The best and the brightest

Posted by Leslie Yeh Johnson, Google University Relations

[Also posted on the Official Google Blog]

I can't think of a better environment than academia for asking hard questions and trying to solve the unsolvable. It's at universities that graduate students perform some of the most exciting and game-changing research in computer science and technology. These university labs foster the students that are going to be the next innovators and leaders in research.

We started the Google Fellowship Program this year to support graduate students in their quest to discover and achieve great things. Our goal was to find the best and brightest PhD students and award them a unique fellowship that highlights their contributions to research and supports them through their graduate studies. Several top universities submitted their students for consideration by research scientists, distinguished engineers and executives at Google. The breadth of research covered by these students and the scope of their vision was astounding. Learning about them was exciting; choosing from among them was truly difficult.

After careful review, we are proud to announce the 2009 Google Fellowship recipients:

• Roxana Geambasu, Google Fellowship in Cloud Computing (University of Washington)
• Michael Piatek, Google Fellowship in Computer Networking (University of Washington)
• David Sontag, Google Fellowship in Machine Learning (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Ali Farhadi, Google Fellowship in Computer Vision Image Interpretation (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Nicholas Chen, Google Fellowship in Human-Computer Interaction (University of Maryland)
• Siddhartha Sen, Google Fellowship in Fault Tolerant Computing (Princeton University)
• Ryan Peterson, Google Fellowship in Distributed Systems (Cornell University)
• Eric Gilbert, Google Fellowship in Social Computing (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Micha Elsner, Google Fellowship in Natural Language Processing (Brown University)
• Subhransu Maji, Google Fellowship in Computer Vision Object Recognition (University of California, Berkeley)
• Nicolas Lambert, Google Fellowship in Market Algorithms (Stanford University)
• Han Liu, Google Fellowship in Statistics (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Lixia Liu, Google Fellowship in Compiler Technology (Purdue University)

These students exemplify excellence in all areas, and we look forward to the impact that they are sure to have on their fields and the world. The Google Fellowship will provide them with funding to cover their tuition and expenses, plus an Android-powered phone and a Google mentor. Our sincere congratulations to all of them!