Google grew out of an academic experiment and we continue to value a strong dialogue with universities around the globe. While we do significant in-house research and engineering, we also maintain strong relations with leading academic institutions world-wide pursuing research in areas of common interest. And each year, faculty members across a broad range of computing disciplines visit Google to explore the latest research and technology results and discuss the challenges the community faces. We recently hosted the third Google EMEA Faculty Summit in our Zurich office, the largest of our engineering centres in the region. One hundred computer science academics from 62 leading universities throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East joined over 80 Google engineers for three days of exciting dialogue. As our VP of Research Alfred Spector put it in his keynote: "We need to maintain strong relationships with the academic community, we can't be an island unto ourselves." The event featured contributions from receipients of Google's support, including Dr. Andy Hopper of Cambridge University, whose research group recently received a Focused Research Award for their work on 'Computing for the Future of the Planet' , and Dr. Frank Stajano , also of Cambridge and the newest addition to Google's Visiting Faculty Program. Attendees also heard about Google Transit – which started out as a "20% time" project and achieved fruition thanks to Faculty member Hannah Bast , who, prior to her current position at the University of Freiburg, spent a year on sabbatical working with the Google Zurich team as part of our Visiting Faculty programme . However, the real aim of the event is to provide Google employees and academics maximum opportunities for networking, discussion and collaboration. Attendees participated in day-long 'stream' discussions on themes ranging from Privacy and Security – with the participation of leading researchers such as Professor Ross Anderson – to Natural Language Technologies, featuring NLP expert Fred Jelinek . The groups also looked at mobile applications and, more generally, the current challenges that our search and advertising engineers are working on. But our relations with universities is of course not simply an annual conference. Our University Relations initiatives supports university research, technological innovation and the teaching and learning experience through a variety of programs. We offer awards through the Faculty Research Awards program and fund specific research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community, through our Google Focused Research Awards program . Through the Google Visiting Faculty Program , faculty are invited for 6-12 month periods to join Google research teams on projects of mutual interest. We covered some of our other initiatives in an earlier post . We will be posting more about our work in this area over the coming months, and we are certainly interested in expanding our collaborations in EMEA. Post by Vicky Greaves, University Programmes Specialist
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