Announcing the 2018 PhD fellowships to support cutting edge computer science research in Australia

The Google PhD Fellowship program supports PhD students in computer science and related fields, and is part of our commitment to building strong relationships with the global academic community. In our most recent round four PhD students in Australia have been recognised for their outstanding efforts.

• Xiang Zhang, Google Phd Fellowship in HCI (University of New South Wales) - Research Proposal Title: Context-aware Human Intent Inference for Improving Human Machine Cooperation

Xiang's research is aimed at overcoming the research hurdles and stretching the horizons of interactive intelligent systems and brain-computer interface by developing novel learning paradigm. The goal of his research is to create a body of work both theoretically well-founded and readily applicable to real-world problems in the area of human-computer interactions bridging the gap between theory and practice. He is inspired by the fascinating fact that human mind can directly affect the physical reality and has developed a brain typing system and a mind-controlled assistant robot which could provide a better life for people with disabilities.

• Siqi Wu, Google PhD Fellowship in HCI (Australian National University) - Research Proposal Title: How is Attention Allocated? A Data-driven Study of Popularity and Engagement in Online Videos

Siqi’s interest in understanding online behaviours originated from his own daily activities on web. He always wonders how things become popular and how people influence each other on the Internet. Coming to the Computational Media lab at ANU, study in the interdisciplinary field of Computational Social Science sparked his interest both in empirical measurement and theoretical modeling, which Siqi hopes his work will lead to advances in online systems.

• Niels van Berkel, Google PhD Fellowship in HCI (The University of Melbourne) - Research Proposal Title: Data Quality and Quantity in Mobile Self-Report Studies

Niels’s research examines how to assess and increase the quality of human-contributed data collected through their personal smartphones. His fascination for the societal impact of digital technology led him to pursue studies in human-computer interaction. Niels hopes that his research can strengthen the role of smartphones as valuable scientific instruments, and ultimately increase our understanding of human behaviour.

• Stephen Mallon, Google PhD Fellowship in Networking (The University of Sydney) - Research Proposal Title: DLibOS Achieving performance and protection for IO bound applications on multi-core and many-core architectures

Stephen has always been naturally drawn to trying to understand how things work, he was inspired to pursue computer systems research after taking an undergraduate informatics course. His research focuses on how to improve the performance and efficiency of network applications by better leveraging the capabilities of underlying hardware. His overarching goal is that his research will impact and influence the design and architecture of real-world networking systems.

By supporting these four Australian Fellows we recognise their significant academic achievements and hope that they will go on to be leaders in their respective fields. We look forward to building even stronger links between industry and academia to help push important research forward in Australia.