Google on Monday announced support for the five faculty members who are the recipient of this year’s Google India AI/ML Research Awards, a program focused on supporting exceptional AI research in India.

The awardees are working to advance foundational and applied research to advance the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence across a wide range of research areas including Algorithms and Theory, Computer Vision, Natural Language Understanding and Privacy & Security.

The search giant said it received over a hundred proposals across various fields of AI. All of them went through an extensive review process involving global expert reviewers who assessed them on merit, innovation, connection to Google’s research efforts and alignment with the company’s overall research philosophy and AI Principles.

“We remain committed to investing in the development of the research ecosystem in India through various research grant-based and education programs, and continue to pursue cutting-edge research at Google Research India: an AI lab in Bangalore,” Google wrote in a blog post.

Here’s the list of Google India AI/ML Research Awardees 2020:

1. Arpita Patra: She is an Associate Professor at Dept. of Computer Science & Automation (CSA), EECS Division, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and is working on molding the use of Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) techniques to ML that preserves the privacy of the user.
2. Anirban Dasgupta: He is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar and is working on developing randomized algorithms for numerical tensor algebra.
3. Pawan Goyal: An Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Goyal is developing ways to build a conceptual understanding of natural language in AI Dialogue Systems.
4. Soma Biswas: She is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and is working on making AI systems more robust. This work has widespread applications in image classification, detection, segmentation, etc.
5. Vasudev Verma: He is a Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad and is advancing his work on ‘Project ANGEL’ that seeks to utilize machine learning techniques for enhancing the well-being of teenagers, especially girls.