Jason Cong and Ameet Talwalkar, both on faculty at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, are recipients of the Google Faculty Research Award for 2015. The one-year award supports the work of world-class, permanent faculty members at top universities around the world. with the aim of advancing cutting-edge research in computer science, engineering and related fields.
Cong, a professor of computer science, received the Google Faculty Research Award in the category of Systems (Hardware and Software). Among other topics, Cong's research focuses on energy-efficient computing, costumized big data computing and highly scalable algorithms. He is the director of UCLA's Center for Domain-Specific Computing as well as the VLSI Architecture, Synthesis, and Technology Laboratory. Cong served as chair of the Department of Computer Science for three years and is currently the Vice Provost for Internationalization.
Talwalkar, an assistant professor of computer science, conducts research that addresses scalability and ease-of-use issues in the field of statistical machine learning, with applications in computational genomics. He led the initial development of the MLlib project in Apache Spark and is a co-author of the graduate-level textbook, “Foundations in Machine Learning”( MIT Press, 2012).
More information on the Google Faculty Research Awards can be found here.
