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Google has announced the recipients of its 2013 Ph.D. Fellowship program, which the search giant promotes as a way to gain new insights and innovations from some of the best minds in colleges and universities around the world.
“We are extremely excited to announce the 2013 Global Google Ph.D. Fellows,” wrote Michael Rennaker of Google University Relations, in a June 11 post on the Google Research Blog. “From all around the globe, these 39 Ph.D. 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.”
Google launched its Ph.D. Fellowship Program in 2009 as a way of recognizing and supporting outstanding graduate students who were pursuing work in computer science, related disciplines or promising research areas, wrote Rennaker. In 2009, the first year of the program, 13 United States Ph.D. students were awarded fellowships. The program has since been extended to Europe, China, India and Australia.
From the United States and Canada, 15 Google Ph.D. Fellows were selected for 2013.
They are Fernando deGoes, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Computer Graphics (California Institute of Technology); Bhavana Dalvi, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Information Extraction (Carnegie Mellon University); Karthik Raman, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Search and Information Retrieval (Cornell University); Fang Han, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Statistics (Johns Hopkins University); Jeff Regier, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Machine Learning (University of California Berkeley); Yingyi Bu, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Structured Data (University of California Irvine); Bart Knijnenburg, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Privacy (University of California Irvine); Mark Gordon, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Mobile Computing (University of Michigan); and Ian Goodfellow, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Deep Learning (University of Montreal).
Also selected were Yunchao Gong, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Machine Perception (University of North Carolina); Yinqian Zhang, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Computer Security (University of North Carolina); Sumita Barahmand, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Cloud Computing (University of Southern California); Yang Wang, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Distributed Computing (University of Texas at Austin); Adrian Sampson, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Computer Architecture (University of Washington); and Aditya Thakur, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Programming Technology (University of Wisconsin Madison).
The Australia Ph.D. Fellowships were awarded to Tor Lattimore, Google Australia Fellowship in Machine Learning (Australian National University, Research School of Computer Science); and to Yiran Shen, Google Australia Fellowship in Computer Networking (University of New South Wales, School of Computer Science & Engineering).
In China, the Ph.D. Fellowships were awarded to Yanjiao Chen, Google China Fellowship in Mobile Computing (HKUST); Songpei Du, Google China Fellowship in Computer Graphics (Tsinghua University); Wei Shen, Google China Fellowship in Search and Information Retrieval (Tsinghua University); and Wei Bi, Google China Fellowship in Machine Learning (HKUST).
The Google European Doctoral Fellowships were awarded to Maciej Besta, Google Europe Fellowship in Parallel Computing (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich); Gideon Blocq, Google Europe Fellowship in Computer Networking (Technion Israel Institute of Technology); Matthew Henderson, Google Europe Fellowship in Speech Technology (University of Cambridge); Annelie Heuser, Google Europe Fellowship in Privacy (Institut Mines Télécom); Christoph Kofler, Google Europe Fellowship in Video Search (Delft University of Technology); and Robin Morisset, Google Europe Fellowship in Operating Systems (École Normale Supérieure / INRIA).
The other European Fellowships went to Lukas Neumann, Google Europe Fellowship in Computer Vision (Czech Technical University); Daniel Renshaw, Google Europe Fellowship in Natural Language Processing (The University of Edinburgh); Sigurd Schneider, Google Europe Fellowship in Compiler Technology (Saarland University); Aliaksei Severyn, Google Europe Fellowship in Machine Learning (University of Trento); Christopher Smith, Google Europe Fellowship in Data Mining (University College London); Evgeny Strekalovskiy, Google Europe Fellowship in Image Analysis (Technische Universität München); and Oana TifreaMarciuska, Google Europe Fellowship in Social Search (University of Oxford).
The Google Ph.D. Fellowships in India went to Abir De, Google India Fellowship in Social Computing (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur); Debarghya Ghoshdastidar, Google India Fellowship in Statistical Learning Theory (Indian Institute of Science); Shahbaz Khan, Google India Fellowship in Algorithms (Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur); Harikrishna Narasimhan, Google India Fellowship in Machine Learning (Indian Institute of Science); and Rajvi Shah, Google India Fellowship in Computer Vision (International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad).
Google Award 39 Ph.D. Fellowships in Computer Science
“We welcome the latest recipients of the Global Google Ph.D. Fellowships for 2013 with great excitement and high expectations,” wrote Rennaker. “Recognized for their incredible innovation, creativity and leadership, we are very happy to support these excellent Ph.D. students and offer our sincere congratulations.”
A previous winner, 2009 Ph.D. Fellow Roxana Geambasu, Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, was interviewed in Rennaker’s post and said that the experience helped lay the foundation for her academic career.
“Beyond the financial support, I think that the fellowship impacted my career in many important ways,” Geambasu told Rennaker. “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.”
The Google Fellowship also continues to expose her “to new people from Google and gain valuable advice about faculty award opportunities,” she told Rennaker.
Google has made a point of creating programs that foster innovation and ideas in technology around the world.
In February, Google sought applicants for its sixth annual Google Policy Fellowship Program, which brings interested college and university students together to spend their summers immersed in the world of Internet policy as Google Policy Fellows.
Also in February, Google awarded its first-ever Google App Engine Research Awards to seven projects that will use the App Engine platform’s abilities to work with large data sets for academic and scientific research. The new program, which was announced in the spring of 2012, brought in many proposals for a wide variety of scientific research, including in subject areas such as mathematics, computer vision, bioinformatics, climate and computer science.
Google’s Summer of Code contest is in its ninth year this summer. The program has involved some 6,000 college and university students from more than 100 countries since its start in 2005.