Google has announced the winners of 110 summer Google Research Awards that will fund the research projects of 110 applicants who sought the company’s backing in a wide range of computer science fields.
The winners were unveiled by Maggie Johnson, the director of education and university relations for Google, in an Aug. 20 post on the Google Research Blog. The latest round of Google Research Awards is part of a biannual open call for proposals on computer science-related topics including systems, software engineering, machine perception, structured data, privacy, robotics, networking, security, social media and mobile, according to Johnson. The grant awards cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google researchers and engineers on their projects.
Google received 722 proposals in the summer round of awards, which is an increase of 5 percent over the last round, she wrote. Entries were received from researchers in 44 countries on six continents. The 110 winning entries were chosen through expert reviews and committee discussions. “The subject areas that received the highest level of support were systems, human-computer interaction, mobile, and machine perception, with 22 percent of the funding awarded to universities outside the U.S.,” Johnson wrote.
“We introduced three new topics this round, representing important new research areas for Google,” she explained in her post. “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.”
The deadline for the next round of this year’s Google Research Awards is Oct. 15.
The full list of grant award winners can be found here.
In August 2013, Google announced 105 winners in that round of the awards. At that time, Google received 550 proposals from 50 nations around the world for the awards.
Google Research Awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world, according to Google. Faculty members can apply for up to $150,000 in eligible expenses, but most awards are funded at the amount needed to support basic expenses for one graduate student for one year, according to Google. The awards support innovative research in computer science, engineering and related fields.
The awards program was created to bolster the company’s own research efforts, according to Google. “While we do significant in-house research and engineering, we also maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide pursuing innovative research in core areas relevant to our mission,” Google said in a statement on its awards Website. “As part of that vision, the Google Research Awards program aims to identify and support world-class, full-time faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest.”