Google Research Blog
The latest news from Research at Google
Announcing the 2017 Google PhD Fellows for North America, Europe and the Middle East
Monday, April 10, 2017
Posted by Michael Rennaker, Program Manager
Google created the
PhD Fellowship program
in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in Computer Science and related disciplines. Now in its eighth year, our fellowship program has supported hundreds of future faculty, industry researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs.
Reflecting our continuing commitment to supporting and building relationships with the academic community, we are excited to announce the 33 recipients from North America, Europe and the Middle East. We offer our sincere congratulations to Google’s 2017 Class of Google PhD Fellows.
Algorithms, Optimizations and Markets
Chiu Wai Sam Wong,
University of California, Berkeley
Eric Balkanski,
Harvard University
Haifeng Xu,
University of Southern California
Human-Computer Interaction
Motahhare Eslami,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Sarah D'Angelo,
Northwestern University
Sarah Mcroberts,
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Machine Learning
Aude Genevay,
Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris
Dustin Tran,
Columbia University
Jamie Hayes,
University College London
Martin Arjovsky,
New York University
Taco Cohen,
University of Amsterdam
Yuhuai Wu,
University of Toronto
Yunye Gong,
Cornell University
Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision
Franziska Müller,
Saarland University - Saarbrücken GSCS and MPI Institute for Informatics
George Trigeorgis,
Imperial College London
Iro Armeni,
Stanford University
Saining Xie,
University of California, San Diego
Yu-Chuan Su,
University of Texas, Austin
Natural Language Processing
Jianpeng Cheng, The University of Edinburgh
Kevin Clark, Stanford University
Tim Rocktaschel, University College London
Privacy and Security
Romain Gay,
ENS - École Normale Supérieure
Xi He,
Duke University
Yupeng Zhang,
University of Maryland, College Park
Programming Languages and Software Engineering
Christoffer Quist Adamsen,
Aarhus Universit
y
Muhammad Ali Gulzar,
University of California, Los Angeles
Oded Padon,
Tel-Aviv University
Structured Data and Database Management
Amir Shaikhha,
EPFL CS
Jingbo Shang,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Systems and Networking
Ahmed M. Said Mohamed Tawfik Issa,
Georgia Institute of Technology
Khanh Nguyen,
University of California, Irvine
Radhika Mittal,
University of California, Berkeley
Ryan Beckett,
Princeton University
Google Research Awards 2016
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations, Google
We’ve just completed another round of the
Google Research Awards
, our annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics including
machine learning
,
machine perception
,
natural language processing
, and
security
. Our grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers.
This round we received 876 proposals covering 44 countries and over 300 universities. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 143 projects. Here are a few observations from this round:
The subject areas that received the most support were
machine learning
,
machine perception
,
networking
and
systems
.
Proposals related to Machine learning represented 20% of the total submissions received, up from 12% in 2015.
Proportionally, proposals from Europe had a 4% higher acceptance rate, attributed to our
increased research presence in Zürich
.
Congratulations to the well-deserving
recipients of this round’s awards
. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is September 30th), please visit
our website
for more information.
Announcing the First Annual Global PhD Fellowship Summit and the 2016 Google PhD Fellows
Wednesday, September 07, 2016
Posted by Michael Rennaker, Program Manager, University Relations
In 2009, Google created the
PhD Fellowship Program
to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in Computer Science and related disciplines. Now in its eighth year, our Fellowships have helped support over 250 graduate students in
Australia
,
China and East Asia
,
India
,
North America
,
Europe and the Middle East
who seek to shape and influence the future of technology.
Recently, Google PhD Fellows from around the globe converged on our Mountain View campus for the first annual Global PhD Fellowship Summit. The students heard talks from researchers like
Jeff Dean
,
Françoise Beaufays
,
Peter Norvig
,
Maya Gupta
and
Amin Vahdat
, and got a glimpse into some of the state-of-the-art research pursued across Google.
Senior Google Fellow Jeff Dean shares how TensorFlow is used at Google
Fellows also had the chance to connect one-on-one with Googlers to discuss their research, as well as receive feedback from leaders in their fields. The event wrapped up with a panel discussion with
Dan Russell
,
Kristen LeFevre
,
Douglas Eck
and
Françoise Beaufays
about their unique career paths.
Maggie Johnson
concluded the Summit by sharing about the different types of research environments across academia and industry.
(Left) PhD Fellows share their work with Google researchers during the poster session
(Right) Research panelists share their journeys through academia and industry
Our PhD Fellows represent some the best and brightest young researchers around the globe in Computer Science and it is our ongoing goal to support them as they make their mark on the world.
We’d also like to welcome the newest class of Google PhD Fellows recently awarded in China and East Asia, India, and Australia. We look forward to seeing each of them at next year’s summit!
2016 Global PhD Fellows
Computational Neuroscience
Cameron (Po-Hsuan) Chen,
Princeton University
Grace Lindsay,
Columbia University
Martino Sorbaro Sindaci,
The University of Edinburgh
Human-Computer Interaction
Dana McKay,
University of Melbourne
Koki Nagano,
University of Southern California
Arvind Satyanarayan,
Stanford University
Amy Xian Zhang,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Machine Learning
Olivier Bachem,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
Tianqi Chen,
University of Washington
Emily Denton,
New York University
Kwan Hui Lim,
University of Melbourne
Yves-Laurent Kom Samo,
University of Oxford
Woosang Lim,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Anirban Santara,
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
Daniel Jaymin Mankowitz,
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Lucas Maystre,
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Arvind Neelakantan,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Ludwig Schmidt,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Quanming Yao,
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Shandian Zhe,
Purdue University, West Lafayette
Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision
Eugen Beck,
RWTH Aachen University
Yu-Wei Chao,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Wei Liu,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Aron Monszpart,
University College London
Thomas Schoeps,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
Tian Tan,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Chia-Yin Tsai,
Carnegie Mellon University
Weitao Xu,
University of Queensland
Market Algorithms
Hossein Esfandiari,
University of Maryland, College Park
Sandy Heydrich,
Saarland University - Saarbrucken GSCS
Rad Niazadeh,
Cornell University
Sadra Yazdanbod,
Georgia Institute of Technology
Mobile Computing
Lei Kang,
University of Wisconsin
Tauhidur Rahman,
Cornell University
Chungkuk Yoo,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Yuhao Zhu,
University of Texas, Austin
Natural Language Processing
Tamer Alkhouli,
RWTH Aachen University
Jose Camacho Collados,
Sapienza - Università di Roma
Privacy and Security
Chitra Javali,
University of New South Wales
Kartik Nayak,
University of Maryland, College Park
Nicolas Papernot,
Pennsylvania State University
Damian Vizar,
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Xi Wu,
University of Wisconsin
Programming Languages, Algorithms and Software Engineering
Marcelo Sousa,
University of Oxford
Arpita Biswas,
Indian Institute of Science
Structured Data and Database Management
Xiang Ren,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Systems and Networking
Ying Chen,
Tsinghua University
Andrew Crotty,
Brown University
Aniruddha Singh Kushwaha,
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Ilias Marinos,
University of Cambridge
Kay Ousterhout,
University of California, Berkeley
Hong Zhang,
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Announcing the 2016 Google PhD Fellows for North America, Europe and the Middle East
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Posted by Michael Rennaker, Google PhD Fellowships Lead
Google created the
PhD Fellowship program
in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in Computer Science and related disciplines. Now in its eighth year, our fellowship program has supported hundreds of future faculty, industry researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs.
Reflecting our continuing commitment to supporting and building relationships with the academic community, we are excited to announce the 39 recipients from North America, Europe and the Middle East. We offer our sincere congratulations to Google’s 2016 Class of PhD Fellows.
Computational Neuroscience
Cameron (Po-Hsuan) Chen,
Princeton University
Grace Lindsay,
Columbia University
Martino Sorbaro Sindaci,
The University of Edinburgh
Human-Computer Interaction
Koki Nagano,
University of Southern California
Arvind Satyanarayan,
Stanford University
Amy Xian Zhang,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Machine Learning
Olivier Bachem,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
Tianqi Chen,
University of Washington
Emily Denton,
New York University
Yves-Laurent Kom Samo,
University of Oxford
Daniel Jaymin Mankowitz,
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Lucas Maystre,
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Arvind Neelakantan,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Ludwig Schmidt,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Shandian Zhe,
Purdue University, West Lafayette
Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision
Eugen Beck,
RWTH Aachen University
Yu-Wei Chao,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Wei Liu,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Aron Monszpart,
University College London
Thomas Schoeps,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
Chia-Yin Tsai,
Carnegie Mellon University
Market Algorithms
Hossein Esfandiari,
University of Maryland, College Park
Sandy Heydrich,
Saarland University - Saarbrucken GSCS
Rad Niazadeh,
Cornell University
Sadra Yazdanbod,
Georgia Institute of Technology
Mobile Computing
Lei Kang,
University of Wisconsin
Tauhidur Rahman,
Cornell University
Yuhao Zhu,
University of Texas, Austin
Natural Language Processing
Tamer Alkhouli,
RWTH Aachen University
Jose Camacho Collados,
Sapienza - Università di Roma
Privacy and Security
Kartik Nayak,
University of Maryland, College Park
Nicolas Papernot,
Pennsylvania State University
Damian Vizar,
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Xi Wu,
University of Wisconsin
Programming Languages and Software Engineering
Marcelo Sousa,
University of Oxford
Structured Data and Database Management
Xiang Ren,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Systems and Networking
Andrew Crotty,
Brown University
Ilias Marinos,
University of Cambridge
Kay Ousterhout,
University of California, Berkeley
Google Research Awards: Fall 2015
Friday, February 12, 2016
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
Please Note:
Due to changes in the program, the new deadline for the 2016 Google Faculty Research Awards is
September 30th, 11:59 PM PDT
, and not October 15th, as shown below.
We have just completed another round of the
Google Research Awards
, our annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics including machine learning, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational neuroscience. Our grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers.
This round we received 950 proposals, an increase of 18% over last round, covering 55 countries and over 350 universities. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 151 projects. This round we increased our support of machine learning projects increased by 71% from last round. Physical interfaces and immersive experiences, a relatively new area for the Google Research Awards, saw a 19% increase in the number of submitted proposals.
Congratulations to the well-deserving
recipients of this round’s awards
. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is October 15), please visit
our website
for more information. Please note that we are now moving to an annual cycle.
Announcing Google’s 2015 Global PhD Fellows
Friday, August 28, 2015
Posted by Michael Rennaker, Google University Relations
In 2009, Google created the
PhD Fellowship program
to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in Computer Science and related disciplines. Now in its seventh year, our fellowship programs have collectively supported over 200 graduate students in
Australia
,
China and East Asia
,
India
,
North America
,
Europe and the Middle East
who seek to shape and influence the future of technology.
Reflecting our continuing commitment to building mutually beneficial relationships with the academic community, we are excited to announce the 44 students from around the globe who are recipients of the award. We offer our sincere congratulations to Google’s 2015 Class of PhD Fellows!
Australia
Bahar Salehi
, Natural Language Processing (University of Melbourne)
Siqi Liu
, Computational Neuroscience (University of Sydney)
Qian Ge
, Systems (University of New South Wales)
China and East Asia
Bo Xin
, Artificial Intelligence (Peking University)
Xingyu Zeng
, Computer Vision (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Suining He
, Mobile Computing (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Zhenzhe Zheng
, Mobile Networking (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
Jinpeng Wang
, Natural Language Processing (Peking University)
Zijia Lin
, Search and Information Retrieval (Tsinghua University)
Shinae Woo
, Networking and Distributed Systems (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Jungdam Won
, Robotics (Seoul National University)
India
Palash Dey
, Algorithms (Indian Institute of Science)
Avisek Lahiri
, Machine Perception (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)
Malavika Samak
, Programming Languages and Software Engineering (Indian Institute of Science)
Europe and the Middle East
Heike Adel
, Natural Language Processing (University of Munich)
Thang Bui
, Speech Technology (University of Cambridge)
Victoria Caparrós Cabezas
, Distributed Systems (ETH Zurich)
Nadav Cohen
, Machine Learning (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Josip Djolonga
, Probabilistic Inference (ETH Zurich)
Jakob Julian Engel
, Computer Vision (Technische Universität München)
Nikola Gvozdiev
, Computer Networking (University College London)
Felix Hill
, Language Understanding (University of Cambridge)
Durk Kingma
, Deep Learning (University of Amsterdam)
Massimo Nicosia
, Statistical Natural Language Processing (University of Trento)
George Prekas
, Operating Systems (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Roman Prutkin
, Graph Algorithms (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Siva Reddy
, Multilingual Semantic Parsing (The University of Edinburgh)
Immanuel Trummer
, Structured Data Analysis (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Margarita Vald
, Security (Tel Aviv University)
North America
Waleed Ammar
, Natural Language Processing (Carnegie Mellon University)
Justin Meza
, Systems Reliability (Carnegie Mellon University)
Nick Arnosti
, Market Algorithms (Stanford University)
Osbert Bastani
, Programming Languages (Stanford University)
Saurabh Gupta
, Computer Vision (University of California, Berkeley)
Masoud Moshref Javadi
, Computer Networking (University of Southern California)
Muhammad Naveed
, Security (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Aaron Parks
, Mobile Networking (University of Washington)
Kyle Rector
, Human Computer Interaction (University of Washington)
Riley Spahn
, Privacy (Columbia University)
Yun Teng
, Computer Graphics (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Carl Vondrick
, Machine Perception, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Xiaolan Wang
, Structured Data (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Tan Zhang
, Mobile Systems (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Wojciech Zaremba
, Machine Learning (New York University)
Google Faculty Research Awards: Summer 2015
Friday, August 21, 2015
posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
We have just completed another round of the
Google Faculty Research Awards
, our annual open call for research proposals on Computer Science and related topics, including systems, machine learning, software engineering, security and mobile. Our grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers.
This round we received 805 proposals, about the same as
last round
, covering 48 countries on 6 continents. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 113 projects, with 27% of the funding awarded to universities outside the U.S. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were systems, machine perception, software engineering, and machine learning.
The Faculty Research Awards program plays a critical role in building and maintaining strong collaborations with top research faculty globally. These relationships allow us to keep a pulse on what’s happening in academia in strategic areas, and they help to extend our research capabilities and programs. Faculty also report, through our annual survey, that they and their students benefit from a direct connection to Google as a source of ideas and perspective.
Congratulations to the well-deserving
recipients of this round’s awards
. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is October 15), please visit
our website
for more information.
Announcing the 2015 Google European Doctoral Fellows
Friday, June 05, 2015
Posted by David Harper, University Relations and Beate List, Research Programs
In 2009, Google created the
PhD Fellowship program
to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in Computer Science and related disciplines. The following year, we launched the program in Europe as the
Google European Doctoral Fellowship program
. Alumni of the European program occupy a variety of positions including faculty positions (
Ofer Meshi
,
Cynthia Liem
), academic research positions (
Roland Angst
,
Carola Doerr
née Winzen) and positions in industry (
Yair Adato
,
Peter Hosek
,
Neil Houlsby
).
Reflecting our continuing commitment to building strong relations with the European academic community, we are delighted to announce the 2015 Google European Doctoral Fellows. The following fifteen fellowship recipients were selected from an outstanding set of PhD students nominated by our partner universities:
Heike Adel
, Fellowship in Natural Language Processing (University of Munich)
Thang Bui,
Fellowship in Speech Technology (University of Cambridge)
Victoria Caparrós Cabezas
, Fellowship in Distributed Systems (ETH Zurich)
Nadav Cohen
, Fellowship in Machine Learning (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Josip Djolonga
, Fellowship in Probabilistic Inference (ETH Zurich)
Jakob Julian Engel
, Fellowship in Computer Vision (Technische Universität München)
Nikola Gvozdiev
, Fellowship in Computer Networking (University College London)
Felix Hill
, Fellowship in Language Understanding (University of Cambridge)
Durk Kingma
, Fellowship in Deep Learning (University of Amsterdam)
Massimo Nicosia
, Fellowship in Statistical Natural Language Processing (University of Trento)
George Prekas
, Fellowship in Operating Systems (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Roman Prutkin
, Fellowship in Graph Algorithms (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Siva Reddy
, Fellowship in Multilingual Semantic Parsing (The University of Edinburgh)
Immanuel Trummer
, Fellowship in Structured Data Analysis (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Margarita Vald
, Fellowship in Security (Tel Aviv University)
This group of students represent the next generation of researchers who will endeavor to solve some of the most interesting challenges in Computer Science. We offer our congratulations, and look forward to their future contributions to the research community with high expectation.
Google Computer Science Capacity Awards
Monday, March 16, 2015
By Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations and Chris Busselle, Google.org
One of Google's goals is to surface successful strategies that support the expansion of high-quality Computer Science (CS) programs at the undergraduate level. Innovations in teaching and technologies, while additionally ensuring better engagement of women and underrepresented minority students, is necessary in creating inclusive, sustainable, and scalable educational programs.
To address issues arising from the
dramatic increase in undergraduate CS enrollments
, we recently launched the Computer Science Capacity Awards program. For this three-year program, select educational institutions were invited to contribute proposals for innovative, inclusive, and sustainable approaches to address current scaling issues in university CS educational programs.
Today, after an extensive proposal review process, we are pleased to announce the recipients of the Capacity Awards program:
Carnegie Mellon University - Professor Jacobo Carrasquel
Alternate Instructional Model for Introductory Computer Science Classes
CMU will develop a new instructional model consisting of two optional mini lectures per week given by the instructor, and problem-solving sessions with flexible group meetings that are coordinated by undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants.
Duke University - Professor Jeffrey Forbes
North Carolina State University - Professor Kristy Boyer
University of North Carolina - Professor Ketan Mayer-Patel
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PEER TEACHING FELLOWS: Scalable Evidence-Based Peer Teaching for Improving CS Capacity and Diversity
The project hopes to increase CS retention and diversity by developing a highly scalable, effective, evidence-based peer training program across three universities in the North Carolina Research Triangle.
Mount Holyoke College - Professor Heather Pon-Barry
MaGE (Megas and Gigas Educate): Growing Computer Science Capacity at Mount Holyoke College
Mount Holyoke’s
MaGE program
includes a plan to grow enrollment in introductory CS courses, particularly for women and other underrepresented groups. The program also includes a plan of action for CS students to educate, mentor, and support others in inclusive ways.
George Mason University - Professor Jeff Offutt
SPARC: Self-PAced Learning increases Retention and Capacity
George Mason University wants to replace the traditional course model for CS-1 and CS-2 with an innovative teaching model of self- paced introductory programming courses. Students will periodically demonstrate competency with practical skills demonstrations similar to those used in martial arts.
Rutgers University - Professor Andrew Tjang
Increasing the Scalability and Diversity in the Face of Large Growth in Computer Science Enrollment
Rutger’s program addresses scalability issues with technology tools, as well as collaborative spaces. It also emphasizes outreach to Rutgers’ women’s college and includes original research on success in CS programs to create new courses that cater to the changing environment.
University of California, Berkeley - Professor John DeNero
Scaling Computer Science through Targeted Engagement
Berkeley’s program plans to increase Software Engineering and UI Design enrollment by 500 total students/year, as well as increase the number of women and underrepresented minority CS majors by a factor of three.
Each of the selected schools brings a unique and innovative approach to addressing current scaling issues, and we are excited to collaborate in developing concrete strategies to develop sustainable and inclusive educational programs. Stay tuned over the coming year, where we will report on program recipients' progress and share results with the broader CS education community.
Announcing the Google MOOC Focused Research Awards
Monday, March 09, 2015
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations, and Aimin Zhu, University Relations Manager, APAC
Last year, Google and
Tsinghua University
hosted the
2014 APAC MOOC Focused Faculty Workshop
, an event designed to share, brainstorm and generate ideas aimed at fostering MOOC innovation. As a result of the
ideas generated at the workshop
, we solicited proposals from the attendees for research collaborations that would advance important topics in MOOC development.
After expert reviews and committee discussions, we are pleased to announce the following recipients of the MOOC
Focused Research Awards
. These awards cover research exploring new interactions to enhance learning experience, personalized learning, online community building, interoperability of online learning platforms and education accessibility:
“MOOC Visual Analytics” - Michael Ginda, Indiana University, United States
“Improvement of students’ interaction in MOOCs using participative networks” - Pedro A. Pernías Peco, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
“Automated Analysis of MOOC Discussion Content to Support Personalised Learning” - Katrina Falkner, The University of Adelaide, Australia
“Extending the Offline Capability of Spoken Tutorial Methodology” - Kannan Moudgalya, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India
“Launching the Pan Pacific ISTP (Information Science and Technology Program) through MOOCs” - Yasushi Kodama, Hosei University, Japan
“Fostering Engagement and Social Learning with Incentive Schemes and Gamification Elements in MOOCs” - Thomas Schildhauer, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Germany
“Reusability Measurement and Social Community Analysis from MOOC Content Users” - Timothy K. Shih, National Central University, Taiwan
In order to further support these projects and foster collaboration, we have begun pairing the award recipients with Googlers pursuing online education research as well as product development teams.
Google is committed to supporting innovation in
online learning at scale
, and we congratulate the recipients of the MOOC Focused Research Awards. It is our belief that these collaborations will further develop the potential of online education, and we are very pleased to work with these researchers to jointly push the frontier of MOOCs.
Google Faculty Research Awards: Winter 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
We have just completed another round of the
Google Faculty Research Awards
, our biannual open call for research proposals on Computer Science and related topics, including systems, machine perception, structured data, robotics, and mobile. Our grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers.
This round we received 808 proposals, an increase of 12% over
last round
, covering 55 countries on 6 continents. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 122 projects, with 20% of the funding awarded to universities outside the U.S. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were systems, human-computer interaction, and machine perception.
The Faculty Research Award program enables us to build strong relationships with faculty around the world who are pursuing innovative research, and plays an important role for Google’s
Research organization
by fostering an exchange of ideas that advances the state of the art. Each round, we receive proposals from faculty who may be just starting their careers, or who might be experimenting in new areas that help us look forward and innovate on what's emerging in the CS community.
Congratulations to the well-deserving
recipients of this round’s awards
. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is April 15), please visit
our website
for more information.
Announcing the 2015 North American Google PhD Fellows
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Posted by Michael Rennaker, Google University Relations
In 2009, Google created the
PhD Fellowship program
to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in Computer Science (CS) and related disciplines. In that time we’ve seen past recipients add depth and breadth to CS by developing new ideas and research directions, from
building new intelligence models
to
changing the way in which we interact with computers
to
advancing into faculty positions
, where they go on to train the next generation of researchers.
Reflecting our continuing commitment to building strong relations with the global academic community, we are excited to announce the latest North American Google PhD Fellows. The following 15 fellowship recipients were chosen from a highly competitive group, and represent the outstanding quality of nominees provided by our university partners:
Justin Meza, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Systems Reliability (Carnegie Mellon University)
Waleed Ammar, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Natural Language Processing (Carnegie Mellon University)
Aaron Parks, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Mobile Networking (University of Washington)
Kyle Rector, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Human Computer Interaction (University of Washington)
Nick Arnosti, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Market Algorithms (Stanford University)
Osbert Bastani, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Programming Languages (Stanford University)
Carl Vondrick, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Machine Perception, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Wojciech Zaremba, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Machine Learning (New York University)
Xiaolan Wang, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Structured Data (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Muhammad Naveed, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Security (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Masoud Moshref Javadi, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Computer Networking (University of Southern California)
Riley Spahn, Google US/CanadaFellowship in Privacy (Columbia University)
Saurabh Gupta, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Computer Vision (University of California, Berkeley)
Yun Teng, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Computer Graphics (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Tan Zhang, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Mobile Systems (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
This group of students represent the next generation of researchers who endeavor to solve some of the most interesting challenges in Computer Science. We offer our congratulations, and look forward to their future contributions to the research community with high expectations.
MOOC Research and Innovation
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
Recently,
Tsinghua University
and Google collaborated to host the
2014 APAC MOOC Focused Faculty Workshop
in Shanghai, China. The workshop brought together
37 professors from 12 countries
in APAC, NA and EMEA to share, brainstorm and generate important topics that are of mutual interests in the research behind MOOCs and how to foster MOOC innovation.
During the 2-day workshop, faculty and Googlers shared lessons learned and best practices for the following focus areas:
Effectiveness of
hybrid learning
models.
Topics in adaptive learning and how they can tailor to individual students by Integrating MOOCs into a student's timetable / semester / curriculum.
Standards and practices for interoperability between online learning platforms.
Current focuses and important topics for future MOOC research.
In addition to discussing these focus areas, here was ample time for participants to brainstorm and discuss innovative research ideas for the next-steps in potential research collaboration. Emerging from these discussions were the following themes identified as important future research topics:
Adding new interactions to MOOCs including social and
gamification
Building a data & analytics Infrastructure that provides a foundation for personalized learning
Interoperability across platforms, and providing access to online content for audiences with limited access.
Google is committed to supporting research and innovation in
online learning at scale
, through both grants and our open source
Course Builder
platform, and we are excited to pursue potential research collaborations with partner universities to move forward on the topics discussed. Stay tuned for future announcements on research and collaboration aimed at enabling further MOOC innovation.
Google Research Awards: Summer 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
We have just completed another round of the
Google Research Awards
, our biannual open call for proposals on computer science-related topics including systems, machine perception, structured data, robotics, and mobile. Our grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers.
This round we received 722 proposals, an increase of 5% over last round, covering 44 countries on 6 continents. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 110 projects. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were systems, human-computer interaction, mobile, and machine perception, with 22% of the funding awarded to universities outside the U.S.
We introduced three new topics this round, representing important new research areas for Google. Computational neuroscience looks at the information processing properties of the brain and nervous system. One funded proposal will study scene recognition in this context. A second new area is physical interactions with devices. With the introduction of new paradigms such as
Google Glass
, we can study how such devices expand our processing capabilities. The third new area is online learning at scale, which covers topics such as teacher-student interaction at scale, data-driven adaptive learning, and innovative assessment methods.
Congratulations to the well-deserving
recipients of this round’s awards
. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is October 15), please visit
our website
for more information.
Google Award Program stimulates Journalism and CS collaboration
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Research Scientist
Last fall, Google invited academic researchers to participate in a Computational Journalism awards program focused on the intersection of Computer Science and Journalism. We solicited proposals for original research projects relevant to today’s fast evolving news industry.
As technology continues to shape and be shaped by the media landscape, applicants were asked to rethink traditional models and roles in the ecosystem, and reimagine the lifecycle of the news story in the online world. We encouraged them to develop innovative tools and open source software that could benefit readers and be game-changers for reporters and publishers. Each award includes funding of $60,000 in cash and $20,000 in computing credits on Google’s Cloud Platform.
We congratulate the recipients of these awards, whose projects are described below, and look forward to the results of their research. Stay tuned for updates on their progress.
Larry Birnbaum
, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Journalism, Northwestern University
Project
: Thematic Characterization of News Stories
This project aims to develop computational methods for identifying abstract themes or "angles" in news stories, e.g., seeing a story as an instance of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps," or as a "David vs. Goliath" story. In collaboration with journalism and computer science students, we will develop applications utilizing these methods in the creation, distribution, and consumption of news content.
Irfan Essa
, Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Project
: Tracing Reuse in Political Language
Our goal in this project is to research, and then develop a data-mining tool that allows an online researcher to find and trace language reuse. By language reuse, we specifically mean: Can we find if in a current text some language was used that can be traced back to some other text or script. The technical innovation in this project is aimed at (1) identifying linguistic reuse in documents as well as other forms of material, which can be converted to text, and therefore includes political speeches and videos. Another innovation will be in (2) how linguistic reuse can be traced through the web and online social networks.
Susan McGregor
, Assistant Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School
Project
: InfoScribe
InfoScribe
is a collaborative web platform that lets citizens participate in investigative journalism projects by digitizing select data from scanned document sets uploaded by journalists. One of InfoScribe's primary research goals is to explore how community participation in journalistic activities can help improve their accuracy, transparency and impact. Additionally, InfoScribe seeks to build and expand upon understandings of how computer vision and statistical inference can be most efficiently combined with human effort in the completion of complex tasks.
Paul Resnick
, Professor, University of Michigan School of Information
Project
: RumorLens
RumorLens
is a tool that will aid journalists in finding posts that spread or correct a particular rumor on Twitter, by exploring the size of the audiences that those posts have reached. In the collection phase, the user provides one or a few exemplar tweets and then manually classifies a few hundred others as spreading the rumor, correcting it, or labeling it as unrelated. This enables automatic retrieval and classification of remaining tweets, which are then presented in an interactive visualization that shows audience sizes.
Ryan Thornburg
, Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Project: Public Records Dashboard for Small Newsrooms
Building off our Knight News Challenge effort to bring data-driven journalism to readers of rural newspaper websites, we are developing an internal newsroom tool that will alert reporters and editors to potential story tips found in public data. Our project aims to lower the cost of finding in public data sets stories that shine light in dark places, hold powerful people accountable, and explain our increasingly complex and interconnected world. (Public facing site for the data acquisition element of the project at
http://open-nc.org
)
Google Research Awards: Winter 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations
We have just completed another round of the
Google Research Awards
, our biannual open call for proposals on computer science-related topics including robotics, natural language processing, systems, policy, and mobile. Our grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers.
This round we received 691 proposals, an increase of 19% over last round, covering 46 countries on 6 continents. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 115 projects. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were human-computer interaction, systems, and machine learning, with 25% of the funding awarded to universities outside the U.S.
We set a new record this round with over 2000 reviews done by 650 reviewers. Each proposal is reviewed by internal committees who provide feedback on merit and relevance. In many cases, the committees include some of the foremost experts in the world. All committee members are volunteers who spend a significant amount of time making the Research Award program happen twice a year.
Congratulations to the well-deserving
recipients of this round’s awards
. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is April 15), please visit
our website
for more information.
New Research Challenges in Language Understanding
Friday, November 22, 2013
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
We held the first global Language Understanding and Knowledge Discovery Focused Faculty Workshop in Nanjing, China, on November 14-15, 2013. Thirty-four faculty members joined the workshop arriving from 10 countries and regions across APAC, EMEA and the US. Googlers from Research, Engineering and University Relations/University Programs also attended the event.
The 2-day workshop included keynote talks, panel discussions and break-out sessions [
agenda
]. It was an engaging and productive workshop, and we saw lots of positive interactions among the attendees. The workshop encouraged communication between Google and faculty around the world working in these areas.
Research in text mining continues to explore open questions relating to entity annotation, relation extraction, and more. The workshop’s goal was to brainstorm and discuss relevant topics to further investigate these areas. Ultimately, this research should help provide users search results that are much more relevant to them.
At the end of the workshop, participants identified four topics representing challenges and opportunities for further exploration in Language Understanding and Knowledge Discovery:
Knowledge representation, integration, and maintenance
Efficient and scalable infrastructure and algorithms for inferencing
Presentation and explanation of knowledge
Multilingual computation
Going forward, Google will be collaborating with academic researchers on a position paper related to these topics. We also welcome faculty interested in contributing to further research in this area to submit a proposal to the
Faculty Research Awards program
. Faculty Research Awards are one-year grants to researchers working in areas of mutual interest.
The faculty attendees responded positively to the focused workshop format, as it allowed time to go in depth into important and timely research questions. Encouraged by their feedback, we are considering similar workshops on other topics in the future.
Google Research Awards: Summer 2013
Monday, August 12, 2013
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations
Another round of the
Google Research Awards
is complete. This is our biannual open call for proposals on computer science-related topics including machine learning and structured data, policy, human computer interaction, and geo/maps. Our grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google scientists and engineers.
This round, we received 550 proposals from 50 countries. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 105 projects. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were human-computer interaction, systems and machine learning. In addition, 19% of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.
We noticed some new areas emerging in this round of proposals. In particular, an increase of interest in neural networks, accessibility-related projects, and some innovative ideas in robotics. One project features the use of
Android-based
multi-robot systems which are significantly more complex than single robot systems. Faculty researchers are looking to explore novel uses of
Google Glass
such as an indoor navigation system for blind users, and how Glass can facilitate social interactions.
Congratulations to the well-deserving
recipients of this round’s awards
. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is October 15), please visit
our website
for more information.
Natural Language Understanding-focused awards announced
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
Posted by Massimiliano Ciaramita, Research Scientist and David Harper, Head University Relations (EMEA)
Some of the biggest challenges for the scientific community today involve understanding the principles and mechanisms that underlie natural language use on the Web. An example of long-standing problem is language ambiguity; when somebody types the word “Rio” in a query do they mean the city, a movie, a casino, or something else? Understanding the difference can be crucial to help users get the answer they are looking for. In the past few years, a significant effort in industry and academia has focused on disambiguating language with respect to Web-scale knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia and Freebase. These resources are used primarily as canonical, although incomplete, collections of “entities”. As entities are often connected in multiple ways, e.g., explicitly via hyperlinks and implicitly via factual information, such resources can be naturally thought of as (knowledge) graphs. This work has provided the first breakthroughs towards anchoring language in the Web to interpretable, albeit initially shallow, semantic representations. Google has brought the vision of semantic search directly to millions of users via the adoption of the
Knowledge Graph
. This massive change to search technology has also been called a shift “from strings to things”.
Understanding natural language is at the core of Google's work to help people get the information they need as quickly and easily as possible. At Google we work hard to advance the state of the art in natural language processing, to improve the understanding of fundamental principles, and to solve the algorithmic and engineering challenges to make these technologies part of everyday life. Language is inherently productive; an infinite number of meaningful new expressions can be formed by combining the meaning of their components systematically. The logical next step is the semantic modeling of structured meaningful expressions -- in other words, “what is said” about entities. We envision that knowledge graphs will support the next leap forward in language understanding towards scalable compositional analyses, by providing a universe of entities, facts and relations upon which semantic composition operations can be designed and implemented.
So we’ve just awarded over $1.2 million to support several natural language understanding research awards given to university research groups doing work in this area. Research topics range from semantic parsing to statistical models of life stories and novel compositional inference and representation approaches to modeling relations and events in the Knowledge Graph.
These awards went to researchers in nine universities and institutions worldwide, selected after a rigorous internal review:
Mark Johnson and Lan Du (Macquarie University) and Wray Buntine (NICTA) for “Generative models of Life Stories”
Percy Liang and Christopher Manning (Stanford University) for “Tensor Factorizing Knowledge Graphs”
Sebastian Riedel (University College London) and Andrew McCallum (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) for “Populating a Knowledge Base of Compositional Universal Schema”
Ivan Titov (University of Amsterdam) for “Learning to Reason by Exploiting Grounded Text Collections”
Hans Uszkoreit (Saarland University and DFKI), Feiyu Xu (DFKI and Saarland University) and Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome) for “Language Understanding cum Knowledge Yield”
Luke Zettlemoyer (University of Washington) for “Weakly Supervised Learning for Semantic Parsing with Knowledge Graphs”
We believe the results will be broadly useful to product development and will further scientific research. We look forward to working with these researchers, and we hope we will jointly push the frontier of natural language understanding research to the next level.
2013 Google PhD Fellowships: 5 Years of Supporting the Future of Computer Science
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Posted by Michael Rennaker, Google University Relations
We are extremely excited to announce the
2013 Global Google PhD Fellows
. From all around the globe, these 39 PhD students represent the fifth class in the program’s history, a select group recognized by Google researchers and their institutions as some of the most promising young academics in the world. As we welcome the newest class of PhD Fellows, we take a look back at the program’s roots and hear from two past recipients.
In 2009, Google launched its
PhD Fellowship Program
, created to recognize and support outstanding graduate students pursuing work in computer science, related disciplines or promising research areas. In its inaugural year, 13 United States PhD students were awarded fellowships, drawn from an extremely competitive pool of applicants. The global program now covers Europe, China, India and Australia and continues to draw some of the best young researchers, reflecting Google’s commitment to building strong relations with the academic community.
Among those first recipients of the fellowship award are 2009 PhD Fellow
Roxana Geambasu
, Visiting Professor in the
Computer Science Department
at Columbia University, and 2010 European Doctoral Fellow
Roland Angst
, Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University and affiliated with the
Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication
. As early recipients of the award, Roxana and Roland reflect on the impact that the Google Fellowship program had on their careers.
For Roxana, the fellowship provided the tools and connections that helped lay the foundation for her academic career. She believes industrial fellowship programs are very important, as they give students an opportunity to interact more closely with industry.
“Beyond the financial support, I think that the fellowship impacted my career in many important ways. First, the Google fellowships are regarded as highly competitive, so receiving the award was probably a big plus on my resume when I was interviewing for faculty positions.”
“Second, the award yielded a mentor within Google, Brad Chen, with whom I've kept in touch ever since, as well as opportunities to visit the campus, deliver talks and meet Google engineers. Brad and I continue to meet at conferences and discuss my work, his work and (of late) the work of my students; it’s through that relationship I’m exposed to new people from Google and gain valuable advice about
faculty award opportunities
.”
Roland Angst credits the award with the ability to lighten his teaching load and instead focus on his research, which ultimately prepared him for his future academic career. Like Roxanna, Roland states that the fellowship also gave him the opportunity to establish connections with people working in related topics in industry.
“In my view, programs such as the Google Fellowship Awards represent an important and integral link between industry and universities. Firstly, such programs increase the awareness in the academic world for relevant problems in industry. Secondly, these programs allow the IT industry to express their gratitude to the educational services provided by the universities on which the IT industry heavily relies on."
We welcome the latest recipients of the Global Google PhD Fellowships for 2013 with great excitement and high expectations. Recognized for their incredible innovation, creativity and leadership, we are very happy to support these excellent PhD students and offer our sincere congratulations.
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