Four UCLA Samueli School of Engineering faculty members have received 2019-2020 Google Faculty Research Awards for their technical research in computer science and engineering.
The highly competitive awards program — only 15% of applicants receive funding after a rigorous review — identifies and supports faculty pursuing innovative research in areas of interest to Google. The award is structured as an unrestricted gift, designed to support the cost of one graduate student for a year.
Machine learning and data mining
Suhas Diggavi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been recognized for his work in machine learning and data mining.
His Information Theory and Systems Laboratory focuses on exploring information theory and its applications for wireless and sensor networks, network data compression and storage, network secrecy, machine learning and large scale data analysis algorithms.
Machine perception
Achuta Kadambi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been recognized for his work in machine perception.
His Visual Machines Group gives sight to machines. Kadambi’s research team is building computational imaging systems that tightly couple computer algorithms and imaging hardware to potentially build superhuman robotics.
Mobile
Ravi Netravali, an assistant professor of computer science, has been recognized for his work in the mobile space.
His research interests lie in systems and networking, and his recent work focused on building practical systems to improve the performance and debugging of large-scale distributed applications for both users and developers.
Security
Rafail Ostrovsky, a professor of computer science and mathematics, has been recognized for his work in security. He focuses on all aspects of computational theory, especially in cryptography, network algorithms, and search and classification of large-scale, high-dimensional data.
He is director of UCLA’s Center for Information and Computation Security, which investigates techniques and solutions for securing both national and private sector information infrastructures.
According to Google’s website, the research awards facilitate interaction between Google and academia, and support projects whose results will be accessible to the wider research community.