Announcing the 2021 Research Scholar Program Recipients

In March 2020 we introduced the Research Scholar Program, an effort focused on developing collaborations with new professors and encouraging the formation of long-term relationships with the academic community. In November we opened the inaugural call for proposals for this program, which was received with enthusiastic interest from faculty who are working on cutting edge research across many research areas in computer science, including machine learning, human-computer interaction, health research, systems and more.

Today we are pleased to announce that in this first year of the program we have granted 77 awards, which included 86 principal investigators representing 15+ countries and over 50 universities. Of the 86 award recipients, 43% identify as an historically marginalized group within technology. Please see the full list of 2021 recipients on our web page, as well as in the list below.

We offer our congratulations to this year’s recipients, and look forward to seeing what they achieve!

Algorithms and Optimization

Alexandros Psomas, Purdue University
Auction Theory Beyond Independent, Quasi-Linear Bidders

Julian Shun, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Scalable Parallel Subgraph Finding and Peeling Algorithms

Mary Wootters, Stanford University
The Role of Redundancy in Algorithm Design

Pravesh K. Kothari, Carnegie Mellon University
Efficient Algorithms for Robust Machine Learning

Sepehr Assadi, Rutgers University
Graph Clustering at Scale via Improved Massively Parallel Algorithms

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Srinath Sridhar, Brown University
Perception and Generation of Interactive Objects

Geo

Miriam E. Marlier, University of California, Los Angeles
Mapping California’s Compound Climate Hazards in Google Earth Engine

Suining He, University of Connecticut
Fairness-Aware and Cross-Modality Traffic Learning and Predictive Modeling for Urban Smart Mobility Systems

Human Computer Interaction

Arvind Satyanarayan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Generating Semantically Rich Natural Language Captions for Data Visualizations to Promote Accessibility

Dina El-Zanfaly, Carnegie Mellon University
In-the-making: An intelligence mediated collaboration system for creative practices

Katharina Reinecke, University of Washington
Providing Science-Backed Answers to Health-related Questions in Google Search

Misha Sra, University of California, Santa Barbara
Hands-free Game Controller for Quadriplegic Individuals

Mohsen Mosleh, University of Exeter Business School
Effective Strategies to Debunk False Claims on Social Media: A large-scale digital field experiments approach

Tanushree Mitra, University of Washington
Supporting Scalable Value-Sensitive Fact-Checking through Human-AI Intelligence

Health Research

Catarina Barata, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa
DeepMutation – A CNN Model To Predict Genetic Mutations In Melanoma Patients

Emma Pierson, Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Institute, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and Cornell University
Using cell phone mobility data to reduce inequality and improve public health

Jasmine Jones, Berea College
Reachout: Co-Designing Social Connection Technologies for Isolated Young Adults

Mojtaba Golzan, University of Technology Sydney, Jack Phu, University of New South Wales
Autonomous Grading of Dynamic Blood Vessel Markers in the Eye using Deep Learning

Serena Yeung, Stanford University
Artificial Intelligence Analysis of Surgical Technique in the Operating Room

Machine Learning and Data Mining

Aravindan Vijayaraghavan, Northwestern University, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Carnegie Mellon University
Principled Approaches for Learning with Test-time Robustness

Cho-Jui Hsieh, University of California, Los Angeles
Scalability and Tunability for Neural Network Optimizers

Golnoosh Farnadi, University of Montreal, HEC Montreal/MILA
Addressing Algorithmic Fairness in Decision-focused Deep Learning

Harrie Oosterhuis, Radboud University
Search and Recommendation Systems that Learn from Diverse User Preferences

Jimmy Ba, University of Toronto
Model-based Reinforcement Learning with Causal World Models

Nadav Cohen, Tel-Aviv University
A Dynamical Theory of Deep Learning

Nihar Shah, Carnegie Mellon University
Addressing Unfairness in Distributed Human Decisions

Nima Fazeli, University of Michigan
Semi-Implicit Methods for Deformable Object Manipulation

Qingyao Ai, University of Utah
Metric-agnostic Ranking Optimization

Stefanie Jegelka, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Generalization of Graph Neural Networks under Distribution Shifts

Virginia Smith, Carnegie Mellon University
A Multi-Task Approach for Trustworthy Federated Learning

Mobile

Aruna Balasubramanian, State University of New York – Stony Brook
AccessWear: Ubiquitous Accessibility using Wearables

Tingjun Chen, Duke University
Machine Learning- and Optical-enabled Mobile Millimeter-Wave Networks

Machine Perception

Amir Patel, University of Cape Town
WildPose: 3D Animal Biomechanics in the Field using Multi-Sensor Data Fusion

Angjoo Kanazawa, University of California, Berkeley
Practical Volumetric Capture of People and Scenes

Emanuele Rodolà, Sapienza University of Rome
Fair Geometry: Toward Algorithmic Debiasing in Geometric Deep Learning

Minchen Wei, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Accurate Capture of Perceived Object Colors for Smart Phone Cameras

Mohsen Ali and Izza Aftab, Information Technology University of the Punjab, Pakistan
Is Economics From Afar Domain Generalizable?

Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Bridging Perspectives of Explainability and Adversarial Robustness

Xin Yu and Linchao Zhu, University of Technology Sydney
Sign Language Translation in the Wild

Networking

Aurojit Panda, New York University
Bertha: Network APIs for the Programmable Network Era

Cristina Klippel Dominicini, Instituto Federal do Espirito Santo
Polynomial Key-based Architecture for Source Routing in Network Fabrics

Noa Zilberman, University of Oxford
Exposing Vulnerabilities in Programmable Network Devices

Rachit Agarwal, Cornell University
Designing Datacenter Transport for Terabit Ethernet

Natural Language Processing

Danqi Chen, Princeton University
Improving Training and Inference Efficiency of NLP Models

Derry Tanti Wijaya, Boston University, Anietie Andy, University of Pennsylvania
Exploring the evolution of racial biases over time through framing analysis

Eunsol Choi, University of Texas at Austin
Answering Information Seeking Questions In The Wild

Kai-Wei Chang, University of California, Los Angeles
Certified Robustness to against language differences in Cross-Lingual Transfer

Mohohlo Samuel Tsoeu, University of Cape Town
Corpora collection and complete natural language processing of isiXhosa, Sesotho and South African Sign languages

Natalia Diaz Rodriguez, University of Granada (Spain) + ENSTA, Institut Polytechnique Paris, Inria. Lorenzo Baraldi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
SignNet: Towards democratizing content accessibility for the deaf by aligning multi-modal sign representations

Other Research Areas

John Dickerson, University of Maryland – College Park, Nicholas Mattei, Tulane University
Fairness and Diversity in Graduate Admissions

Mor Nitzan, Hebrew University
Learning representations of tissue design principles from single-cell data

Nikolai Matni, University of Pennsylvania
Robust Learning for Safe Control

Privacy

Foteini Baldimtsi, George Mason University
Improved Single-Use Anonymous Credentials with Private Metabit

Yu-Xiang Wang, University of California, Santa Barbara
Stronger, Better and More Accessible Differential Privacy with autodp

Quantum Computing

Ashok Ajoy, University of California, Berkeley
Accelerating NMR spectroscopy with a Quantum Computer

John Nichol, University of Rochester
Coherent spin-photon coupling

Jordi Tura i Brugués, Leiden University
RAGECLIQ - Randomness Generation with Certification via Limited Quantum Devices

Nathan Wiebe, University of Toronto
New Frameworks for Quantum Simulation and Machine Learning

Philipp Hauke, University of Trento
ProGauge: Protecting Gauge Symmetry in Quantum Hardware

Shruti Puri, Yale University
Surface Code Co-Design for Practical Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Structured Data, Extraction, Semantic Graph, and Database Management

Abolfazl Asudeh, University Of Illinois, Chicago
An end-to-end system for detecting cherry-picked trendlines

Eugene Wu, Columbia University
Interactive training data debugging for ML analytics

Jingbo Shang, University of California, San Diego
Structuring Massive Text Corpora via Extremely Weak Supervision

Security

Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup and Markus Wagner, University of Adelaide
Automatic Post-Quantum Cryptographic Code Generation and Optimization

Elette Boyle, IDC Herzliya, Israel
Cheaper Private Set Intersection via Advances in "Silent OT"

Joseph Bonneau, New York University
Zeroizing keys in secure messaging implementations

Yu Feng, University of California, Santa Barbara, Yuan Tian, University of Virginia
Exploit Generation Using Reinforcement Learning

Software engineering and Programming Languages

Kelly Blincoe, University of Auckland
Towards more inclusive software engineering practices to retain women in software engineering

Fredrik Kjolstad, Stanford University
Sparse Tensor Algebra Compilation to Domain-Specific Architectures

Milos Gligoric, University of Texas at Austin
Adaptive Regression Test Selection

Sarah E. Chasins, University of California, Berkeley
If you break it, you fix it: Synthesizing program transformations so that library maintainers can make breaking changes

Systems

Adwait Jog, College of William & Mary
Enabling Efficient Sharing of Emerging GPUs

Heiner Litz, University of California, Santa Cruz
Software Prefetching Irregular Memory Access Patterns

Malte Schwarzkopf, Brown University
Privacy-Compliant Web Services by Construction

Mehdi Saligane, University of Michigan
Autonomous generation of Open Source Analog & Mixed Signal IC

Nathan Beckmann, Carnegie Mellon University
Making Data Access Faster and Cheaper with Smarter Flash Caches

Yanjing Li, University of Chicago
Resilient Accelerators for Deep Learning Training Tasks