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)

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2013 Google PhD Fellowships 5 Years of Supporting the Future of Computer Science

Posted by Michael Rennaker, Google University Relations

We are extremely excited to announce the 2013 Global Google PhD Fellows. From all around the globe, these 39 PhD students represent the fifth class in the program’s history, a select group recognized by Google researchers and their institutions as some of the most promising young academics in the world. As we welcome the newest class of PhD Fellows, we take a look back at the program’s roots and hear from two past recipients.

In 2009, Google launched its PhD Fellowship Program, created to recognize and support outstanding graduate students pursuing work in computer science, related disciplines or promising research areas. In its inaugural year, 13 United States PhD students were awarded fellowships, drawn from an extremely competitive pool of applicants. The global program now covers Europe, China, India and Australia and continues to draw some of the best young researchers, reflecting Google’s commitment to building strong relations with the academic community.

Among those first recipients of the fellowship award are 2009 PhD Fellow Roxana Geambasu, Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, and 2010 European Doctoral Fellow Roland Angst, Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University and affiliated with the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication. As early recipients of the award, Roxana and Roland reflect on the impact that the Google Fellowship program had on their careers.

For Roxana, the fellowship provided the tools and connections that helped lay the foundation for her academic career. She believes industrial fellowship programs are very important, as they give students an opportunity to interact more closely with industry.

“Beyond the financial support, I think that the fellowship impacted my career in many important ways. First, the Google fellowships are regarded as highly competitive, so receiving the award was probably a big plus on my resume when I was interviewing for faculty positions.”

“Second, the award yielded a mentor within Google, Brad Chen, with whom Ive kept in touch ever since, as well as opportunities to visit the campus, deliver talks and meet Google engineers. Brad and I continue to meet at conferences and discuss my work, his work and (of late) the work of my students; it’s through that relationship I’m exposed to new people from Google and gain valuable advice about faculty award opportunities.”

Roland Angst credits the award with the ability to lighten his teaching load and instead focus on his research, which ultimately prepared him for his future academic career. Like Roxanna, Roland states that the fellowship also gave him the opportunity to establish connections with people working in related topics in industry.

“In my view, programs such as the Google Fellowship Awards represent an important and integral link between industry and universities. Firstly, such programs increase the awareness in the academic world for relevant problems in industry. Secondly, these programs allow the IT industry to express their gratitude to the educational services provided by the universities on which the IT industry heavily relies on."

We welcome the latest recipients of the Global Google PhD Fellowships for 2013 with great excitement and high expectations. Recognized for their incredible innovation, creativity and leadership, we are very happy to support these excellent PhD students and offer our sincere congratulations.

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2014 Google PhD Fellowships Supporting the Future of Computer Science

Posted by David Harper, Google University Relations & Beate List, Google Research Programs


Nurturing and maintaining strong relations with the academic community is a top priority at Google. Today, we’re announcing the 2014 Google PhD Fellowship recipients. These students, recognized for their incredible creativity, knowledge and skills, represent some of the most outstanding graduate researchers in computer science across the globe. We’re excited to support them, and we extend our warmest congratulations.

The Google PhD Fellowship program supports PhD students in computer science or closely related fields and reflects our commitment to building strong relations with the global academic community. Now in its sixth year, the program covers North America, Europe, China, India and Australia. To date we’ve awarded 193 Fellowships in 72 universities across 17 countries.

As we welcome the 2014 PhD Fellows, we hear from two past recipients, Cynthia Liem and Ian Goodfellow. Cynthia studies at the Delft University of Technology, and was awarded a Fellowship in Multimedia. Ian is about to complete his PhD at the Université de Montréal in Québec, and was awarded a Fellowship in Deep Learning. Recently interviewed on the Google Student blog, they expressed their views on how the Fellowship affected their careers.

Cynthia has combined her dual passions of music and computing to pursue a PhD in music information retrieval. She speaks about the fellowship and her links with Google:

“Through the Google European Doctoral Fellowship, I was assigned a Google mentor who works on topics related to my PhD interests. In my case, this was Dr. Douglas Eck in Mountain View, who is part of Google Research and leads a team focusing on music recommendation. Doug has been encouraging me in several of my academic activities, most notably the initiation of the ACM MIRUM Workshop, which managed to successfully bring music retrieval into the spotlight of the prestigious ACM Multimedia conference.”

Ian is about to start as a research scientist on Jeff Dean’s deep learning infrastructure team. He was also an intern at Google, and contributed to the development of a neural network capable of transcribing the address numbers on houses from Google Street View photos. He describes the connection between this intern project and his PhD study supported by the Fellowship:

“The project I worked on during my internship was the basis for a publication at the International Conference on Learning Representations …. my advisor let me include this paper in my PhD thesis since there was a close connection to the subject area.… I can show that some of the work developed early in the thesis has had a real impact.“

We’re proud to have supported Cynthia, Ian, and all the other recipients of the Google PhD Fellowship. We continue to look forward to working with, and learning from, the academic community with great excitement and high expectations.

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Announcing the 2015 North American Google 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 work in Computer Science (CS) and related disciplines. In that time we’ve seen past recipients add depth and breadth to CS by developing new ideas and research directions, from building new intelligence models to changing the way in which we interact with computers to advancing into faculty positions, where they go on to train the next generation of researchers.

Reflecting our continuing commitment to building strong relations with the global academic community, we are excited to announce the latest North American Google PhD Fellows. The following 15 fellowship recipients were chosen from a highly competitive group, and represent the outstanding quality of nominees provided by our university partners:

• Justin Meza, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Systems Reliability (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Waleed Ammar, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Natural Language Processing (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Aaron Parks, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Mobile Networking (University of Washington)
• Kyle Rector, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Human Computer Interaction (University of Washington)
• Nick Arnosti, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Market Algorithms (Stanford University)
• Osbert Bastani, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Programming Languages (Stanford University)
• Carl Vondrick, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Machine Perception, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Wojciech Zaremba, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Machine Learning (New York University)
• Xiaolan Wang, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Structured Data (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
• Muhammad Naveed, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Security (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Masoud Moshref Javadi, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Computer Networking (University of Southern California)
• Riley Spahn, Google US/CanadaFellowship in Privacy (Columbia University)
• Saurabh Gupta, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Computer Vision (University of California, Berkeley)
• Yun Teng, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Computer Graphics (University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Tan Zhang, Google US/Canada Fellowship in Mobile Systems (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

This group of students represent the next generation of researchers who endeavor to solve some of the most interesting challenges in Computer Science. We offer our congratulations, and look forward to their future contributions to the research community with high expectations.

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