Qualcomm Inc. has provided gift funding to Computer Science Professors Charless Fowlkes, Stephan Mandt and Padhraic Smyth in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). This funding will support Ph.D. students involved in basic research projects across the three groups on topics related to the development of new theories and algorithms in the areas of computer vision and machine learning. The initial award is in the amount of $255,000, with Professors Fowlkes and Mandt each receiving $90,000, and Professor Smyth receiving $75,000 through a 2019 Qualcomm Faculty Award.

“Collaborating with a company like Qualcomm provides faculty and Ph.D. students with excellent opportunities to see how our research ideas in the lab can be scaled up and used in a wide variety of real-world applications in areas like mobile computing, time-series forecasting, distributed machine learning and real-time computer vision,” says Smyth. “The demands imposed by these applications often generate very interesting and challenging basic research questions that provide great material for Ph.D. thesis research.”

The funded projects will involve collaborations with Qualcomm’s rapidly expanding research and development work in artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on Qualcomm AI/ML research labs in San Diego and Amsterdam.

­­— Shani Murray