Google has announced the recipients of the Research Scholar Program. The program was introduced in March 2020 to support early-career professors pursuing research in fields relevant to Google. The inaugural call for proposals was opened in November.
The program has received a favourable response from researchers working in computer science, including machine learning, human-computer interaction, healthcare, systems and more.
In the first year of the program, Google granted 77 awards, which included 86 principal investigators from 15+ countries and over 50 universities. “Of the 86 award recipients, 43% identify as a historically marginalised group within technology,” the company stated.
The recipients were from across categories such as algorithms and optimisation, augmented reality, virtual reality, human-computer interaction, health research, machine learning and data mining, machine perception, networking, natural language processing, privacy, quantum computing, software engineering and programming languages, structured data, semantic graphs, database management and more.
Google has supported faculty research for the last 15 years under the Faculty Research Awards Program supporting technical research in areas such as computer science, engineering and related domains. It has so far funded over 2,000 academics at ~400 Universities in 50+ countries.
To support the broader research community, Google has introduced two new programs.
The Research Scholar Program supports early-career faculty — those who have received their doctorate within the past 7 years and are doing impactful research in fields relevant to Google. It aims to support new collaborations and encourage long-term relationships.
Google said these programs complement the existing support of academic research such as Latin America Research Awards, the PhD Fellowship Program, the Visiting Researcher Program and research grant funding.
Check out the full list of 2021 recipients here.
