Announcing the 2021 Research Scholar Program Recipients

In March 2020 we introduced the Research Scholar Program, an effort focused on developing collaborations with new professors and encouraging the formation of long-term relationships with the academic community. In November we opened the inaugural call for proposals for this program, which was received with enthusiastic interest from faculty who are working on cutting edge research across many research areas in computer science, including machine learning, human-computer interaction, health research, systems and more.

Today we are pleased to announce that in this first year of the program we have granted 77 awards, which included 86 principal investigators representing 15+ countries and over 50 universities. Of the 86 award recipients, 43% identify as an historically marginalized group within technology. Please see the full list of 2021 recipients on our web page, as well as in the list below.

We offer our congratulations to this year’s recipients, and look forward to seeing what they achieve!

Algorithms and Optimization
Alexandros Psomas, Purdue University
   Auction Theory Beyond Independent, Quasi-Linear Bidders
Julian Shun, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
   Scalable Parallel Subgraph Finding and Peeling Algorithms
Mary Wootters, Stanford University
   The Role of Redundancy in Algorithm Design
Pravesh K. Kothari, Carnegie Mellon University
   Efficient Algorithms for Robust Machine Learning
Sepehr Assadi, Rutgers University
   Graph Clustering at Scale via Improved Massively Parallel Algorithms

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
Srinath Sridhar, Brown University
   Perception and Generation of Interactive Objects

Geo
Miriam E. Marlier, University of California, Los Angeles
   Mapping California’s Compound Climate Hazards in Google Earth Engine
Suining He, University of Connecticut
   Fairness-Aware and Cross-Modality Traffic Learning and Predictive Modeling for Urban Smart Mobility Systems

Human Computer Interaction
Arvind Satyanarayan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
   Generating Semantically Rich Natural Language Captions for Data Visualizations to Promote Accessibility
Dina El-Zanfaly, Carnegie Mellon University
   In-the-making: An intelligence mediated collaboration system for creative practices
Katharina Reinecke, University of Washington
   Providing Science-Backed Answers to Health-related Questions in Google Search
Misha Sra, University of California, Santa Barbara
   Hands-free Game Controller for Quadriplegic Individuals
Mohsen Mosleh, University of Exeter Business School
   Effective Strategies to Debunk False Claims on Social Media: A large-scale digital field experiments approach
Tanushree Mitra, University of Washington
   Supporting Scalable Value-Sensitive Fact-Checking through Human-AI Intelligence

Health Research
Catarina Barata, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa
   DeepMutation – A CNN Model To Predict Genetic Mutations In Melanoma Patients
Emma Pierson, Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Institute, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and Cornell University
   Using cell phone mobility data to reduce inequality and improve public health
Jasmine Jones, Berea College
   Reachout: Co-Designing Social Connection Technologies for Isolated Young Adults
Mojtaba Golzan, University of Technology Sydney, Jack Phu, University of New South Wales
   Autonomous Grading of Dynamic Blood Vessel Markers in the Eye using Deep Learning
Serena Yeung, Stanford University
   Artificial Intelligence Analysis of Surgical Technique in the Operating Room

Machine Learning and Data Mining
Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, Northwestern University, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Carnegie Mellon University
   Principled Approaches for Learning with Test-time Robustness
Cho-Jui Hsieh, University of California, Los Angeles
   Scalability and Tunability for Neural Network Optimizers
Golnoosh Farnadi, University of Montreal, HEC Montreal/MILA
   Addressing Algorithmic Fairness in Decision-focused Deep Learning
Harrie Oosterhuis, Radboud University
   Search and Recommendation Systems that Learn from Diverse User Preferences
Jimmy Ba, University of Toronto
   Model-based Reinforcement Learning with Causal World Models
Nadav Cohen, Tel-Aviv University
   A Dynamical Theory of Deep Learning
Nihar Shah, Carnegie Mellon University
   Addressing Unfairness in Distributed Human Decisions
Nima Fazeli, University of Michigan
   Semi-Implicit Methods for Deformable Object Manipulation
Qingyao Ai, University of Utah
   Metric-agnostic Ranking Optimization
Stefanie Jegelka, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
   Generalization of Graph Neural Networks under Distribution Shifts
Virginia Smith, Carnegie Mellon University
   A Multi-Task Approach for Trustworthy Federated Learning

Mobile
Aruna Balasubramanian, State University of New York – Stony Brook
   AccessWear: Ubiquitous Accessibility using Wearables
Tingjun Chen, Duke University
   Machine Learning- and Optical-enabled Mobile Millimeter-Wave Networks

Machine Perception
Amir Patel, University of Cape Town
   WildPose: 3D Animal Biomechanics in the Field using Multi-Sensor Data Fusion
Angjoo Kanazawa, University of California, Berkeley
   Practical Volumetric Capture of People and Scenes
Emanuele Rodolà, Sapienza University of Rome
   Fair Geometry: Toward Algorithmic Debiasing in Geometric Deep Learning
Minchen Wei, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
   Accurate Capture of Perceived Object Colors for Smart Phone Cameras
Mohsen Ali and Izza Aftab, Information Technology University of the Punjab, Pakistan
   Is Economics From Afar Domain Generalizable?
Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
   Bridging Perspectives of Explainability and Adversarial Robustness
Xin Yu and Linchao Zhu, University of Technology Sydney
   Sign Language Translation in the Wild

Networking
Aurojit Panda, New York University
   Bertha: Network APIs for the Programmable Network Era
Cristina Klippel Dominicini, Instituto Federal do Espirito Santo
   Polynomial Key-based Architecture for Source Routing in Network Fabrics
Noa Zilberman, University of Oxford
   Exposing Vulnerabilities in Programmable Network Devices
Rachit Agarwal, Cornell University
   Designing Datacenter Transport for Terabit Ethernet

Natural Language Processing
Danqi Chen, Princeton University
   Improving Training and Inference Efficiency of NLP Models
Derry Tanti Wijaya, Boston University, Anietie Andy, University of Pennsylvania
   Exploring the evolution of racial biases over time through framing analysis
Eunsol Choi, University of Texas at Austin
   Answering Information Seeking Questions In The Wild
Kai-Wei Chang, University of California, Los Angeles
   Certified Robustness to against language differences in Cross-Lingual Transfer
Mohohlo Samuel Tsoeu, University of Cape Town
   Corpora collection and complete natural language processing of isiXhosa, Sesotho and South African Sign languages
Natalia Diaz Rodriguez, University of Granada (Spain) + ENSTA, Institut Polytechnique Paris, Inria. Lorenzo Baraldi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
   SignNet: Towards democratizing content accessibility for the deaf by aligning multi-modal sign representations

Other Research Areas
John Dickerson, University of Maryland – College Park, Nicholas Mattei, Tulane University
   Fairness and Diversity in Graduate Admissions
Mor Nitzan, Hebrew University
   Learning representations of tissue design principles from single-cell data
Nikolai Matni, University of Pennsylvania
   Robust Learning for Safe Control

Privacy
Foteini Baldimtsi, George Mason University
   Improved Single-Use Anonymous Credentials with Private Metabit
Yu-Xiang Wang, University of California, Santa Barbara
   Stronger, Better and More Accessible Differential Privacy with autodp

Quantum Computing
Ashok Ajoy, University of California, Berkeley
   Accelerating NMR spectroscopy with a Quantum Computer
John Nichol, University of Rochester
   Coherent spin-photon coupling
Jordi Tura i Brugués, Leiden University
   RAGECLIQ - Randomness Generation with Certification via Limited Quantum Devices
Nathan Wiebe, University of Toronto
   New Frameworks for Quantum Simulation and Machine Learning
Philipp Hauke, University of Trento
   ProGauge: Protecting Gauge Symmetry in Quantum Hardware
Shruti Puri, Yale University
   Surface Code Co-Design for Practical Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Structured Data, Extraction, Semantic Graph, and Database Management
Abolfazl Asudeh, University Of Illinois, Chicago
   An end-to-end system for detecting cherry-picked trendlines
Eugene Wu, Columbia University
   Interactive training data debugging for ML analytics
Jingbo Shang, University of California, San Diego
   Structuring Massive Text Corpora via Extremely Weak Supervision

Security
Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup and Markus Wagner, University of Adelaide
   Automatic Post-Quantum Cryptographic Code Generation and Optimization
Elette Boyle, IDC Herzliya, Israel
   Cheaper Private Set Intersection via Advances in "Silent OT"
Joseph Bonneau, New York University
   Zeroizing keys in secure messaging implementations
Yu Feng , University of California, Santa Barbara, Yuan Tian, University of Virginia
   Exploit Generation Using Reinforcement Learning

Software engineering and Programming Languages
Kelly Blincoe, University of Auckland
   Towards more inclusive software engineering practices to retain women in software engineering
Fredrik Kjolstad, Stanford University
   Sparse Tensor Algebra Compilation to Domain-Specific Architectures
Milos Gligoric, University of Texas at Austin
   Adaptive Regression Test Selection
Sarah E. Chasins, University of California, Berkeley
   If you break it, you fix it: Synthesizing program transformations so that library maintainers can make breaking changes

Systems
Adwait Jog, College of William & Mary
   Enabling Efficient Sharing of Emerging GPUs
Heiner Litz, University of California, Santa Cruz
   Software Prefetching Irregular Memory Access Patterns
Malte Schwarzkopf, Brown University
   Privacy-Compliant Web Services by Construction
Mehdi Saligane, University of Michigan
   Autonomous generation of Open Source Analog & Mixed Signal IC
Nathan Beckmann, Carnegie Mellon University
   Making Data Access Faster and Cheaper with Smarter Flash Caches
Yanjing Li, University of Chicago
   Resilient Accelerators for Deep Learning Training Tasks

Source: Google AI Blog