Michelle Lee. (Photo by Jason Doiy/ALM)

Former USPTO Director Michelle Lee has joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) as vice president of its Machine Learning Solutions Lab.

Lee said she will lead a team whose mission is working with companies and organizations across sectors to solve business needs using AWS' cloud-based, artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.

"I am a firm believer in the promise of artificial intelligence and its potential to transform our lives for the better," Lee said. "It's an exciting opportunity in an area that I have been passionate about since my graduate school days at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab."

Lee was deputy general counsel in charge of patent strategy at Google before joining the PTO in 2012. She ran the agency's Silicon Valley office for a few years, then President Barack Obama appointed her the PTO's first woman director in 2014. Lee left in June 2017 and was succeeded by Andrei Iancu.

Later that year she began teaching a class on disruptive technologies for Stanford's law and engineering schools. The class examined how IP laws and government policies shape everything from driverless cars to artificial intelligence, personalized medicine, and gene splicing.

At the time she noted the increasingly interdependent nature of the technology industry. "I've seen a lot of use of software and big data analytics to address and try to find a cure for cancer," she said in a 2017 interview. "So you're seeing a blending and a merging of technical disciplines, and I think that will lead to better and more effective innovations."

Since then Lee has served on the board of directors of cloud-based home security company Alarm.com, and on Nauto, an AI-powered intelligent driver safety system.

A co-founder of the ChIPs network, Lee has continued to work on supporting opportunities for women in science, technology, engineering and math. Earlier this year she testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee about the lack of diversity in patent inventorship.

According to Amazon Web Services' website, the Machine Learning Lab pairs AWS customers and partners with machine learning experts to prepare data, build and train models, and put models into production.

"I look forward to helping organizations harness the power and potential of machine learning to solve challenging, real-world problems," Lee said Monday.