We recently concluded our annual edition of the Google India AI/ML Research Awards, a program focussed on supporting exceptional AI research in India. We also want to identify and strengthen long-term collaborative relationships with faculty working on problems that will impact how future generations use technology.
This year we received over a hundred proposals across various fields of AI. We also received several proposals working to advance the use of AI for Social Good. All proposals went through an extensive review process involving expert reviewers across Google who assessed the proposals on merit, innovation, connection to Google's research efforts and alignment with our overall research philosophy and AI Principles.
As a result, we are happy to announce our support for five faculty members who are working to advance foundational and applied research to advance the state-of-the-art in AI across a wide range of research areas including Algorithms & Theory, Computer Vision, Natural Language Understanding and Privacy & Security.
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Arpita Patra, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science is working on moulding the use of Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) techniques to advance Machine Learning that preserves the privacy of the user, which can be tuned to real-world problems in the social good space, such as medical diagnosis systems, disparity against women, and fake news detection.
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Anirban Dasgupta, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar is working on developing randomized approximation algorithms for numerical tensor algebra that strike a balance by being practically useful as well as by being equipped with theoretical guarantees. He also aims to develop such algorithms for applications such as streaming and large-scale social networks.
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Pawan Goyal, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur is developing ways to build conceptual understanding of natural language in AI Dialogue Systems. His work aims at developing dialog systems that can learn underlying concepts and perform commonsense reasoning to help AI systems in conversations.
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Soma Biswas, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science is working on making AI systems more robust by fundamentally advancing how deep learning algorithms recognize and directly provide information on what groups of data the system does not know much about . This work has widespread applications in image classification, detection, segmentation, etc.
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Vasudeva Verma, Professor at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad is advancing his work on 'Project ANGEL', an initiative aimed at utilizing machine learning techniques for enhancing the well-being of teenagers, especially teenage girls. He intends to develop a cohesive technology stack (including prior work on Building on hate speech detection, sexism classification), through multi-disciplinary research for helping teenagers in an empathetic, proactive manner.
In the past we have supported various faculty members, including Sunita Sarawagi, working on continuously trainable learning systems with applications in grammar error correction and translation. Our past awardee, Rijurekha Sen worked on developing low-cost, scalable measurement frameworks for real time monitoring of road traffic congestion and particulate matter in the air.
We remain committed to investing in the development of the Research ecosystem in India through various research grant-based and education programs, and continue to pursue cutting-edge research at Google Research India: an AI lab in Bangalore. More information about our program can be found here.
Posted by Ashwani Sharma, Head of Research Operations and University Relations, Google Research India, and Divy Thakkar, Research and Education Program Manager