Research Highlights

$1.5 Million Google Research Grant Awarded to Professor Panos Ipeirotis & Colleagues

Panos Ipeirotis, associate professor of information, operations and management sciences and George A. Kellner Faculty Fellow, along with researchers Serge Belongie of UC San Diego and Pietro Perona of Caltech, received a $1.5 million grant from Google. With this grant, they will develop a program for integrating crowdsourcing with machine learning algorithms to improve the ability to search and identify visual media. This program has immediate applications for Google in Project Glass, Google Goggles and general search for images and video.

“We’re absolutely thrilled to receive this level of support from Google, a world-class leader in data science,” explains Professor Ipeirotis. “Our research may go a long way toward unlocking the potential of image and video catalogs around the world and across varied industries, and toward the development of exciting new technologies.”

Through its Focused Research Awards program, Google supports multi-year research projects in computer science and engineering. These unrestricted grants run for two-to-three years, and recipients gain access to Google tools and technologies and have an opportunity to work directly with Google scientists and engineers. Google received nearly 600 proposals from 46 countries during its “Winter 2013” round of awards, and funded 102 projects.