Tag Archives: University Relations

Highlights from the Annual Google PhD Fellowship Summit, and Announcing the 2017 Google PhD Fellows

Posted by Susie Kim, 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 ninth year, our Fellowships have helped support over 300 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 second annual Global PhD Fellowship Summit. VP of Education and University Programs Maggie Johnson welcomed the Fellows and went over Google's approach to research and its impact across our products and services. The students heard talks from researchers like Ed Chi, Douglas Eck, Úlfar Erlingsson, Dina Papagiannaki, Viren Jain, Ian Goodfellow, Kevin Murphy and Galen Andrew, and got a glimpse into some of the state-of-the-art research pursued across Google.
Google Fellows attending the 2017 Global PhD Fellowship Summit
The event included a panel discussion with Domagoj Babic, Kathryn McKinley, Nina Taft, Roy Want and Sunny Colsalvo about their unique career paths in academia and industry. 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 in smaller deep dives and a poster event.
Fellows share their work with Google researchers during the poster session
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 additionally like to announce the complete list of our 2017 Google PhD Fellows, including the latest recipients from China and East Asia, India, and Australia. We look forward to seeing each of them at next year’s summit!

2017 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
Sarah Webber, The University of Melbourne

Machine Learning
Aude Genevay, Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris
Dustin Tran, Columbia University
Jamie Hayes, University College London
Jin-Hwa Kim, Seoul National University
Ling Luo, The University of Sydney
Martin Arjovsky, New York University
Sayak Ray Chowdhury, Indian Institute of Science
Song Zuo, Tsinghua University
Taco Cohen, University of Amsterdam
Yuhuai Wu, University of Toronto
Yunhe Wang, Peking University
Yunye Gong, Cornell University

Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision
Avijit Dasgupta, International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad
Franziska Müller, Saarland University - Saarbrücken GSCS and Max Planck 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

Mobile Computing
Sangeun Oh, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Shuo Yang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Natural Language Processing
Bidisha Samanta, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
Ekaterina Vylomova, The University of Melbourne
Jianpeng Cheng, The University of Edinburgh
Kevin Clark, Stanford University
Meng Zhang, Tsinghua University
Preksha Nama, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
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, Algorithms and Software Engineering
Christoffer Quist Adamsen, Aarhus University
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
Samaneh Movassaghi, Australian National University

Announcing the 2017 Google PhD Fellows for North America, Europe and the Middle East

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 University
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

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:


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

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

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

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

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

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

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.