Announcing our Q2 Research Awards

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations

We’re excited to announce the latest round of Google Research Awards, our program which identifies and supports full-time faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest. From a record number of submissions, we are funding 75 awards across 18 different areas—a total of more than $4 million.

The areas that received the highest level of funding for this round were systems and infrastructure, human computer interaction, multimedia and security. We also continue to develop more collaborations internationally. In this round, 26 percent of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

Here are some examples from this round of awards:

• Jeremy Cooperstock, McGill University. A Spatialized Audio Map System for Mobile Blind Users (Geo/maps): A mobile audio system that provides location-based information, primarily for use by the blind and visually impaired communities.
• Alexander Pretschner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Towards Operational Privacy (Security and privacy): Provide a framework for precise semantic definitions in policies for domain-specific applications to give users a way to define the exact behaviour they expect from a system in application-specific contexts.
• Erik Brynjolfsson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Future of Prediction - How Google Searches Foreshadow Housing Prices and Quantities (Economics and market algortihms): How data from search engines like Google provide a highly accurate but simple way to predict future business activities.
• Stephen Pulman, Oxford University Computing Laboratory. Automatic Generation of Natural Language Descriptions of Visual Scenes (Natural language processing): Develop a system that automatically generates a description of a visual scene.
• Jennifer Rexford, Princeton. Rethinking Wide-Area Traffic Management (Software and hardware systems infrastructure): Drawing on mature techniques from optimization theory, design new traffic-management solutions where the hosts, routers, and management system cooperate in a more effective way.
• John Quinn, Makerere University, Uganda. Mobile Crop Surveillance in the Developing World (Multimedia search and audio/video processing): A computer vision system using camera-enabled mobile devices to monitor the spread of viral disease among staple crops.
• Allison Druin, University of Maryland. Understanding how Children Change as Searchers (Human-computer interaction): Do children change as searchers as they age? How do searchers typically shift between roles over time? If children change, how many of them become Power Searchers? If children don’t change, what roles do they typically demonstrate?
• Ronojoy Adhikari, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, India. Machine Learning of Syntax in Undeciphered Scripts (Machine learning): Devise algorithms that would learn to search for evidence of semantics in datasets such as the Indus script.

You can find the full list of this round’s award recipients here (pdf). More information on our research award program can be found on our website.