The inaugural cohort of Google Academic Research Awards (GARA) recipients – a list of 95 globally selected proposals – includes three from the University of California San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
The researchers were honored for three projects and include Assistant Professor Deepak Kumar and Associate Professors Rose Yu and Yiying Zhang.
Kumar, a recent addition to the department, was recognized for his proposal, Automated Conversational Interventions to Curb Toxic Content in Online Communities, in the Trust & Safety category. This award offers an unrestricted grant to support research on digital safety, particularly in areas like scams, safety by design, misinformation, child safety, and generative AI.
Cybersecurity, specifically, sociotechnical cybersecurity (STC), is Kumar’s research specialty. His work delves into complex interactions between humans, technology, and society and considers social, psychological, economic, technical, legal, and policy factors when devising solutions to digital threats. Kumar hopes to build technology that’s safer and more resilient.
Associate Professor Rose Yu and Assistant Professor Duncan Watson-Parris from Scripps Institute of Oceanography were recognized for their collaborative proposal, ClimateBench2.0: Probabilistic climate model scoring. It was one of a handful of projects in the GARA category, Creating ML Benchmarks for Climate Problems – a topic that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop data-driven solutions for climate action and emphasizes the importance of strong benchmarks to evaluate those models.
Yu is a lead faculty member in the department’s AI group and has previously worked with collaborators to improve the resolution of climate models. She is one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 in this year’s list of “exceptionally talented young innovators” and is a recent recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award for her research on large language models.
Zhang’s proposal, Learned Tiered Memory System: Optimizing Tiered Memory Performance with ML-Based Memory Access Pattern Prediction, was recognized in a category focused on systems and infrastructure problems. The project dovetails neatly with the work she leads in WukLab.
Zhang’s primary research interests include building systems for ML/AI and using ML/AI to solve systems problems. Zhang is a member of the Systems & Software team for PRISM, the $50.5 million UC San Diego-led Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory center. Her team is working on an ambitious project to make computing orders of magnitude faster and more efficient.
Google Academic Research Awards foster an ecosystem that generates impactful research with real-world applications. In each cycle, the GARA program outlines specific research challenges and opportunities within technology and computing that Google seeks to address through funding and collaborations with academic institutions and researchers.
By Kimberley Clementi