AUSTIN (KXAN) — With a goal to prompt new discoveries and create solutions to help society, Amazon and the University of Texas at Austin are creating a new science and engineering hub, the two partners announced Tuesday.

The UT Austin-Amazon Science Hub will foster collaboration among faculty and students by developing a pipeline of research talent, a release said. Initial focus areas are machine learning, image/video processing, robotics and networking/communications.

The science hub will be in the Cockrell School of Engineering but will include researchers from the Cockrell School, College of Natural Sciences, McCombs School of Business and College of Liberal Arts.

Amazon will fund research projects, doctoral graduate student fellowships and events to diversity and increase cross-disciplinary innovation, according to the hub. The fellowships are expected to start in the fall 2023 semester. Research grants will be for the 2023 cycle.

“For years, our top scientists have been a resource to UT Austin graduate students, collaborating on topics such as developing objective machine learning models to predict perceptual video quality that drive smart compression and multimodal AI models that help ensure highest quality media playback experience at scale,” BA Winston, the Prime Video vice president of technology, said in a release.

This is the sixth partnership between UT and Amazon and builds on the existing Amazon Scholars program, the release said.