Highlights from the 2018 Google PhD Fellowship Summit

Posted by Susie Kim, Program Manager, University Relations

Google created the PhD Fellowship Program to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in Computer Science and related disciplines. This program provides a unique opportunity for students pursuing a graduate degree in Computer Science (or related field) who seek to influence the future of technology. Now in its tenth year, our Fellowships have helped support close to 400 graduate students globally in Australia, China and East Asia, India, North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the most recent region to award Google Fellowships.

Every year, Google PhD Fellows are invited to our global PhD Fellowship Summit where they are exposed to state-of-the-art research pursued across Google, and are given the opportunity to network with Google’s research community as well as other PhD Fellows from around the world. Below we share some highlights from our most recent summit, and also announce the newest recipients.

Summit Highlights
At this year’s annual Global PhD Fellowship Summit, Fellows from around the world converged on our Mountain View campus for two days of talks, focused discussions, sharing research work, and networking. VP of Education and University Programs Maggie Johnson welcomed the Fellows and presented Google's approach to research and its various outreach efforts that encourage collaboration with academia. The agenda also included talks on a range of topics, starting with an opening keynote from Principal Scientist Maya Gupta on controlling machine learning models with constraints and goals to make them do what you want, followed by researchers Andrew Tomkins, Rahul Sukthankar, Sai Teja Peddinti, Amin Vahdat, Martin Stumpe, Ed Chi and Ciera Jaspan giving talks from a variety of research perspectives. A closing presentation was given by Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow and SVP of Google AI, who spoke about using deep learning to solve a variety of challenging research problems at Google.

Starting clockwise from top left: Researchers Rahul Sukthankar and Ed Chi talking with Fellow attendees; Jeff Dean delivering the closing talk; Poster session in full swing.

Fellows had the chance to connect with each other and Google researchers to discuss their work during a poster event, as well as receive feedback from leaders in their fields in smaller deep dives. A panel discussion comprised of Fellow alumni, 2 from academia and 2 from Google, provided both perspectives on career paths.

Google Fellows attending the 2018 PhD Fellowship Summit.

The Complete List of 2018 Google PhD Fellows
We believe that the Google PhD Fellows represent some of the best and brightest young researchers around the globe in Computer Science, and it is our ongoing goal to support them as they make their mark on the world. As such, we would like to announce the latest recipients from China and East Asia, India, Australia and Africa, who join the North America, Europe and Middle East Fellows we announced last April. Congratulations to all of this year’s awardees! The complete list of recipients is:

Algorithms, Optimizations and Markets
Emmanouil Zampetakis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Manuela Fischer, ETH Zurich
Pranjal Dutta, Chennai Mathematical Institute
Thodoris Lykouris, Cornell University
Yuan Deng, Duke University

Computational Neuroscience
Ella Batty, Columbia University
Neha Spenta Wadia, University of California - Berkeley
Reuben Feinman, New York University

Human Computer Interaction
Gierad Laput, Carnegie Mellon University
Mike Schaekermann, University of Waterloo
Minsuk (Brian) Kahng, Georgia Institute of Technology
Niels van Berkel, The University of Melbourne
Siqi Wu, Australian National University
Xiang Zhang, The University of New South Wales

Machine Learning
Abhijeet Awasthi, Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay
Aditi Raghunathan, Stanford University
Futoshi Futami, University of Tokyo
Lin Chen, Yale University
Qian Yu, University of Southern California
Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Hebrew University
Shuai Li, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shuang Liu, University of California - San Diego
Stephen Tu, University of California - Berkeley
Steven James, University of the Witwatersrand
Xinchen Yan, University of Michigan
Zelda Mariet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Machine Perception, Speech Technology and Computer Vision
Antoine Miech, INRIA
Arsha Nagrani, University of Oxford
Arulkumar S, Indian Institute of Technology - Madras
Joseph Redmon, University of Washington
Raymond Yeh, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Shanmukha Ramakrishna Vedantam, Georgia Institute of Technology

Mobile Computing
Lili Wei, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
Rizanne Elbakly, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology
Shilin Zhu, University of California - San Diego

Natural Language Processing
Anne Cocos, University of Pennsylvania
Hongwei Wang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Jonathan Herzig, Tel Aviv University
Rotem Dror, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Shikhar Vashishth, Indian Institute of Science - Bangalore
Yang Liu, University of Edinburgh
Yoon Kim, Harvard University
Zhehuai Chen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Imane khaouja, Université Internationale de Rabat

Privacy and Security
Aayush Jain, University of California - Los Angeles

Programming Technology and Software Engineering
Gowtham Kaki, Purdue University
Joseph Benedict Nyansiro, University of Dar es Salaam
Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, University of California - Irvine
Victor Lanvin, Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris

Quantum Computing
Erika Ye, California Institute of Technology

Structured Data and Database Management
Lingjiao Chen, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Systems and Networking
Andrea Lattuada, ETH Zurich
Chen Sun, Tsinghua University
Lana Josipovic, EPFL
Michael Schaarschmidt, University of Cambridge
Rachee Singh, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Stephen Mallon, The University of Sydney