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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