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.

Google Computational Journalism Research Awards launch in Europe

Posted by Andrea Held, Google University Relations & Matt Cooke, Google News Lab Europe

Journalism is evolving fast in the digital age, and researchers across Europe are working on exciting projects to create innovative new tools and open source software that will support online journalism and benefit readers. As part of the wider Google Digital News Initiative (DNI), we invited academic researchers across Europe to submit proposals for the Computational Journalism Research Awards.

After careful review by Google’s News Lab and Research teams, the following projects were selected:

SCAN: Systematic Content Analysis of User Comments for Journalists
Walid Maalej, Professor of Informatics, University of Hamburg
Wiebke Loosen, Senior Researcher for Journalism, Hans-Bredow-Institute, Hamburg, Germany
This project aims at developing a framework for the systematic, semi-automated analysis of audience feedback on journalistic content to better reflect the voice of users, mitigate the analysis efforts, and help journalists generate new content from the user comments.

Event Thread Extraction for Viewpoint Analysis
Ioana Manolescu, Senior Researcher, INRIA Saclay, France
Xavier Tannier, Professor of Computer Science, University Paris-Sud, France
The goal of the project is to automatically build topic "event threads" that will help journalists and citizens decode claims made by public figures, in order to distinguish between personal opinion, communication tools and voluntary distortions of the reality.

Computational Support for Creative Story Development by Journalists
Neil Maiden, Professor of Systems Engineering
George Brock, Professor of Journalism, City University London, UK
This project will develop a new software prototype to implement creative search strategies that journalists could use to strengthen investigative storytelling more efficiently than with current news content management and search tools.

We congratulate the recipients of these awards and we look forward to the results of their research. Each award includes funding of up to $60,000 in cash and $20,000 in computing credits on Google’s Cloud Platform. Stay tuned for updates on their progress.

Announcing the Google MOOC Focused Research Awards

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations, and Aimin Zhu, University Relations Manager, APAC

Last year, Google and Tsinghua University hosted the 2014 APAC MOOC Focused Faculty Workshop, an event designed to share, brainstorm and generate ideas aimed at fostering MOOC innovation. As a result of the ideas generated at the workshop, we solicited proposals from the attendees for research collaborations that would advance important topics in MOOC development.

After expert reviews and committee discussions, we are pleased to announce the following recipients of the MOOC Focused Research Awards. These awards cover research exploring new interactions to enhance learning experience, personalized learning, online community building, interoperability of online learning platforms and education accessibility:

• “MOOC Visual Analytics” - Michael Ginda, Indiana University, United States
• “Improvement of students’ interaction in MOOCs using participative networks” - Pedro A. Pernías Peco, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
• “Automated Analysis of MOOC Discussion Content to Support Personalised Learning” - Katrina Falkner, The University of Adelaide, Australia
• “Extending the Offline Capability of Spoken Tutorial Methodology” - Kannan Moudgalya, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India
• “Launching the Pan Pacific ISTP (Information Science and Technology Program) through MOOCs” - Yasushi Kodama, Hosei University, Japan
• “Fostering Engagement and Social Learning with Incentive Schemes and Gamification Elements in MOOCs” - Thomas Schildhauer, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Germany
• “Reusability Measurement and Social Community Analysis from MOOC Content Users” - Timothy K. Shih, National Central University, Taiwan

In order to further support these projects and foster collaboration, we have begun pairing the award recipients with Googlers pursuing online education research as well as product development teams.

Google is committed to supporting innovation in online learning at scale, and we congratulate the recipients of the MOOC Focused Research Awards. It is our belief that these collaborations will further develop the potential of online education, and we are very pleased to work with these researchers to jointly push the frontier of MOOCs.

Google Faculty Research Awards: Winter 2015

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

We have just completed another round of the Google Faculty Research Awards, our biannual open call for research proposals on Computer Science and related topics, including systems, machine perception, structured data, robotics, 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 808 proposals, an increase of 12% over last round, covering 55 countries on 6 continents. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 122 projects, with 20% of the funding awarded to universities outside the U.S. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were systems, human-computer interaction, and machine perception.

The Faculty Research Award program enables us to build strong relationships with faculty around the world who are pursuing innovative research, and plays an important role for Google’s Research organization by fostering an exchange of ideas that advances the state of the art. Each round, we receive proposals from faculty who may be just starting their careers, or who might be experimenting in new areas that help us look forward and innovate on what's emerging in the CS community.

Congratulations to the well-deserving recipients of this round’s awards. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is April 15), please visit our website for more information.

Little Box Challenge Academic Awards

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Last July, Google and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power Electronics Society (IEEE PELS) announced the Little Box Challenge, a competition designed to push the forefront of new technologies in the research and development of small, high power density inverters.

In parallel, we announced the Little Box Challenge award program designed to help support academics pursuing groundbreaking research in the area of increasing the power density for DC-­to­-AC power conversion. We received over 100 proposals and today we are proud to announce the following recipients of the academic awards:

Primary Academic Institution	Principal Investigator
University of Colorado Boulder	Khurram K. Afridi
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology	Huang-Jen Chiu
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid	José A. Cobos
Texas A&M University	Prasad Enjeti
ETH Zürich	Johann W. Kolar
University of Bristol	Neville McNeill
Case Western Reserve University	Timothy Peshek
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	Robert Pilawa-Podgurski
University of Stuttgart	Jörg Roth-Stielow
Queensland University of Technology	Geoff Walker

The recipients hail from many different parts of the world and were chosen based on their very strong and thoughtful entries dealing with all the issues raised in the request for proposals. Each of these researchers will receive approximately $30,000 US to support their research into high power density inverters, and are encouraged to use this work to attempt to win the $1,000,000 US grand prize for the Little Box Challenge.

There were many submissions beyond those chosen here that reviewers also considered to be very promising. We encourage all those who did not receive funding to still participate in the Little Box Challenge, and pursue improvements not only in power density, but also in the reliability, efficiency, safety, and cost of inverters (and of course, to attempt to win the grand prize!)

Call for Research Proposals to participate in the Open Web of Things Expedition

Posted Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Roy Want and Max Senges, Google Research

Imagine a world in which access to networked technology defies the constraints of desktops, laptops or smartphones. A future where we work seamlessly with connected systems, services, devices and “things” to support work practices, education, and daily interactions. While the Internet of Things (IoT) conjures a vision of “anytime, any place” connectivity for all things, the realization is complex given the need to work across interconnected and heterogeneous systems, and the special considerations needed for security, privacy, and safety.

Google is excited about the opportunities the IoT presents for future products and services. To further the development of open standards, facilitate ease of use, and ensure that privacy and security are fundamental values throughout the evolution of the field, we are in the process of establishing an open innovation and research program around the IoT. We plan to bring together a community of academics, Google experts and potentially other parties to pursue an open and shared mission in this area.

As a first step, we are announcing an open call for research proposals for the Open Web of Things:

• Researchers interested in the Expedition Lead Grant should build a team of PIs and put forward a proposal outlining a draft research roadmap both for their team(s), as well as how they propose to integrate related research that is implemented outside their labs (e.g., Individual Project Grants).
• For the Individual Project Grants we are seeking research proposals relating to the IoT in the following areas (1) user interface and application development, (2) privacy & security, and (3) systems & protocols research.

Importantly, we are open to new and unorthodox solutions in all three of these areas, for example, novel interactions, usable security models, and new approaches for open standards and evolution of protocols.

Additionally, to facilitate hands-on research supporting our mission driven research, we plan to provide participating faculty access to hardware, software and systems from Google. We look forward to your submission by January 21, 2015 and expect to select proposals early Spring. Selected PIs will be invited to participate in a kick-off workshop at Google shortly after.

Automatically making sense of data

Posted by Kevin Murphy, Research Scientist and David Harper, Head of University Relations, EMEA

While the availability and size of data sets across a wide range of sources, from medical to scientific to commercial, continues to grow, there are relatively few people trained in the statistical and machine learning methods required to test hypotheses, make predictions, and otherwise create interpretable knowledge from this data. But what if one could automatically discover human-interpretable trends in data in an unsupervised way, and then summarize these trends in textual and/or visual form?

To help make progress in this area, Professor Zoubin Ghahramani and his group at the University of Cambridge received a Google Focused Research Award in support of The Automatic Statistician project, which aims to build an "artificial intelligence for data science".

So far, the project has mostly been focussing on finding trends in time series data. For example, suppose we measure the levels of solar irradiance over time, as shown in this plot:This time series clearly exhibits several sources of variation: it is approximately periodic (with a period of about 11 years, known as the Schwabe cycle), but with notably low levels of activity in the late 1600s. It would be useful to automatically discover these kinds of regularities (as well as irregularities), to help further basic scientific understanding, as well as to help make more accurate forecasts in the future.

We can model such data using non-parametric statistical models based on Gaussian processes. Such methods require the specification of a kernel function which characterizes the nature of the underlying function that can accurately model the data (e.g., is it periodic? is it smooth? is it monotonic?). While the parameters of this kernel function are estimated from data, the form of the kernel itself is typically specified by hand, and relies on the knowledge and experience of a trained data scientist.

Prof Ghahramani's group has developed an algorithm that can automatically discover a good kernel, by searching through an open-ended space of sums and products of kernels as well as other compositional operations. After model selection and fitting, the Automatic Statistician translates each kernel into a text description describing the main trends in the data in an easy-to-understand form.

The compositional structure of the space of statistical models neatly maps onto compositionally constructed sentences allowing for the automatic description of the statistical models produced by any kernel. For example, in a product of kernels, one kernel can be mapped to a standard noun phrase (e.g. ‘a periodic function’) and the other kernels to appropriate modifiers of this noun phrase (e.g. ‘whose shape changes smoothly’, ‘with growing amplitude’). The end result is an automatically generated 5-15 page report describing the patterns in the data with figures and tables supporting the main claims. Here is an extract of the report produced by their system for the solar irradiance data:

Extract of the report for the solar irradiance data, automatically generated by the automatic statistician.

The Automatic Statistician is currently being generalized to find patterns in other kinds of data, such as multidimensional regression problems, and relational databases. A web-based demo of a simplified version of the system was launched in August 2014. It allowed a user to upload a dataset, and to receive an automatically produced analysis after a few minutes. An expanded version of the service will be launched in early 2015 (we will post details when available). We believe this will have many applications for anyone interested in Data Science.

Collaborative Mathematics with SageMathCloud and Google Cloud Platform

Posted by Craig Citro, Software Engineer

(cross-posted on the Google for Education blog and Google Cloud Platform blog)

Modern mathematics research is distinguished by its openness. The notion of "mathematical truth" depends on theorems being published with proof, letting the reader understand how new results build on the old, all the way down to basic mathematical axioms and definitions. These new results become tools to aid further progress.

Nowadays, many of these tools come either in the form of software or theorems whose proofs are supported by software. If new tools produce unexpected results, researchers must be able to collaborate and investigate how those results came about. Trusting software tools means being able to inspect and modify their source code. Moreover, open source tools can be modified and extended when research veers in new directions.

In an attempt to create an open source tool to satisfy these requirements, University of Washington Professor William Stein built SageMathCloud (or SMC). SMC is a robust, low-latency web application for collaboratively editing mathematical documents and code. This makes SMC a viable platform for mathematics research, as well as a powerful tool for teaching any mathematically-oriented course. SMC is built on top of standard open-source tools, including Python, LaTeX, and R. In 2013, William received a 2013 Google Research Award which provided Google Cloud Platform credits for SMC development. This allowed William to extend SMC to use Google Compute Engine as a hosting platform, achieving better scalability and global availability.

SMC allows users to interactively explore 3D graphics with only a browser

SMC has its roots in 2005, when William started the Sage project in an attempt to create a viable free and open source alternative to existing closed-source mathematical software. Rather than starting from scratch, Sage was built by making the best existing open-source mathematical software work together transparently and filling in any gaps in functionality.

During the first few years, Sage grew to have about 75K active users, while the developer community matured with well over 100 contributors to each new Sage release and about 500 developers contributing peer-reviewed code.

Inspired by Google Docs, William and his students built the first web-based interface to Sage in 2006, called The Sage Notebook. However, The Sage Notebook was designed for a small number of users and would work for a small group (such as a single class), but soon became difficult to maintain for larger groups, let alone the whole web.

As the growth of new users for Sage began to stall in 2010, due largely to installation complexity, William turned his attention to finding ways to expand Sage's availability to a broader audience. Based on his experience teaching his own courses with Sage, and feedback from others doing the same, William began building a new Web-hosted version of Sage that can scale to the next generation of users.

The result is SageMathCloud, a highly distributed multi-datacenter application that creates a viable way to do computational mathematics collaboratively online. SMC uses a wide variety of open source tools, from languages (CoffeeScript, node.js, and Python) to infrastructure-level components (especially Cassandra, ZFS, and bup) and a number of in-browser toolkits (such as CodeMirror and three.js).

Latency is critical for collaborative tools: like an online video game, everything in SMC is interactive. The initial versions of SMC were hosted at UW, at which point the distance between Seattle and far away continents was a significant issue, even for the fastest networks. The global coverage of Google Cloud Platform provides a low-latency connection to SMC users around the world that is both fast and stable. It's not uncommon for long-running research computations to last days, or even weeks -- and here the robustness of Google Compute Engine, with machines live-migrating during maintenance, is crucial. Without it, researchers would often face multiple restarts and delays, or would invest in engineering around the problem, taking time away from the core research.

SMC sees use across a number of areas, especially:

• Teaching: any course with a programming or math software component, where you want all your students to be able to use that component without dealing with the installation pain. Also, SMC allows students to easily share files, and even work together in realtime. There are dozens of courses using SMC right now.

• Collaborative Research: all co-authors of a paper can work together in an SMC project, both writing the paper there and doing research-level computations.

Since launching SMC in May 2013, there are already more than 20,000 monthly active users who've started using Sage via SMC. We look forward to seeing if SMC has an impact on the number of active users of Sage, and are excited to learn about the collaborative research and teaching that it makes possible.

Google Research Awards: Summer 2014

posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

We have just completed another round of the Google Research Awards, our biannual open call for proposals on computer science-related topics including systems, machine perception, structured data, robotics, 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 722 proposals, an increase of 5% over last round, covering 44 countries on 6 continents. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 110 projects. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were systems, human-computer interaction, mobile, and machine perception, with 22% of the funding awarded to universities outside the U.S.

We introduced three new topics this round, representing important new research areas for Google. Computational neuroscience looks at the information processing properties of the brain and nervous system. One funded proposal will study scene recognition in this context. A second new area is physical interactions with devices. With the introduction of new paradigms such as Google Glass, we can study how such devices expand our processing capabilities. The third new area is online learning at scale, which covers topics such as teacher-student interaction at scale, data-driven adaptive learning, and innovative assessment methods.

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.

Focus Areas for Policy & Standards Research Proposals

Posted by Vint Cerf, VP & Chief Internet Evangelist

Twice a year, Google’s Faculty Research Awards program seeks and reviews proposals in 23 research areas, assigning to each area a group of experienced Googlers who assess and deliberate over which proposals we should and can fund. With each call for proposals, we receive a wide array of research ideas in fields that fall within the realm of Internet policy.

We would like to share with you the areas of Internet policy in which we are particularly interested to see progress and stimulate further research:

• Accessibility: Google is committed to supporting research that generates insights about what helps make technology a usable reality for everyone, regardless of cognitive, physical, sensory, or other form of impairment.
• Access: What policies help bring open, robust, competitive and affordable Internet access to everyone in the world? What are the economic and social impacts of improved Internet access? In particular, what are the emerging impacts of gigabit access networks?
• Intellectual property (IP) in the digital era: The growth of digital industries has meant that IP law is an increasingly important policy tool governing innovation and economic growth. We would like to better understand how IP legislation can enable new technologies, and what effect different national or regional IP regimes have on innovation, such as the effect of patent litigation on invention, and how copyright exceptions affect the creation of online technologies.
• Freedom of Expression: As an advocate of freedom of expression on the Internet, Google is interested in research that produces insights into how discourse and expression in the global online (public) sphere happens, and how stakeholders best allow freedom of expression, balance it with other rights and resolve conflicts or interest/disputes.
• Internet Governance: The Internet is a universal space that many expect to remain open, free, and borderless. Multiple stakeholders (internet companies, governments and civil society) work together to design the governance practices and institutions to maintain order and innovation in the global Internet ecosystem. We are interested in supporting top researchers who analyze and contribute insights into which practices and institutional structures work and which don’t.
• Open Standards and Interoperability: Open Standards and interoperability of services are at the core of the Internet’s successful international propagation and usefulness. Google is interested in research that contributes analysis and best practices for standardization and interoperability. Among them we see resource management, access control and authorities for the Internet of Things, as well as questions regarding convergence and security. Also, cloud computing and storage could benefit from open standards that enable interoperability.

Additionally, there are several important research areas like Privacy, Economics and market algorithms, and Security, which have a significant policy component but are dealt with as research topics distinct from policy & standards.

Researchers who are interested in applying for a Faculty Research Award can do so twice a year following the instructions laid out on the Google Faculty Research Awards website. Additional information about Internet Policy research support from Google, including the Google Policy Fellowship program, can be found in the recent post on the Google Europe Blog.

We look forward to your proposals.

Academics and the Little Box Challenge

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Think shrink! Min it to win it! Smaller is baller! That's what the Little Box Challenge is all about: developing a high power density inverter. It’s a competition presented by Google and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power Electronics Society (IEEE PELS) -- not only a grand engineering challenge, but your chance to make a big impact on the future of renewables and electricity.

With the rise of solar photovoltaic panels, electric vehicles (EV) and large format batteries, we’ve seen a resurgence in the over-a-century-long feud between Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC) and Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC). The electric grid and most higher power household and commercial devices use AC; batteries, photovoltaics, and electric vehicles work in DC. So the power electronics that convert between the two -- rectifiers (AC->DC), and inverters (DC->AC) -- are also gaining increased prominence, as well as the DC/DC and AC/AC converters that switch between different voltages or frequencies.

While different flavors of these devices have been around for well over a century, some of them are starting to show their age and limitations versus newer technologies. For example, conventional string inverters have power densities around 0.5-3 Watts/Inch³, and microinverters around 5 Watts/Inch³ -- but lithium ion batteries can now get 4-10 Watt Hours/Inch³. So for a 1-2 hour battery pack, your inverter could end up being bigger than your battery -- a lot to carry around.

Some recent advances may change what’s possible in power electronics. For example, Wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductors -- such as gallium-nitride (GaN) and silicon-carbide (SiC) -- not only enable higher power densities than conventional silicon-based devices do, but can also convert between DC and AC at higher temperatures, using higher switching frequencies, and with greater efficiency.

But even WBG materials and other new technologies for power electronics run into limits on the power density of inverters. Photovoltaic power and batteries suffer when they see oscillations on their power output and thus require some form of energy storage -- electrolytic capacitors store that energy and bridge the power differential between the DC input and the AC output, but that makes the devices much larger. Household and consumer devices also need to add filters to prevent electromagnetic interference, so that’s even more bulk.

When it comes to shrinking these devices, inverters may have the most potential. And because inverters are so common in household applications, we hope The Little Box Challenge may lead to improvements not only in power density, but also in reliability, efficiency, safety, and cost. Furthermore, it is our hope that some of these advances can also improve the other types of power electronics listed above. If these devices can be made very small, reliable and inexpensive, we could see all kinds of useful applications to the electric grid, consumer devices and beyond, maybe including some we have yet to imagine.

To recognize the role academics have played in pushing the forefront of new technologies, Google has taken a couple of special steps to help them participate:

• Research at Google will provide unrestricted gifts to to academics pursuing the prize. This funding can be used for research equipment and to support students. Visit the Little Box Challenge awards for academics page for more info -- proposals are due September 30, 2014.

• Academics often have trouble getting the latest technology from device manufacturers to tinker on. So Google has reached out to a number of WBG manufacturers who’ve put up dedicated pages detailing their devices. Check out the Little Box Challenge site to get started.

We hope you’ll consider entering, and please tell your colleagues, professors, students and dreamers -- you can print and post these posters on your campus to spread the word.

Google Research Awards: Winter 2014

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations

We have just completed another round of the Google Research Awards, our biannual open call for proposals on computer science-related topics including robotics, natural language processing, systems, policy, 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 691 proposals, an increase of 19% over last round, covering 46 countries on 6 continents. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 115 projects. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were human-computer interaction, systems, and machine learning, with 25% of the funding awarded to universities outside the U.S.

We set a new record this round with over 2000 reviews done by 650 reviewers. Each proposal is reviewed by internal committees who provide feedback on merit and relevance. In many cases, the committees include some of the foremost experts in the world. All committee members are volunteers who spend a significant amount of time making the Research Award program happen twice a year.

Congratulations to the well-deserving recipients of this round’s awards. If you are interested in applying for the next round (deadline is April 15), please visit our website for more information.

Google Research Awards: Summer 2013

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations

Another round of the Google Research Awards is complete. This is our biannual open call for proposals on computer science-related topics including machine learning and structured data, policy, human computer interaction, and geo/maps. Our grants cover tuition for a graduate student and provide both faculty and students the opportunity to work directly with Google scientists and engineers.

This round, we received 550 proposals from 50 countries. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we decided to fund 105 projects. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were human-computer interaction, systems and machine learning. In addition, 19% of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

We noticed some new areas emerging in this round of proposals. In particular, an increase of interest in neural networks, accessibility-related projects, and some innovative ideas in robotics. One project features the use of Android-based multi-robot systems which are significantly more complex than single robot systems. Faculty researchers are looking to explore novel uses of Google Glass such as an indoor navigation system for blind users, and how Glass can facilitate social interactions.

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.