Tag Archives: University Relations

Google Faculty Research Awards 2018

Posted by Maggie Johnson, VP, Education and Negar Saei, Program Manager, University Relations

We just completed another round of the Google Faculty Research Awards, our annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics, such as quantum computing, machine learning, algorithms and theory, natural language processing and more. 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 910 proposals covering 40 countries and over 320 universities. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 158 projects. The subject areas that received the most support this year were human computer interaction, machine learning, machine perception, and systems.

Congratulations to the well-deserving recipients of this round's awards. More information on how to apply for the next round will be available at the end of the summer on our website. You can find award recipients from previous years here.

Source: Google AI Blog


Google’s Workshop on AI/ML Research and Practice in India

Posted by Pankaj Gupta and Anand Rangarajan, Engineering Directors, Google India

Last month, Google Bangalore hosted the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with the goal of fostering collaboration between the academic and industry research communities in India. This forum was designed to exchange current research and industry projects in AI & ML, and included faculty and researchers from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other leading universities in India, along with industry practitioners from Amazon, Delhivery, Flipkart, LinkedIn, Myntra, Microsoft, Ola and many more. Participants spoke on the ongoing research and work being undertaken in India in deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, systems and generative models (you can access all the presentations from the workshop here).

Google’s Jeff Dean and Prabhakar Raghavan kicked off the workshop by sharing Google’s uses of deep learning to solve challenging problems and reinventing productivity using AI. Additional keynotes were delivered by Googlers Rajen Sheth and Roberto Bayardo. We also hosted a panel discussion on the challenges and future of AI/ML ecosystem in India, moderated by Google Bangalore’s Pankaj Gupta. Panel participants included Anirban Dasgupta (IIT Gandhinagar), Chiranjib Bhattacharyya of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Ashish Tendulkar and Srinivas Raaghav (Google India) and Shourya Roy (American Express Big Data Labs).
Prabhakar Raghavan’s keynote address
Sessions
The workshop agenda included five broad sessions with presentations by attendees in the following areas:
Pankaj Gupta moderating the panel discussion
Summary and Next Steps
As in many countries around the world, we are seeing increased dialog on various aspects of AI and ML in multiple contexts in India. This workshop hosted 80 attendees representing 9 universities and 36 companies contributing 28 excellent talks, with many opportunities for discussing challenges and opportunities for AI/ML in India. Google will continue to foster this exchange of ideas across a diverse set of folks and applications. As part of this, we also announced the upcoming research awards round (applications due June 4) to support up to seven faculty members in India on their AI/ML research, and new work on an accelerator program for Indian entrepreneurs focused primarily on AI/ML technologies. Please keep an eye out for more information about these programs.

Google’s Workshop on AI/ML Research and Practice in India

Posted by Pankaj Gupta and Anand Rangarajan, Engineering Directors, Google India

Last month, Google Bangalore hosted the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with the goal of fostering collaboration between the academic and industry research communities in India. This forum was designed to exchange current research and industry projects in AI & ML, and included faculty and researchers from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other leading universities in India, along with industry practitioners from Amazon, Delhivery, Flipkart, LinkedIn, Myntra, Microsoft, Ola and many more. Participants spoke on the ongoing research and work being undertaken in India in deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, systems and generative models (you can access all the presentations from the workshop here).

Google’s Jeff Dean and Prabhakar Raghavan kicked off the workshop by sharing Google’s uses of deep learning to solve challenging problems and reinventing productivity using AI. Additional keynotes were delivered by Googlers Rajen Sheth and Roberto Bayardo. We also hosted a panel discussion on the challenges and future of AI/ML ecosystem in India, moderated by Google Bangalore’s Pankaj Gupta. Panel participants included Anirban Dasgupta (IIT Gandhinagar), Chiranjib Bhattacharyya of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Ashish Tendulkar and Srinivas Raaghav (Google India) and Shourya Roy (American Express Big Data Labs).
Prabhakar Raghavan’s keynote address
Sessions
The workshop agenda included five broad sessions with presentations by attendees in the following areas:
Pankaj Gupta moderating the panel discussion
Summary and Next Steps
As in many countries around the world, we are seeing increased dialog on various aspects of AI and ML in multiple contexts in India. This workshop hosted 80 attendees representing 9 universities and 36 companies contributing 28 excellent talks, with many opportunities for discussing challenges and opportunities for AI/ML in India. Google will continue to foster this exchange of ideas across a diverse set of folks and applications. As part of this, we also announced the upcoming research awards round (applications due June 4) to support up to seven faculty members in India on their AI/ML research, and new work on an accelerator program for Indian entrepreneurs focused primarily on AI/ML technologies. Please keep an eye out for more information about these programs.

Source: Google AI Blog


Announcing the 2018 Google PhD Fellows for North America, Europe and the Middle East

Posted by Susie Kim, Program Manager, University Relations

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 ninth 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 the 2018 Google PhD Fellows.

Algorithms, Optimizations and Markets
Emmanouil Zampetakis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Manuela Fischer, ETH Zurich CS
Thodoris Lykouris, Cornell University
Yuan Deng, Duke University

Computational Neuroscience
Ella Batty, Columbia University
Neha Spenta Wadia, University of California, Berkeley
Reuben Feinman, New York University

Human-Computer Interaction
Gierad Laput, Carnegie Mellon University
Mike Schaekermann, University of Waterloo
Minsuk (Brian) Kahng, Georgia Tech

Machine Learning
Aditi Raghunathan, Stanford University
Lin Chen, Yale University
Qian Yu, University of Southern California
Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Shuang Liu, University of California, San Diego
Stephen Tu, University of California, Berkeley
Xinchen Yan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Zelda Mariet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mobile Computing
Shilin Zhu, University of California, San Diego

Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision
Antoine Miech, INRIA
Arsha Nagrani, University of Oxford (ES)
Joseph Redmon, University of Washington
Raymond Yeh, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Shanmukha Ramakrishna Vedantam, Georgia Tech

Natural Language Processing
Anne Cocos, University of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Herzig, Tel-Aviv University
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Yang Liu, The University of Edinburgh
Yoon Kim, Harvard University

Privacy and Security
Aayush Jain, University of California, Los Angeles

Programming Technology and Software Engineering
Gowtham Kaki, Purdue University, West Lafayette
Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, University of California, Irvine
Victor Lanvin, Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris

Quantum Computing
Erika Ye, California Institute of Technology

Structured Data and Database Management
Lingjiao Chen, University of Wisconsin

Systems and Networking
Andrea Lattuada, ETH Zurich CS
Lana Josipović, EPFL CS
Michael Schaarschmidt, University of Cambridge - Computer Laboratory
Rachee Singh, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Announcing the 2018 Google PhD Fellows for North America, Europe and the Middle East

Posted by Susie Kim, Program Manager, University Relations

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 ninth 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 the 2018 Google PhD Fellows.

Algorithms, Optimizations and Markets
Emmanouil Zampetakis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Manuela Fischer, ETH Zurich CS
Thodoris Lykouris, Cornell University
Yuan Deng, Duke University

Computational Neuroscience
Ella Batty, Columbia University
Neha Spenta Wadia, University of California, Berkeley
Reuben Feinman, New York University

Human-Computer Interaction
Gierad Laput, Carnegie Mellon University
Mike Schaekermann, University of Waterloo
Minsuk (Brian) Kahng, Georgia Tech

Machine Learning
Aditi Raghunathan, Stanford University
Lin Chen, Yale University
Qian Yu, University of Southern California
Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Shuang Liu, University of California, San Diego
Stephen Tu, University of California, Berkeley
Xinchen Yan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Zelda Mariet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mobile Computing
Shilin Zhu, University of California, San Diego

Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision
Antoine Miech, INRIA
Arsha Nagrani, University of Oxford (ES)
Joseph Redmon, University of Washington
Raymond Yeh, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Shanmukha Ramakrishna Vedantam, Georgia Tech

Natural Language Processing
Anne Cocos, University of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Herzig, Tel-Aviv University
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Yang Liu, The University of Edinburgh
Yoon Kim, Harvard University

Privacy and Security
Aayush Jain, University of California, Los Angeles

Programming Technology and Software Engineering
Gowtham Kaki, Purdue University, West Lafayette
Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, University of California, Irvine
Victor Lanvin, Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris

Quantum Computing
Erika Ye, California Institute of Technology

Structured Data and Database Management
Lingjiao Chen, University of Wisconsin

Systems and Networking
Andrea Lattuada, ETH Zurich CS
Lana Josipović, EPFL CS
Michael Schaarschmidt, University of Cambridge - Computer Laboratory
Rachee Singh, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Source: Google AI Blog


Investing in France’s AI Ecosystem

Posted by Olivier Bousquet, Principal Engineer, Google Zürich

Recently, we announced the launch of a new AI research team in our Paris office. And today DeepMind has also announced a new AI research presence in Paris. We are excited about expanding Google’s research presence in Europe, which bolsters the efforts of the existing groups in our Zürich and London offices. As strong supporters of academic research, we are also excited to foster collaborations with France’s vibrant academic ecosystem.

Our research teams in Paris will focus on fundamental AI research, as well as important applications of these ideas to areas such as Health, Science or Arts. They will publish and open-source their results to advance the state-of-the-art in core areas such as Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning.

Our approach to research is based on building a strong connection with the academic community; contributing to training the next generation of scientists and establishing a bridge between academic and industrial research. We believe that both objectives are key to fostering a healthy research ecosystem that will flourish in the long term. These ideas are very much aligned with some of the recommendations that Fields Medalist and member of French Parliament Cédric Villani is putting forward in his report on AI to the French government.

As we expand our teams in France, we have several initiatives that illustrate our commitment to these goals:
  • We are sponsoring “Artificial Intelligence and Visual Computing” Chair at École Polytechnique (one of the leading higher education institutions in France) which will support their education initiatives in AI
  • We just established a partnership with INRIA for conducting collaborative research projects
  • We are funding academic research with unrestricted grants mostly dedicated to the support of PhD and postdoc positions through our Faculty Research Awards and PhD Fellowship programs, as well as our Focused Research Awards. As one example, we have recently funded a project on large scale optimization of neural networks led by Francis Bach (INRIA and ENS) and Alexandre d’Aspremont (CNRS and ENS)
  • We are working on offering CIFRE PhD positions (joint PhD positions between Google and an academic lab) as well as internships for PhD students
Additionally, we are pleased to announce that one of the world’s leading experts in computer vision, Cordelia Schmid, will begin a dual appointment at INRIA and Google Paris. These kind of appointments, together with our Visiting Faculty program, are a great way to share ideas and research challenges, and utilize Google's world-class computing infrastructure to explore new projects at industrial scale.

France has a long tradition of research and educational excellence, and has a very dynamic and active machine learning community. This makes it a great place to pursue our goal of building AI-enabled technologies that can benefit everyone, through fundamental advances in machine learning and related fields.

Investing in France’s AI Ecosystem

Posted by Olivier Bousquet, Principal Engineer, Google Zürich

Recently, we announced the launch of a new AI research team in our Paris office. And today DeepMind has also announced a new AI research presence in Paris. We are excited about expanding Google’s research presence in Europe, which bolsters the efforts of the existing groups in our Zürich and London offices. As strong supporters of academic research, we are also excited to foster collaborations with France’s vibrant academic ecosystem.

Our research teams in Paris will focus on fundamental AI research, as well as important applications of these ideas to areas such as Health, Science or Arts. They will publish and open-source their results to advance the state-of-the-art in core areas such as Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning.

Our approach to research is based on building a strong connection with the academic community; contributing to training the next generation of scientists and establishing a bridge between academic and industrial research. We believe that both objectives are key to fostering a healthy research ecosystem that will flourish in the long term. These ideas are very much aligned with some of the recommendations that Fields Medalist and member of French Parliament Cédric Villani is putting forward in his report on AI to the French government.

As we expand our teams in France, we have several initiatives that illustrate our commitment to these goals:
  • We are sponsoring “Artificial Intelligence and Visual Computing” Chair at École Polytechnique (one of the leading higher education institutions in France) which will support their education initiatives in AI
  • We just established a partnership with INRIA for conducting collaborative research projects
  • We are funding academic research with unrestricted grants mostly dedicated to the support of PhD and postdoc positions through our Faculty Research Awards and PhD Fellowship programs, as well as our Focused Research Awards. As one example, we have recently funded a project on large scale optimization of neural networks led by Francis Bach (INRIA and ENS) and Alexandre d’Aspremont (CNRS and ENS)
  • We are working on offering CIFRE PhD positions (joint PhD positions between Google and an academic lab) as well as internships for PhD students
Additionally, we are pleased to announce that one of the world’s leading experts in computer vision, Cordelia Schmid, will begin a dual appointment at INRIA and Google Paris. These kind of appointments, together with our Visiting Faculty program, are a great way to share ideas and research challenges, and utilize Google's world-class computing infrastructure to explore new projects at industrial scale.

France has a long tradition of research and educational excellence, and has a very dynamic and active machine learning community. This makes it a great place to pursue our goal of building AI-enabled technologies that can benefit everyone, through fundamental advances in machine learning and related fields.

Source: Google AI Blog


Google Faculty Research Awards 2017

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Vice President of Education and University Relations, Google


We’ve just completed another round of the Google Faculty Research Awards, our annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics such as machine learning, machine perception, natural language processing, and quantum computing. 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 1033 proposals covering 46 countries and over 360 universities. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 152 projects. The subject areas that received the most support this year were human computer interaction, machine learning, machine perception, and systems. Here are a few observations from this round:
  • There was a 17% increase in the total number of proposals received
  • There was a 87% increase in the number of proposals from Asia Pacific universities
  • Proposals focused on Computational Neuroscience increased 53%
  • Proposals focused on Quantum Computing more than doubled this round
Congratulations to the well-deserving recipients of this round’s awards. If you are interested in applying for the next round (September 2018 deadline), please visit our website for more information. You can find award recipients from previous years here.

Google Faculty Research Awards 2017

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Vice President of Education and University Relations, Google


We’ve just completed another round of the Google Faculty Research Awards, our annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics such as machine learning, machine perception, natural language processing, and quantum computing. 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 1033 proposals covering 46 countries and over 360 universities. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 152 projects. The subject areas that received the most support this year were human computer interaction, machine learning, machine perception, and systems. Here are a few observations from this round:
  • There was a 17% increase in the total number of proposals received
  • There was a 87% increase in the number of proposals from Asia Pacific universities
  • Proposals focused on Computational Neuroscience increased 53%
  • Proposals focused on Quantum Computing more than doubled this round
Congratulations to the well-deserving recipients of this round’s awards. If you are interested in applying for the next round (September 2018 deadline), please visit our website for more information. You can find award recipients from previous years here.

Source: Google AI Blog


A Summary of the First Conference on Robot Learning

Posted by Vincent Vanhoucke, Principal Scientist, Google Brain Team and Melanie Saldaña, Program Manager, University Relations

Whether in the form of autonomous vehicles, home assistants or disaster rescue units, robotic systems of the future will need to be able to operate safely and effectively in human-centric environments. In contrast to to their industrial counterparts, they will require a very high level of perceptual awareness of the world around them, and to adapt to continuous changes in both their goals and their environment. Machine learning is a natural answer to both the problems of perception and generalization to unseen environments, and with the recent rapid progress in computer vision and learning capabilities, applying these new technologies to the field of robotics is becoming a very central research question.

This past November, Google helped kickstart and host the first Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) at our campus in Mountain View. The goal of CoRL was to bring machine learning and robotics experts together for the first time in a single-track conference, in order to foster new research avenues between the two disciplines. The sold-out conference attracted 350 researchers from many institutions worldwide, who collectively presented 74 original papers, along with 5 keynotes by some of the most innovative researchers in the field.
Prof. Sergey Levine, CoRL 2017 co-chair, answering audience questions.
Sayna Ebrahimi (UC Berkeley) presenting her research.
Videos of the inaugural CoRL are available on the conference website. Additionally, we are delighted to announce that next year, CoRL moves to Europe! CoRL 2018 will be chaired by Professor Aude Billard from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and will tentatively be held in the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich on October 29th-31st, 2018. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Prof. Ken Goldberg, CoRL 2017 co-chair, and Jeffrey Mahler (UC Berkeley) during a break.