CMU researchers get $2M from Google

Carnegie Mellon University researchers came up big winners in the focused research awards announced by Google this week. Of the $5.7 million in awards the search engine giant awarded to 11 U.S. universities and one British school, three of the 12 funded projects are at the Pittsburgh university.

Three CMU projects will share $2 million. In the School of Computer Science, researchers William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson and Tom Mitchell will research machine learning techniques. Two other CS professors, Lorrie Cranor and Norman Sadeh, will work with Alessandro Acquisti of the Heinz School to study how people can protect their privacy online. That award was $400,000. The third award, for $100,000, went to David G. Andersen and Mor Harchol-Balter, both in the School of Computer Science, to look at how large data centers can run on less energy.

Google recently announced that it would expand its presence in Pittsburgh. The firm, with over 100 local staffers, has been housed at the Collaborative Innovation Center at CMU since 2006. The center is a partnership between Carnegie Mellon, the Carnegie Museums, and local economic development organizations. Google will move to office space in the nearby East Liberty neighborhood in the second half of the year.

CMU spokesman Byron Spice said that the research would take place on CMU’s campus, rather than at corporate offices. “These are gift awards, so our researchers aren’t operating under contract to Google,” he says,

Source: Byron Spice, CMU
Writer: Chris O’Toole