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 Research Awards by submitting a proposal to one of our two 2013 funding rounds. Our 2013 deadlines are April 15 and October 15. Recipients are selected through a comprehensive internal review process and notified of their awards within 4 months of the initial submission. 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. Please see our FAQs for more details on eligibility and budgets.

The intent of the Google Research Awards is to support cutting-edge research in Computer Science, Engineering, and related fields. We ask applicants 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. We encourage Research Awards recipients to visit Google to give talks related to their work and meet with relevant research groups here. Through the Research Awards program, we try to fund projects where collaboration with Google will be especially valuable to the research team.

More information: http://research.google.com/university/relations/research_awards.html