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Google is now accepting applications its Research Awards 2013. The Google Research Awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world. Faculty members can apply for Google Research Awards by submitting a proposal to one of their two 2013 funding rounds. Recipients are selected through a comprehensive internal review process and notified of their awards within 4 months of the initial submission.

Value of Award

• Faculty members can apply for up to 150,000 USD in eligible expenses, but actual award amounts are frequently less than the full amount requested.
•  Most awards are funded at the amount needed to support basic expenses for one graduate student for one year.
• The intent of the Google Research Awards is to support cutting-edge research in Computer Science, Engineering, and related fields.

Applicants are to categorize their proposals into one of the following broad research areas of interest to Google:

• Economics and market algorithms
• Geo/maps
• Human-computer interaction
• Information retrieval, extraction, and organization
• Machine learning and data mining
• Machine perception
• Machine translation
• Mobile
• Natural language processing
• Networking
• Policy and standards
• Privacy
• Security
• Social networks
• Software engineering
• Speech
• Structured data and database management
• Systems (hardware and software)

Each funded project will be assigned a Google sponsor. The role of the sponsor is to support the project by discussing research directions, engaging with professors and students, and overseeing collaboration between the project team and Google.

• Research Awards recipients are expected to visit Google to give talks related to their work and meet with relevant research groups here.

How to Apply

To apply for a Google research award, faculty members should use the following general guidelines for proposal submission.

• Full-time faculty members from universities worldwide are eligible to serve as Principal Investigators (PIs) or co-PIs on Research Awards proposals.
  •  Faculty members may submit one proposal per funding cycle as a PI or a co-PI unless they received an award the previous round. This advice on drafting a strong proposal, written by a group of Google researchers and engineers involved in the review and selection process, is an excellent place to start as applicants prepare an application for the Research Awards program.
  • The application process for the Research Awards includes filling out an online form requesting basic information and uploading a PDF proposal via the form. As part of the online form, applicants will be asked to select a topic area from among the 18 areas listed above.

• Applicants are to select carefully, as this will determine which of the review committees will review their proposal.
• Proposal: the main proposal section is comprised of 4 parts: An overview, a proposal body, a data policy, and a budget. The maximum length of the entire proposal section, including references, is 3 pages. In addition to the 3-page proposal, we require a CV from the primary PI and allow the inclusion of CVs from co-PIs.
• The maximum length for each CV is 2 pages. For PIs (and co-PIs) who have been funded by Google in the past, in addition to the 4 parts listed above, we also require a brief (1/2 page maximum) summary of the results of past projects funded by Google.
• This section does not count toward the three-page proposal limit.
  • Overview
    • Proposal Title
    • Principal Investigator (PI) full name, contact information (postal address, email address, phone), affiliation (university, school, college and/or department)
    • [Optional] The name(s) of up to two Google contacts. Contacts are defined as people at Google who are familiar with your professional work.
    • [Optional] The name(s) of up to two potential Google sponsors. Potential sponsors are defined as people at Google with whom you have already discussed the specific proposal. Providing contacts and potential sponsors as part of the appliction is optional; Google will assign sponsors to each funded proposal. Please see their FAQs for details on Google contacts and potential sponsors.
  • Proposal body
    • Abstract
    • Research goals, including a problem statement
    • Description of the work you’d like to do, as well as the expected outcomes and results
    • How this relates to prior work in the area (including your own, if relevant)
    • References, where applicable
    • Please carefully review the advice provided by some of their reviewers before crafting your proposal
  • Data policy
    • Google’s Research Awards program is designed to support work whose output will be made available to the public and to the research community. To that end, we ask that you provide us with a few sentences sharing what you intend to do with the output of your project (e.g. open sourcing code, making data sets public, etc). Please note that Research Awards are structured as unrestricted gifts, so there are no legal requirements once a project is selected for funding. This is simply a statement of your current intentions.
  • Budget
    • The budget section should provide a breakdown in US dollars across major line items, such as student salary, student tuition, travel, and the cost of Android hardware where applicable. We prefer a short bulleted list of overall costs with basic explanations where needed. Please keep in mind that your budget counts towards the 3-page limit. Full-page budgets are not helpful to them.
• CV of the PI(s)
  • The maximum length of a PI CV is two pages. Any submitted CV that is longer than 2 pages may be cut off at two pages before the proposal review process begins.
  • CV for at least the primary PI on the proposal.  CVs will be accepted from each of the PIs listed on the proposal (up to three are allowed). Each CV must be limited to two pages.

Deadline: application closes on October 15, 2013

For details and to apply online, click Google Research Award here