Computer Scientists Receive Inaugural Google Research Awards

Two assistant professors of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, Kai-Wei Chang and Cho-Jui Hsieh, have each received a $60,000 award from Google’s newly launched Research Scholar Program.

Google announced in April the first cohort of 86 recipients, representing more than 50 universities in 15 countries. The program was created to support early-career faculty working on cutting-edge research across many areas in computer science, including machine learning, human-computer interaction, health research and others.

Chang, whose research is at the nexus of natural language processing and machine learning, will explore certified robustness against language differences in cross-lingual transfer.

Hsieh, who focuses on developing new algorithms for large-scale machine-learning problems, received the award for proposed research on scalability and tunability for neural network optimizers.

Another UCLA faculty, Miriam Marlier, also was chosen to receive the award. An assistant professor of global environmental change at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Marlier will focus on mapping California’s compound climate hazards in the Google Earth engine.