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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Announcing the 2015 Google European Doctoral Fellows

Posted by David Harper, University Relations and Beate List, Research Programs

In 2009, Google created the PhD Fellowship program to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in Computer Science and related disciplines. The following year, we launched the program in Europe as the Google European Doctoral Fellowship program. Alumni of the European program occupy a variety of positions including faculty positions (Ofer Meshi, Cynthia Liem), academic research positions (Roland Angst, Carola Doerr née Winzen) and positions in industry (Yair Adato, Peter Hosek, Neil Houlsby).

Reflecting our continuing commitment to building strong relations with the European academic community, we are delighted to announce the 2015 Google European Doctoral Fellows. The following fifteen fellowship recipients were selected from an outstanding set of PhD students nominated by our partner universities:

• Heike Adel, Fellowship in Natural Language Processing (University of Munich)
• Thang Bui, Fellowship in Speech Technology (University of Cambridge)
• Victoria Caparrós Cabezas, Fellowship in Distributed Systems (ETH Zurich)
• Nadav Cohen, Fellowship in Machine Learning (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
• Josip Djolonga, Fellowship in Probabilistic Inference (ETH Zurich)
• Jakob Julian Engel, Fellowship in Computer Vision (Technische Universität München)
• Nikola Gvozdiev, Fellowship in Computer Networking (University College London)
• Felix Hill, Fellowship in Language Understanding (University of Cambridge)
• Durk Kingma, Fellowship in Deep Learning (University of Amsterdam)
• Massimo Nicosia, Fellowship in Statistical Natural Language Processing (University of Trento)
• George Prekas, Fellowship in Operating Systems (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
• Roman Prutkin, Fellowship in Graph Algorithms (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
• Siva Reddy, Fellowship in Multilingual Semantic Parsing (The University of Edinburgh)
• Immanuel Trummer, Fellowship in Structured Data Analysis (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
• Margarita Vald, Fellowship in Security (Tel Aviv University)

This group of students represent the next generation of researchers who will 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 expectation.

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Computer Science Teaching Fellows Starting Up in Charleston SC

Posted by Cameron Fadjo, Program Lead, Computer Science Teaching Fellows

Google recently started up an exciting new program to ignite interest in computer science (CS) for K12 kids. Located in our South Carolina data center, the Computer Science Teaching Fellows is a two-year post graduate fellowship for new STEM teachers and CS graduates. The goal is to bring computer science and computational thinking to all children, especially underrepresented minorities and girls, and close the gap between the ever-increasing demand in CS and the inadequate supply. We hope to learn what really works and scale those best practices regionally and then nationally.

The supply of CS majors in the pipeline has been a concern for many years. In 2007, the Computer Science education community was alarmed by the lack of CS majors and enrollments in US colleges and universities.

Source: 2009-2010 CRA Taulbee Survey (http://www.cra.org/resources/)

This prompted the development of several programs and activities to start raising awareness about the demand and opportunities for computer scientists, and to spark the interest of K12 students in CS. For example, the NSF funded curriculum and professional development around the new CS Principles Advanced Placement course. The CSTA published standards for K12 CS and a report on the limited extent to which schools, districts and states provide CS instruction to their students. CS advocacy groups, Computing in the Core and Code.org have played an instrumental role in adding provisions to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act to support CS education. More generally, we have seen innovations in online learning with MOOCs, machine learning to provide personalized learning experiences, and platforms like Khan Academy that allow flipped classrooms.

All of these activities represent a convergence in the CS education space, where existing programs are ready for scale, and technological advancements can support that scale in innovative ways. Our Teaching Fellows will be testing after school programs, classroom curriculum and online CS programs to determine what works and why. They’ll start in the local Charleston area and then spread the best programs and curriculum to South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina (where we also have large data centers). They are currently preparing programs for the fall semester.

We are very excited about the convergence we are seeing in CS education and the potential to bring many more kids into a field that offers not only great career opportunities but also a shot at really making a difference in the world. We’ll keep you posted on the progress of our Teaching Fellows.

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