephus

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  [Wikidata] and David V. Anderson  [Wikidata].^[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]}

• African-American women in computer science
• Women in engineering in the United States

• Nashlie Sephus's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
• The Why and How of Diversity in Tech | Nashlie Sephus | TEDxJackson on YouTube

• Living people
• Businesspeople from Jackson, Mississippi
• 21st-century African-American women
• 21st-century African-American scientists
• 21st-century American businesswomen
• 21st-century American businesspeople
• 21st-century American engineers
• Mississippi State University alumni
• Georgia Tech alumni
• Technology evangelists
• Amazon (company) people
• Engineers from Mississippi
• American women computer scientists
• American computer scientists
• Computer engineers
• African-American computer scientists
• African-American women engineers
• 21st-century American women engineers
• African-American engineers

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Articles with hCards
• Pages containing links to subscription-only content
• Year of birth missing (living people)