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Google Resarch Awards

At Google, we are committed to helping develop new technologies that will help our users find and use information. While we do significant in-house engineering, we also maintain strong ties with academic institutions that are doing world-class research in areas such as information retrieval, artificial intelligence, and systems. As part of our mission to develop the most advanced and usable methods for information access, we have developed the Google Research Awards program to provide funding support to researchers at academic institutions working on problems relevant to Google's mission.

What are Google Research Awards?

Awards through this program are typically either monetary awards (in the range from $5K-$150K) and/or potential access to anonymized data for research purposes. The awards are intended to help promote and support academic research aimed at improving information access defined broadly. Areas that are of particular interest include (but are not limited to):

information retrieval, extraction, and organization
multi-media search
search engine design and evaluation
machine learning and data mining
personalization
operating systems and distributed systems
file system design
text and natural language processing (e.g., parsing, machine translation, etc.)
user interfaces
algorithms

Participants in the award program are expected to have a primary contact at Google through which they can discuss research directions, provide updates on progress, engage in knowledge transfer, etc. Google maintains an academic environment that we would like award recipients to participate in by giving talks on their work and engaging in discussions with our research group. By sharing new ideas and key insights we hope that both Google and award recipients can mutually benefit from the program. Generally, we will invite the writers of promising award proposals to come to our Mountain View offices to discuss their research further with researchers here. After the research is completed, we will once again invite the award recipient to Google to discuss the results of their work. The purpose of this program is both to facilitate more interaction between Google and academia and also develop a strong relationship and partnership with universities.

Applying for Google Research Awards

To initiate the process of applying for a Google research award, please send an email with the following information to research-awards @google.com:

a short write-up (2 page maximum) outlining some of the particular research projects you would like to pursue with an award
a brief (one or two paragraph) explanation of the amount of the award, how an award from Google might help with this line of work, including a general explanation of how the funding would be used and the duration of time over which it would be spent.
a current CV from the principal investigator(s) of the research

All award requests will be reviewed by our research group and especially promising candidates selected for further consideration. In many cases, we will work to identify a liaison from Google to the research project that receives an award just to provide a regular point of contact. Our aim is to keep the award process light-weight enough so that the research investigators can be supported in their work without being burdened by formality or specific requirements. We think your time is best spent on research, not on paperwork!

Interested in finding out more?

We're always striving to innovate new technologies to improve information access, and we're working with the academic community to help develop and utilize ground-breaking work. To that end, we are looking to support work that will make Google even better in the future, and we would love to work with you to make that happen. Google provides a great combination of interesting research problems, a wealth of data, and the chance to deploy research in a forum that will be used by millions of people and make a real difference in the world everyday.

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Research Awards